In a televised address to the nation on Friday night, Chirac said he would ratify the "first job contract", designed to ease youth unemployment by allowing employers to sack young recruits without explanation during a two year "trial period", but would make the government pass a new law removing most of its meaning. His contorted response to a four-week political and social crisis was dismissed yesterday by students and trade union leaders, as well as most of the French press, as an "April Fool's Joke", a "confidence trick" and a "piece of failed DIY".

Around 2,000 young people . . .some students, but many more farleft and anarchist activists . . . went on a six-hour protest through the streets of central Paris after Chirac's speech. During the chaotic march, ending in the early hours of yesterday, the demonstrators threw bottles at riot police and attempted briefly to storm the National Assembly. Violent fringe groups smashed the windows of two McDonald's restaurants and sacked the offices of Pierre Lellouche, a Paris deputy for Chirac's centre-right party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP).

This wild protest, and similar incidents in provincial cities, will deepen worries that a new day of nationwide strikes and marches planned for Tuesday may once again be invaded by a violent minority of far-left activists and youth gangs from poor suburbs.

Though Chirac conceded ground on the two most contentious parts of the new youth contract, students and union leaders appeared determined yesterday to prolong the unrest. The dispute now threatens to lurch way beyond an argument over youth employment into a head-on confronation between an enfeebled centre-right government and President and a jubilant and . . . for the time being united . . . French Left.

The "contrat premiere embauche" (CPE, or first job contract) was intended to reduce France's youth unemployment rate of 23%. It was rammed through parliament without consultation, or much debate, by the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, who had warned that he would resign . . . plunging the centre-right into crisis . . . if the president suspended or blocked the law.

Chirac said on Friday night that he would sign the law but, in effect, place it in abeyance. He would order the government immediately to prepare a new law reducing the "trial period" to one year and obliging employers to explain their reasons for firing young workers. Although this would reduce the CPE to something relatively toothless . . . and most probably useless . . . student groups and unions are now determined to humiliate the Right and, if possible, bring down Villepin.

France faces a deepening political, social and educational crisis, with many universities and lycees blocked and exams looming, over a law which has all but ceased to exist.