John Lichfield is a former foreign editor of the Independent and was the newspaper’s Paris correspondent for 20 years.

PARIS — The protesters who braved the freezing drizzle of the past few days had a simple message for their president: We're not backing down.

"Welcome to the real France, Monsieur Macron. Here we never surrender," one protester scrawled on the back of his high-vis gilet jaune, the garment that has become synonymous with the anti-establishment Yellow Jackets movement.

A much-touted convergence des luttes ("alliance of struggles") between the Yellow Jackets and the pension strikers may have failed to produce the serious disruption initially expected in Paris on Saturday. But the demonstrator's slogan rings true: Although French President Emmanuel Macron has successfully faced down other union protests and a 13-month-long Yellow Jackets rebellion since he came to power in 2017, this latest set of strikes is something far more menacing.

The union and workers' strikes that began Thursday in response to the government's planned pensions reform is Macron's first real confrontation with the kind of broadly supported, union-led intransigence that has confounded many of the reformist ambitions of French presidents for the past three decades.

Victory, or even a tie, in the pensions struggle will allow Macron to approach the second half of his mandate and the 2022 presidential election with confidence.

The French president held a crisis meeting with the Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and other key ministers at the Elysée Palace Sunday night to gauge how far he can give ground and still preserve his reputation as a fearless reformer.

Victory, or even a tie, in the pensions struggle will allow Macron to approach the second half of his mandate and the 2022 presidential election with confidence. Defeat will leave him badly weakened, both in France and within a European Union that he seeks to lead and transform.

Much will depend on the turnout for a second day of protests on Tuesday called for by seven militant union federations. If support falls much below the 800,000 people — according to government figures — who marched nationwide last Thursday, some of the unions may be ready to compromise.

As things stand, militant union leaders — and more so their grassroots members — appear determined to prolong indefinitely the rail and Metro strikes that have crippled France for the past four days. They want to defeat Macron and to be seen to defeat him.

Potential for compromise

There were times over the weekend when parts of France appeared to be skidding into social anarchy.

Ten of the main motorway routes were blocked by an unrelated protest by truckers who oppose a €0.02 rise in diesel fuel taxes. Motorists found they could drive for free through toll booths, declared open by small bands of Yellow Jackets, only to run into long jams caused by the truckers.

The 56th successive Saturday demonstrations by the Yellow Jackets were poorly attended — only 1,000 or so people marched in Paris and smaller numbers in other cities. But those who did turn up were determined to disrupt normal pre-Christmas commercial life. Banks and shops were smashed by a large group of black-clad youths in Nantes in western France.

Long after the Paris march ended, bands of between 20 and 200 Yellow Jackets and hard-left allies rampaged through shopping centers and boulevards in the capital, playing cat and mouse with police.

Amid the demonstrations, the government has taken pains to show it is open to compromise while insisting it will not abandon the plan completely, as union are calling for it to do.

Philippe will meet union leaders on Monday to outline the kind of compromises he will propose when he announces the final “architecture” of the pension reform in a speech in Paris on Wednesday.

The prime minister will promise higher wages for nurses and teachers, who would see their pensions increase under the proposed new, universal system.

Speaking to French weekly Journal du Dimanche, he warned on Sunday that backing down from the planned reforms would expose the country to a "very brutal" reform in the future.

Philippe is expected to delay the starting date of radical changes in the state system from 2025 to at least 2035 — three presidential elections away. He may also make a big extra concession to the striking workers on the state-owned railways and Paris Metro.

Macron and Philippe are also said to be considering reviving the idea of a “grandfather clause” that would allow existing rail and Metro workers (but not the newly hired) to keep their gold-plated rights to retire in their mid-50s on higher-than average pensions.

The prime minister is expected to promise higher wages for nurses and teachers. He is also expected to promise that there will be no attempt to cut the overall pensions budget, or its €8-billion a year subsidy from general taxes, in the next six years.

If such a compromise is agreed, the planned reform would be disjointed, delayed and weakened. But it would allow Macron to claim a symbolic victory.

A delay to 2035 would exempt people aged 46 and older from the changes. Younger people would belong immediately to a single points-based system with the same rights, making job or career changes less complicated. The principle that people must gradually accept longer careers to pay for their longer lives would be more solidly anchored in French minds.

Battle of the unions

For precisely these reasons, the more militant union leaders will reject any such compromise. They have portrayed and sometimes misrepresented Macron’s reform as a “neo-liberal” conspiracy to destroy the principle of “solidarity” behind the French welfare state.

“Under Macron’s plan, young people like me will have to work until we are 70 for smaller pensions,” said Aurelie, 27, a primary school teacher who attended Saturday’s demonstrations.

Actually, no. But people would be able to work longer for bigger pensions if they wanted to.

The veteran French political commentator, Alain Duhamel, describes the dispute as a “strike of suspicion, based on anxieties about what might happen and misunderstanding of what is happening.”

Philippe Martinez, the leader of the CGT, the second-biggest union federation, dominant on the railways, insists Macron's plan must be withdrawn completely before the strikes are abandoned. Negotiations could then begin on “improvements to the present system.”

Despite this fractured union landscape, the rail and Metro strikes have held more or less solid so far.

After more than a decade of declining membership and power — during which time it was overtaken by CFDT federation as France's largest union — Martinez sees the pension strike as a heaven-sent opportunity to restore the strength of the once-feared CGT.

France, to its misfortune, does not have a single, dominant trade union federation like Britain, Germany or the United States. It has a dozen competing federations, with view ranging from Trotskyism to Catholicism.

Macron’s chief hope is to satisfy the moderate and reform-minded CFDT leader Laurent Berger and peel off a couple of the small, moderate federations now aligned with the CGT and its more militant rivals, SUD and Force Ouvrière.

Despite this fractured union landscape, the rail and Metro strikes have held more or less solid so far.

For Macron, the big test will be the second nationwide protests called by the unions for Tuesday, only five days after the first.

The call for a second day of strikes so close to the first was a calculated gamble by the unions: They have the upper-hand at present. A poor turnout on Tuesday could hand the initiative back to Macron.