COLUMN ONE : Down and Out in City of Light : The homeless are emerging in Paris and across France, shaking up a society that has long seen a job as part of its birthright. Their numbers--and rising militancy--pose headaches for the new president.

When Jean-Pierre Dufour moved to the City of Light two years ago, he expected to find opportunity and prosperity. Sure enough, he lives just steps from the Paris Opera, that ornate symbol of French culture, and spends his days among the prosperous bankers and shoppers in the 8th arrondissement.

But this isn’t the life he imagined: Every morning, Dufour begs spare coins from commuters rushing into the Metro station. He pools his money with two other beggars to buy lunch, which they eat on a stairway landing, taking care to clean up after themselves. At night, he sleeps in a box wedged into a storefront, with the permission of the store owner.

“I just can’t get over how difficult it has been to find work,” said Dufour, 44, dressed neatly in a white, long-sleeved shirt and slacks. He worked in a coal mine until two years ago. “Now the most important thing is to keep clean, to have clean clothes. I am not a bum, you know. I had to learn how to beg.”

French cities have always had a few beggars, of course, the bulk of them hard-luck immigrants or simply clochards , bums who didn’t want to work. But these days tens of thousands of otherwise ordinary French men and women are homeless and begging, in a trend also emerging in other Western European capitals.

“It’s been an evolution, an explosion,” said Jean-Baptiste Eyraud, whose advocacy group has defied the law by occupying two vacant apartment buildings in wealthy Paris neighborhoods, turning them into housing for 120 families. “The people on the street now are younger,” he added, “and many, many more of them are French. Just a few years ago, 5% were French. Now it’s at least 30%. And that is growing.”

The homeless and jobless in France are known collectively as les exclus , people involuntarily cast out of mainstream society by a combination of economic crisis and bad social policy. Their growing numbers, and increasing militancy, have become a major political headache for new President Jacques Chirac. Their very existence, for the French, represents a broken promise in the social contract.

Les exclus seem to be everywhere in Paris this summer--in the subway stations, outside the three-star restaurants, in the manicured parks, in front of the Louvre museum and beneath the Eiffel Tower.

Some have followed the summer exodus to the coast and mountains, where so many have showed up in the towns of La Rochelle and Pau that their mayors have taken the unprecedented step of banning begging.

“Sure, we’re not Calcutta or the Bronx,” said Michel Crepeau, La Rochelle’s mayor. “But just because begging isn’t a crime doesn’t mean we have to allow it.”

“Enough is enough,” added Andre Laberrere, mayor of the Pyrenees resort of Pau. “And if the beggars aren’t happy about it, they can go to Biarritz or Bayonne” on the nearby Atlantic coast.

Every commuter train from the Paris suburbs carries one or two--or three or four--beggars. Often, so many appear at once that they must wait in line to tell their stories in the clattering cars.

“Ladies and gentlemen, excuse me for bothering you, but . . . ,” they usually begin. The tales that follow are a sad testament of the times: lost jobs, sick children, divorces, AIDS, lost apartments and plain bad luck. Breadwinner to beggar, often in a heartbeat.

They are down and out in Paris, although just temporarily, they insist. In the meantime, walking with palm upturned and head bowed, they ask: Can anyone spare a franc or two for a meal?

In Paris, 30,000 people are homeless, known here as SDF, for sans domicile fixe-- without a fixed address. Countrywide, the figure is 200,000 to 600,000, and an additional 4 million live in substandard housing, advocates estimate. More than 3 million of the 25 million-member work force are looking for a job, according to government figures.

A Nation of Their Own

Abbe Pierre, an 82-year-old Roman Catholic priest who has been helping the destitute in Paris for nearly half a century, has never seen it this bad. “Today,” he said, “the marginalized people of France, maltreated and victimized by society, constitute a veritable nation of their own.”

The number of les exclus is small compared to the vast social underclass in the United States. But France has not seen such suffering since the days after World War II.

In times past, France’s generous welfare system, along with family and friends, was enough to get the temporarily jobless back on their feet.

What changed? For one thing, unemployment has become entrenched; the jobless rate has been stuck above 12% for two years. For another, the state has sharply cut benefits for laid-off workers, from 100% salary for two years to 57% for six months, which falls to nothing after two years.

And the unemployment rate, the highest in Northern Europe, doesn’t count the long-term job seekers, those whose benefits have lapsed, or the estimated 2 million people who work part time because they can’t find full-time jobs.

Unlike many Americans, who consider themselves lucky to have a job in tough times, the French have long considered a good job part of their birthright. In fact, it is mentioned in the constitution.

But those expectations are changing. Rare is the family that does not have at least one unemployed relative. And everyone else can see for himself: homeless people snoozing on the freshly swept sidewalks, panhandlers at the stoplights and men trying to clean windshields for a franc (20 cents) at busy traffic circles.

On a Right Bank street, a woman who calls herself Mary tells passersby of her plans to open a restaurant, offering worn blueprints as proof, and then asks for enough to buy herself a meal. “I just need to get by until tomorrow,” she says.

Such scenes have created a feeling of doom, even among the employed. One sign of this is the savings rate, once one of the lowest in Europe and now among the highest. Despite a recent upturn in the economy, people are afraid to spend their money.

Paul Horne, chief international economist in the Paris office of investment firm Smith Barney, calls it “the fear of firing. The French worker today is cowed.”

Dufour is one of half a dozen beggars who work the regional train terminal near the Opera House, beneath the fancy Galeries Lafayette department store. Another is a well-dressed woman, about 50, who sits behind a hand-written sign that reads simply, “Without resources.”

Dufour works a street-level door. His sign, which he hides behind a train map when he’s not begging, reads: “ Bonjour . I am 44 years old. Without a home. Without resources. Please help me.”

In large numbers, people do. As Dufour spoke recently, a man in a suit greeted him and pressed a 5-franc ($1) coin into his palm. Dufour says the man is a regular. “Everyone is very nice,” Dufour said. “I think they all know that this could happen to anybody.”

Dufour’s story is common. He worked for 20 years at a coal mine in northern France but lost his job in 1993 when it was shut. A father of two, his marriage began to fail and he left for Paris. Although shocked to see so many people begging here, he still had hope of a factory job. Eventually, in desperation, he joined them.

Train Station Showers

With his regular donors, Dufour can collect as much as $40 a day, enough for food but not for shelter. He uses free showers at the Gare du Nord train station and shaves in public restrooms, convinced that he must remain clean and presentable.

The donations keep him fed, and he saves enough, along with a $100-a-week welfare payment from the state, to send something back to his teen-age children. But the handouts don’t solve the problem.

“There just isn’t any work out there,” he said. “But I still have very much hope. Maybe after the summer holidays. . . . Many companies have told me to come back in September.”

Chirac came to power in May on a promise to help les exclus and, with his Rally for the Republic party and allies in control of the lawmaking National Assembly, he would seem to have the clout to keep his promise. But he’s hard-pressed to fulfill his contract with the voters. Demands for jobs, on the one hand, and for higher salaries from workers in industry, on the other, already have raised the prospect of a strike-filled autumn.

Chirac’s prime minister, Alain Juppe, recently outlined a plan that he says will add 700,000 jobs to the economy by next year. Among other measures, the government will pay $400 a month to companies that hire the long-term unemployed or young people having difficulty entering the job market. It also will increase the minimum wage and reduce health insurance and social security charges for lower-paid workers.

That sort of talk gives hope to many on the street, but economists fear it is false hope. They doubt that the government can buy jobs without substantial economic growth. And the poor won’t be helped by Juppe’s decision to pay for new jobs by raising the value-added sales tax from 18.6% to 20.6%, which will put an even greater burden on the poor.

One problem is the country’s rigid labor system. Unemployment in France has been exacerbated, ironically, by rules that make it difficult to fire workers. Knowing how difficult it is to lay off workers makes companies reluctant to hire new ones, even when business improves.

Today, Paris counts 7,000 homeless people; advocacy groups say the true figure is closer to 30,000. Last winter, for the first time, the city sent ambulances through the streets to check on the health of the homeless and new shelters were opened. At least four newspapers have been launched specifically to be sold by homeless people in Paris.

The most effective advocate for the homeless is Right to Housing, a private group founded four years ago. After two years of organizing peaceful and ineffective street protests, it abruptly changed tactics. In the past year, it has led homeless families into highly public takeovers of empty buildings.

That effort, unprecedented in Europe, won plenty of popular support; the group is opening new offices in 17 French cities. It also got the government’s attention. Chirac has promised to turn at least some of the hundreds of empty buildings in Paris, many owned by state-run companies, into shelters.

Reform Demanded

“That won’t solve the problem, of course,” said advocate for the homeless Eyraud, president of Right to Housing. “The real problem is unemployment and the rising cost of housing. And for that we need profound reform.”

Chirac’s claim of solidarity with les exclus hasn’t been helped by recent revelations that the city of Paris gave luxury apartments, at rock-bottom rents, to hundreds of politicians and civil servants while Chirac was mayor.

Those sweetheart deals have angered the public and called attention again to the widening gap between rich and poor in France.

That helps explain why Dufour has so many regular benefactors. Even the people who press 5 francs a day into his palm have problems, and some of them unburden themselves to him. “It’s funny, they can talk to me,” Dufour said.

“It’s very hard to find yourself living like this, from one day to the next. There are days when I get fed up and worried. Because once you’re in the Metro, it’s very difficult to get out.”