Hundreds of thousands of French workers will stage a one-day national strike on Thursday calling for an end to job cuts, a reversal of the government’s reform programme and higher welfare payments to help soften the economic crisis.

Olivier Besancenot has set his sights a little higher. The young leader of France’s extreme left is hoping the strike will be the first step towards another French revolution as the recession bites and protests multiply across Europe’s second largest economy.

“We want the established powers to be blown apart,” Mr Besancenot says in an interview with the Financial Times.

From a shabby and anonymous former print works on the edge of Paris which serves as his headquarters, the 34-year-old Trotskyist postman plans to exploit the economic crisis to overturn capitalism, bringing down President Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right government on the way.

“There is a torrent of industrial disputes and social protests,” he says. “But they all remain separate from each other. What we need to do is bring all this together in one massive movement of dissent.”

To many outside observers, Mr Besancenot’s words may sound like a throwback to France’s revolutionary tradition and to its enduring fixation with Marxism.

But his vow to bring about a “new May ‘68” will set alarm bells ringing in Paris, where the political establishment is deeply marked by the events of 40 years ago when students protests combined with the biggest general strike in decades.

Centre-right governments were forced to retreat by big protests movements in 1995 and 2005. Mr Sarkozy is anxious to avoid such a fate. He has shelved an education reform that triggered widespread protests among high school students.

The strike on Thursday, if widely followed, could mark the beginning of a broad-based anti-government movement.

The government is already concerned by signs of radicalisation. SUD, a hardline union movement with links to Mr Besancenot, caused chaos for Parisian commuters during a month of industrial action, including a new weapon – the 59-minute strike.

Next month Mr Besancenot will launch the New Anticapitalist party, an attempt to corral the fractious extreme left into a single movement.

“We are going to reinvent and re-establish the anticapitalist project,” he says. “We want to stick back together all of the radical elements of the workers’ movement, something that has proved impossible for more than 20 years because of historical and personal differences.”

But Mr Besancenot is no shadowy agitator. Equally at ease on a Sunday evening television chatshow as at a rally of revolutionary communists, he is one of the most popular opposition politicians and is often regarded as the most effective adversary of Mr Sarkozy.

With his neat, Tintin looks and mild-mannered eloquence, Mr Besancenot has become the acceptable, even attractive face of French extremist politics. Opinion polls suggest as many as 10 per cent of voters would back him in a presidential election.