Autumn chaos to hit France

Two hundred thousand protesters came together in the southern French countryside at the weekend to plot ways of making September a difficult month for the government.

Almost twice as many participants as expected pitched tents in the scorching heat of the Larzac plain.

A government spokesman tried to play down the significance of the event. "By stirring up the concerns felt by a number of professions, the minority extreme-left activists have only one real goal: to paralyse French society," he said.

But many of those there insisted that they were not extremist activists, just moderates infuriated by the direction taken by the centre-right administration during its first year in power, and spurred to take action for the first time in their lives.

"Of course when you get such a large number of politically motivated people together, there's a powerful sense of solidarity," said Joël Collot, an actor from Montpellier.

"But this isn't a gathering of radicals behaving in a hysterical manner. There are a lot of reasonable people here who are just very angry with the government.

"You can sense that trouble is brewing for the autumn."

Thousands of people squeezed into huge tents to listen to debates over new government reforms proposed for the education system, the perils of privatising France's public services and the menace posed by genetically modified crops.

The organisational forces behind the strikes and demon strations, which have united teachers, train drivers, postmen, students, health workers and actors since the spring, were present.

Unions and campaign groups were recruiting supporters and planning further action for the autumn in protest against the government's plans to extend its implementation of pension reforms to other areas of social security.

Rightwing commentators and organisers alike referred to the gathering as a "summer-school in anti-establishment activity".

"The month of September mustn't merely be hot, it should be scorching; everyone must be on the streets.

"If there are lots of us, we will be able to make a difference," said José Bové, the radical sheep farmer and leader of France's anti-globalisation movement, who was released from prison last week.

"If we do nothing, France's education, its farming community, its health service and culture will all definitively be forced into the commercial sector."

The tone of the occasion was serious; philosophers and union leaders were greeted on stage with the kind of ecstatic excitement reserved elsewhere for pop stars and footballers.

One seminar focused optimistically on the drive to unite the separate campaigns being fought by different professions this year into a grander action on the scale of a general strike. Others planned protests for next month's World Trade Organisation summit in Cancun, Mexico.