This week, seven out of the country’s nine top unions called for a day of strikes next month accusing Mr Macron’s centrist government of launching a "head-on" attack on the country’s civil service.

The man who will lead the charge is Philippe Martinez, whose CGT union was for decades able to bring the country to a standstill with anti-reform protests.

Speaking to the Telegraph, he admitted that Mr Macron had so far got the better of him on labour reform and accused him of taking Margaret Thatcher as a model.

"His aim is to eliminate the unions.... He takes his inspiration from that model... His is a policy of repression of unions,” he said. And one model to be avoided at all costs, according to the CGT leader who is still officially employed as a technician by the carmaker Renault despite not having worked there since 1996, is the UK.

"Anglo-Saxon countries like Britain and United States are Macron's model… his inspiration," Mr Martinez told the Telegraph in a meeting with journalists from the Anglo-American Press Association in the multistorey CGT headquarters perched above the Paris périphérique ring road.

"I saw an excellent Ken Loach film recently, 'I, Daniel Blake'. And if you think that is an example of a modern society...well," he said, referring to the 2016 movie that depicts the harsh and inhumane treatment by the welfare state of a group of English northerners down on their luck.

"We don't want to have zero-hours contracts and no rights for the unemployed," he said.

The moustachioed unionist vowed to continue fighting tooth and nail to prevent France becoming more like Britain. Mr Macron in his first six months in power liberalised France’s notoriously rigid labour market, and made it easier for companies to hire and fire, with the aim being to bring down stubbornly high unemployment that hovers around 10 percent, more than twice that in the UK.