Truck drivers across France have been dismantling their road blockades after union leaders and employers signed an agreement ending a dispute over pay and conditions. This followed five days of strikes which caused widespread disruption and fuel shortages. The French are used to various groups taking their protests to the streets - last week it was truckers, tomorrow it may be farmers or fishermen. By contrast, across the Channel in Britain, large-scale strikes have gone out of fashion. Our former Paris correspondent Andrew Bell returned to France to cover this dispute. Now back in London, he's intrigued by the tolerance with which the French put up with all that inconvenience.

"France is a country of beautiful places to while a way a few days on a story. So why is it then that I always end up at the ferry terminal in Calais? I was there again a couple of days ago, and the place lived up to all my worst memories. It was midnight, with an impenetrable and freezing fog and a dozen men gathered round a brazier, stamping their feet and clapping each other on the back. These were the truck drivers who, with a couple of concrete blocks and some mats of upturned metal spikes, had halted all freight traffic into and out of Calais.

In years of covering strikes in France, I have always been amazed by the disruption that a tiny number of people can cause. A few months ago, again at Calais, I had seen perhaps ten small fishing boats drop their anchors in the main channel; within hours the port was in effect closed and all ferries on their way in were being re-routed.

So few can cause so much trouble to so many because the authorities simply don't move them on. When there are disputes such as these under way, you often hear people in Britain saying "why don't the French police just go in and clear the roads?" - or the railway line, or whatever it is that's being blocked this time. But in France there is a kind of grace period allowed to demonstrators when the police basically leave them alone. That night, around the brazier in Calais, for instance, I was interviewing one of the truck-drivers about his demands. A by-stander stepped in and provided some helpful translation, clearing up some specific terms. After the interview I asked the by-stander if he was perhaps some kind of union representative. Oh no he replied, I'm a police lieutenant, just here keeping an eye on things.

The next day I was in Boulogne, and came upon the local police opening up a blockade, but it was all being done with the agreement of the strikers and only a few of the trapped lorries were being let through - the rest would have to stay put. The Boulogne police chief was there, watching his men reinflate the tyres of a truck that had been disabled in the road. He was chatting away with the strikers, so I asked him if it wasn't really his job to keep the highways open? Oh no he replied, not at times like these. I act on orders from the administration and if they don't want to start getting tough, then I won't.

But as usual in disputes such as this, the French government don't want to get tough - at least not too quickly. Partly that's because they don't wish to inflame a difficult situation through ham-fisted intervention - and that does make plenty of sense. But their softly-softly approach is also conditioned by the knowledge that the French public is remarkably tolerant of groups of workers taking their protests onto the streets. Two years ago I worked in Paris through the prolonged transport strikes that paralysed the capital for three weeks. My sympathy for the strikers evaporated after about day two. But I remember talking to commuters who had slogged in from the Paris suburbs in the freezing December temperatures, and through chattering teeth they'd tell me that they thought the strikers had a point, and that yes, they even had the right to cause so much misery to their fellow citizens. Time and again, opinion polls confirm this phenomenon which I don't think we have on any comparable scale in Britain; that even among middle class, non-unionised French men and women there's a potent reservoir of sympathy for bolshy workers defying the state.

Now I hesitate it psychoanalyse a whole nation - but here goes anyway. I think this all has something to do with a revolutionary tradition a couple of centuries old, a tradition which basically has the state always cast in the role of enemy of the people. In Britain for the last couple of hundred years we have had essentially the same parliamentary system which has evolved and adapted. In the same period the French have had a couple of monarchies, a couple of empires and no less than five republics. The last time the state collapsed when the Fourth Republic gave way to the Fifth was only 1958. In this country we tend to throw out a government when the people become dissatisfied; in France they have had a habit of throwing out the whole system. That makes French governments think twice before rushing into confrontation.

There's a more modern dimension to this too, and that's the startlingly low opinion much of the French public has of its political class. Now, no voters have a very high opinion of their MPs, but in the last couple of years an unprecedented number of French members of parliament and senior politicians have been charged with corruption. As a result groups such as farmers or truck-drivers have even less faith that they should channel their grievances through parliament. Extra-parliamentary direct action appears far more efective, and certainly more fun. And finally there's a sense that a dispute isn't a real dispute until you've taken it out onto the streets - just stopping work hardly counts. That's why a French government cannot charge in too quickly; there's an indefinable period during which which it's generally accepted that strikers have the right to make their case on the streets. The trick both for the strikers and the government is to know how long that period lasts; because the point where the public sympathy starts to shift is the critical point where a deal can be struck.
 

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