COLUMN ONE : Labor Plays Hardball in France : Fishermen rampage. Factory workers take hostages. Commando-style protests bring government concessions and public sympathy as hard times fuel rise in violence.

For generations, the muscled fishermen of Brittany have harvested the cold, choppy waters of the Atlantic, relishing the good years and enduring the bad ones to keep seafood on the great tables of France.

But all that changed when they went on strike recently over low prices for imported fish. In one city, 5,000 fishermen battled riot police with baseball bats and iron bars, injuring 134 officers beneath a tear-gas haze. Elsewhere, they cleaned out supermarket display cases and warehouses, setting fire to giant mounds of fish.

Fisherman Marcel Denic, 36, warned: “There is no fish storehouse in France that is safe.”

His brother, Michel, 45, a fisherman for three decades, explained: “If we stay silent, nobody will hear us. This causes more attention. And it brings the television cameras.”

Indeed it does. The Denics had taken part in a riot that damaged dozens of cars, stores and telephone booths. It also inadvertently touched off a fire that left a 17th-Century Parliament building, Brittany’s pride, a smoldering ruin.

France certainly is no stranger to labor strife or tough talk. But the militant seafarers and their commando actions are part of a new, more belligerent and more desperate phenomenon emerging today: French workers, facing 12% unemployment, have lost patience with old-fashioned strikes and picket lines. And they are turning to increasingly violent ways of holding on to their jobs.

In recent weeks, angry dockworkers in Marseilles have welded shut the gates of a bankrupt port and stopped all ferry traffic between the city and North Africa. Workers at a Tampax factory in the Loire Valley, protesting layoff plans, kidnaped two top managers and held them in their offices for three days. No one has been arrested in the case.

“France has always loved reform but hated change,” says Franz-Olivier Giesbert, editor of Le Figaro, the pro-government daily newspaper. “That is why, unlike a lot of other nations, we feel the need occasionally to make a revolution, good or bad, so as to decompress.”

“We are confronted today by social groups that feel their existence itself is threatened,” says Brice Teinturier, director of the political department at the French Institute of Public Opinion. “And, for the most part, the French sympathize. They feel these are just causes.”

The new wave of violent labor unrest began two years ago with farmers, who blocked traffic, burned produce and clashed repeatedly with police in a dispute over European and American pressure to cut agricultural subsidies.

But it has gained momentum since a strike by Air France workers last September, when demonstrators protesting a government plan to lay off 4,000 employees from the money-losing airline blocked runways at Charles de Gaulle Airport and waged running battles with riot police.

In a way, Prime Minister Edouard Balladur has fanned the flames of unrest by throwing money and other concessions at the most violent strikers, sending an unmistakable message that the more belligerent the strike, the more likely the government will be to open its pocketbook.

Balladur quickly backed down in the face of the Air France strikers, agreeing to withdraw the airline survival plan. He has taken a series of steps to appease the fishermen too, offering financial aid for boat loan payments and a five-month ban on the import of cheap fish.

And this week he launched a $1.8-million radio and billboard ad campaign, urging the French to eat more of “our fresh fish” and reminding consumers that fishermen have to battle rain and worse, “while you were asleep,” to bring in their precious catch.

Some have labeled Balladur’s strategy le tactique salami , in which he slices off piece after piece of the public treasury to feed each protesting group. A recent editorial cartoon in Le Monde, the influential Parisian daily, showed Balladur holding a fishing pole, with money affixed to the hook.

“Tell the fishermen I’m ready,” Balladur calls out in the cartoon.

Balladur, like most top-level politicians in France, has a deep respect for the power of public demonstrations in his country. Still fresh here are the memories of the violent May, 1968, student protests that led to the retirement of no less formidable a statesman than President Charles de Gaulle.

“We’re a very centralized state, and that creates a certain fear,” said Denis Lacorne, a political analyst at the National Political Science Foundation in Paris. “In the United States, when something goes wrong, it might cost a company or university president his job. But, in France, it goes right up to the government.”

Although labor strife has intensified in France--and even though people have died in recent years in strike-related violence in such nations as South Africa and Nicaragua--these incidents are rare in most of the world. That is true even in such places as Germany, where social tensions are rising among workers.

In the United States, scattered communities have been torn in recent years by bitter disputes where strikers were replaced by so-called scabs, but violence has been relatively limited.

Some of America’s bloodiest labor disputes came in the late 1800s, including the Haymarket Square riot in Chicago and the Homestead strike against Carnegie Steel in Pennsylvania, which was suppressed after several people died. In the 1930s, probably the worst era of labor strife, sit-down strikes swept through steel and auto plants.

In America, protesters who resort to violence are viewed as “the radical fringe,” said Charles B. Craver, a law professor at George Washington University in Washington who has studied unions. “Americans are a relatively docile people that way. We tend to go by the rule of law.”

One of the main differences between the labor movements in France and the United States is that French workers enjoy generous social and economic benefits and view them as a right, Craver said. By contrast, he said, “in our country, workers don’t think they have a right to health care or job security. Here, workers are happy if they have a job.”

What is remarkable about France’s current wave of violence is the absence of any criticism of the strikers from the government--or the citizenry. Indeed, there is widespread sympathy for the workers’ cause. That, along with a long-held distrust of the riot police, explains why the government has been reluctant to arrest the strikers.

However, Balladur bristles at the suggestion that he is trying to buy civil peace. “What do you recommend?” he snapped at one reporter. “That I satisfy nobody?”

While sporadic violence has been a feature of labor unrest in France, the number of strikes and the number of violent incidents are on the rise.

The protests have injured hundreds of people, mostly police officers, and caused tens of millions of dollars in damage. But, so far at least, no one has died and the strikers have kept their protests from spiraling out of control.

(A notable exception was the fire at the Parliament building in Brittany, about which the fishermen seemed genuinely embarrassed. It was set, apparently accidentally, by one of the flares that strikers were setting off to light up the night sky.)

Of course, the current unrest doesn’t approach the magnitude of the 1968 student uprising, which eventually led 10 million workers to stage strikes and occupy factories. Even amid those clashes, only one person died.

“One must remember that the right to strike is something very strongly embedded in the French,” said Teinturier, the poll specialist. “It has been the main way of social gain for a very long time.”

But no one denies that the tone has changed, becoming more desperate and less easily doused by police water cannons.

“Of course, we are taught in school to respect the law. But this is not a question of respect for the law,” said Rene Mouriaux, director of research at the Center for the Study of French Political Life in Paris. “These are reactions to things imposed from outside France--fish imports, farm imports.”

And many French workers believe that they already have made financial sacrifices but have little to show for it.

“That pushes them toward harder strikes,” Mouriaux added. “Now each group feels the need to pressure the government to get their own piece of the pie.”

That’s what the fishermen-commandos were thinking when they laid siege to the countryside earlier this month. They ended a two-week strike after the series of government concessions, but the message was clear: The threat of civil unrest pays.

“It’s very sad that we’ve nearly arrived at the year 2000 and we’re still reduced to this type of action,” said Serge Nedelec, a 40-year-old fisherman.

Behind him, a heavy mist hung over the hundreds of boats in the Guilvinec port, which had been blocked the night before with a long chain marked by blue buoys.

“We are up against the wall,” he added, pausing to light a cheap, crumpled corn-leaf cigarette. “The government told us not to break things. But it was only when we started to break things that the government started taking action.”

Jean-Michel Coic, 38, who owns one of the boats in Guilvinec, said the clashes with police were “just an alarm bell. Maybe it wasn’t justified, but that’s the only way. The government has known for a long time that we have serious problems.”

Like other fishermen, Coic blames European trade agreements that have removed French barriers to cheaper imports.

France has about 16,000 skippers and sailors on 7,000 fishing boats, and they lead a difficult existence. They often spend several weeks at sea, returning to the market and an on-the-spot division of the proceeds. If the price is too low to meet costs, as it has been since last month, they earn nothing.

About a third of the annual catch is exported, mostly to Spain and Italy, but those markets have been hurt by a strong French franc. The remainder is consumed in France, as part of a national network of shops offering 25 species of fresh fish daily.

About half of the fish consumed in France these days, though, is imported, mostly from Britain, Norway and Denmark. Sole from the Netherlands, for example, typically sells for as little as $4 a pound at French fish stores, compared to about $6 a pound for French sole.

During their demonstrations, the fishermen tore down traffic lights, pulled bricks from city streets, seized fish from delivery trucks and foreign trawlers and destroyed hundreds of tons of fish. At Rungis, the giant food market known as the “belly of Paris,” more than 1,000 fishermen broke in shortly after 3 a.m. one day this month and managed to destroy nearly 500 tons of fish, both French and imported, before police arrived.

Fishermen also broke into dozens of supermarkets across central France, trashing the frozen fish counters. Edouard Leclerc, the owner of several hundred supermarkets in France, filed suit against the government and announced stepped-up security at his stores. He even tore up an agreement he had made with the fishermen last year to buy at least half his fish from French sources.

And he warned endive and cauliflower producers that, if they made good on threats to follow the fishermen’s example, “you won’t find one endive or head of cauliflower in my shops for a month.”

But France’s sympathy remains with the fishermen. Even Balladur told them, “I hope that your children will feel like doing the same job as you in the future.”

Not much chance of that, the fishermen say.

Bernard Peillon, a stocky, silver-haired man of 51, is the 14th generation of Breton fishermen in his family. “But this is the last one,” he said. “I’ve never even allowed my son to get on board a boat.”

“Maybe our grandson will become a sailor,” his wife, Annie, added with a rueful laugh. “Or a windsurfer.”

Times staff writer Stuart Silverstein contributed to this story.