As roadblocks spread across French highways, around oil refineries and fuel depots yesterday, one barricade was different. At Villefranche, on the A6 autoroute between Lyons and Paris, 400 foreign lorries were making a stand. Most were Spanish and some were German or Dutch, but all were victims of the truckers' protest. This year it has taken much less time for the French and European public to ask the crucial question: no matter how valid their grievances, do French truckers have the right to hold a continent hostage?

For the French truckers' strike - the fourth since 1984 - is a European as well as a French problem. At root is the anarchical and fiercely competitive nature of the French trucking industry, which the usually meddlesome French government has failed to regulate.

In the constant effort by manufacturers and distributors to lower prices, transport costs are the simplest way to cut corners. All the more so because so many drivers own their own lorries - 27,000 French trucking companies have fewer than five employees - and they will undercut any price to stay on the road.

"The profession suffers from the disease of economic and social dumping," is how the Communist Transport Minister, Mr Jean-Claude Gayssot, explains it.

But French truckers have not reconciled their desire to keep working with the low pay and long hours accepted elsewhere. Negotiations are made more difficult by the fact that neither the management groups nor the truckers' unions represent most employers or drivers. And the European Union has failed to harmonise trucking regulations. French employers claim they are forced to pay low wages because of unfair competition; in Portugal, for example, costs are 30 per cent lower.

The broken promises of November last year, when the last truckers' blockades paralysed the country, are the immediate cause of the French lorry drivers' anger. With rare exceptions, retirement at 55 - a key demand - has not materialised.

Most truckers are still not being paid for waiting while trucks are loaded and unloaded. And only 5 per cent of drivers received an agreed £353 bonus. "It was a management recommendation that was in no way obligatory and was up to each company," the largest employers' group, the FNTR, says now.

It's not the first time the truckers have been cheated: under a 1994 "contract of progress", working hours were to have been reduced to 230 hours a month by now. For all other professions, 156 hours is the legal limit, yet only 5 per cent of haulage companies have respected the 1994 agreement.

THE FNTR is the main component of the Union of Transport Federations (UFT), the largest management group, that pulled out of negotiations early on Saturday morning, after union leaders called its representatives "rotten liars".

The Communist CGT then withdrew, when the remaining management group Unostra (which represents small and medium-size companies) refused to consider the truckers' hourly wage demand.

The Transport Minister, Mr Gayssot, yesterday tried desperately to bring all the parties back to the table.

Fewer than 10 per cent of French lorry drivers belong to trade unions. And 85 per cent of 38,000 French trucking companies have fewer than 10 employees. The fragmentation of the industry helps to explain why relations are so poor, and why it is so difficult to make agreements stick. For its part, the French government has made little attempt to enforce labour laws: there are only 380 inspectors for the whole industry, and they went on strike on October 28th to demand the creation of 500 new inspectors' jobs.

Mr Gayssot is still flogging a working document agreed between Unostra and four truckers' unions on Sunday morning. The UFT and 95 per cent of truckers rejected it, but Mr Gayssot has threatened to impose it by force after one week. The "joint declaration" envisages a monthly salary of £1,176 for 200 hours work - but only for a tiny percentage of drivers - from July 2000.

In the meantime, the majority would receive a £14 monthly raise. This is a long way from the truckers' demand for an hourly rate of £5.66. Management insists the drivers work for annual, not hourly, salaries.

The anger, determination and organisation of the truckers are stronger than in the November 1996 strike. Yesterday was only the first day, yet they set up 140 blockades, nearly triple the initial number last year.

Already, there are appeals for the government to intervene, not only to end this crisis, but to clean up the trucking mess once and for all. And there is strong feeling that if France is to play a pivotal role in European trade, it cannot wreak millions of euros worth of damage on its own and its neighbours' economies in this way every year.

THE Jospin government should have seen the crisis coming. The four main lorry drivers' unions stated their intentions clearly on October 3rd. Then the main business management group, the CNPF, announced a freeze on all salary negotiations after last month's National Conference on Employment decided to enact a 35-hour working week in 2000.

The UFT - the haulage group that pulled out of negotiations - is part of the CNPF, and the left sees its intransigence as the revenge of big business for the 35-hour week.

The government's role is a delicate one. Mr Gayssot the Communist Transport Minister, has found himself in the awkward position of advocating a draft agreement which the Communist trade union rejects. The left-wing interior minister was condemned by strikers for using riot police to break up three blockades: "It's a stab in the back of workers who are fighting for their salaries," Mr Christian Laflaquere, of the CFDT union said. "To think it was done by a left-wing government that came to power in part because of our 1996 strike!"