Autumn is protest season in France, when labor leaders try to whip up strikes and demonstrations to bend govern-ment policy for the coming year. Last year, street plebiscites worked beautifully. Weeks of protest marches led to a December strike that crippled France for three weeks and quashed plans to cut civil servants' benefits. Now, the labor boss who led that triumph, Marc Blondel of the Force Ou-vriere union, thinks he can stop the budget-cutters again. "All the ingredients are there for a general explosion," he says.
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