PARIS: The experience still gives Gabrielle nightmares. A normal morning at the Tolbiac faculty of Paris university a couple of years ago, a crowded lecture hall, a group of sleepy first-year political science students, a sudden commotion.

“They came in so fast nobody knew what was happening,” she said. “They were all wearing scarves or masks. They sprayed tear gas everywhere, and amid the shouting and the uproar they released a whole bunch of rats. It was revolting but also very, very frightening.”

Gabrielle, 25, and her fellow students were lucky that time. A leftist student union pamphleteer was beaten with baseball bats later outside the Sorbonne and a passerby with the wrong colour skin was stabbed after the Groupe Union Defence (GUD) left the Les Halles restaurant, where it had been celebrating its 30th anniversary.

Generations of Paris students have learned to fear the GUD. Its “descentes eclaires” may be less frequent than they were in the 1980s, when one of hundreds of such “lightning descents” left 12 victims in hospital, and it has now been banned from its longstanding headquarters at the Assas law faculty near the Pantheon.

But France’s ultra-right student movement is still very much alive — and has some disturbing links not only to the legitimate far right of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his former lieutenant Bruno Megret, but to some prominent figures on the mainstream right as well.

Most of the GUD’s rats noirs (so called after their emblem, a black rat sporting a celtic cross and a martial arts truncheon) now gravitate around Unite Radicale (UR), a federation of France’s disparate ultra-right clans whose best-known member, since last weekend, is the man who pulled out a rifle on the Champs-Elysees and tried to kill Jacques Chirac.

“Maxime Brunerie was a young militant like lots of others: enthusiastic, determined and serious,” said a UR leader, Guillaume Luyt. “It is not for us to approve or criticise his act; simply to show, in his present distress, that camaradarie is not, for us, an empty word.”

Both the GUD and UR, founded in 1998, are rabidly racist, anti-Semitic and anti-American, declared enemies of “global, cosmopolitan finance”, supportive of the September 11 attacks and believers in la France blanche.

While they profess to be genuine “nationalist revolutionaries” rather than neo-Nazis, the paraphernalia of the Third Reich is never far from their gatherings. When the UR celebrated the summer solstice in the woods near Montsegur a few weeks ago, the swastikas were hanging from the trees along with the banners proclaiming “Europe, Youth, Revolution” and “In Paris as in Gaza, Intifada!”

The group is closely associated with a skinhead record label, Bleu-Blanc-Rock, and the guest speaker at its meeting in April was Horst Mahler, a former member of the Baader-Meinhof group who is now the defence lawyer of choice for Germany’s neo-Nazi NPD movement.

But if their words and acts go way beyond even those of the legitimate far right of Mr Le Pen’s National Front and Mr Megret’s National Republican Movement (MNR), France’s hardcore ultra-right is not so far removed from the political mainstream as all that.

A number of former and current conservative MPs have passed through its ranks. Two of them, Alain Madelin and Gerard Longuet, went on to become ministers. Mr Madelin was briefly economic development minister in the ill-fated 1995 government of Alain Juppe, and Mr Longuet once held the education portfolio in a right-wing administration headed by Eduard Balladur.

The movement’s links to the racist far-right are far stronger.

Past and present members of GUD have long appeared in the ranks of the National Front’s black-gloved security service, at rallies and demonstrations. Despite Mr Le Pen’s recent drive for respectability, a small group of UR militants managed to take part in this year’s National Front May Day parade.

In black leather jackets, sunglasses and boots, they dodged the security men to chant “Burn the immigrants” and “Anarchy today, the New Order tomorrow”.

And since the foundation of Mr Megret’s MNR in December 1998, Unite Radicale has consistently backed the party’s racist and nationalist line, even fielding candidates — including Mr Brunerie — on the MNR’s electoral lists.

Commentators have raised the spectre of a resurgence of ultra-right violence, triggered by resentment at the outcome of this year’s general elections.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service