Workers use slogans of protest from an economic horror story

THE French medical students who have protested for the past five weeks against social security reforms said they were rebelling against l'horreur economique. The banners on the fence at the doomed Renault factory at Vilvorde in Belgium said much the same thing: Non a I'horreur eonomique!

Over the past seven months, the slogan has been shouted by tens of thousands of street demonstrators opposing the closure of factories, the privatisation of state companies and other government attempts to reform the centralised, inefficient French economy.

Some of the demonstrators brandish copies of Viviane Forrester's book - L'horreur economique - which has won a literary prize and sold 300,000, copies since it was published last September. And Mrs Forrester has become a kind of cult figure, an unlikely fate for an elegant, kindly, 71-year-old novelist with no formal education beyond the French baccalaureat.

She is thrilled that her title - borrowed from a poem by the 19th century poet Arthur Rimbaud - made such a thundering entry into everyday French vocabulary.

"The demonstrators are right," she says adamantly, sipping mineral water in my Paris apartment. "Rimbaud was very interested in the Commune. He would be moved to see his phrase taken up by the masses.

Since last autumn, Mrs Forrester has travelled to 27 French cities, where she often draws cheering crowds of over 1,000. "At the beginning I got tears in my eyes, she recalls.

Passers-by stop her on Paris sidewalks to tell her, "thank you, thank you".

More than 1,500 readers have written to tell her how deeply her book has touched them. French politicians do not address Mrs Forrester's basic thesis - that employment is finished - but they often refer to the success of her book as a symptom of France's malaise.

The "economic horror" defined by Mrs Forrester and inflaming the French public signifies the end of employment as we know it. We are not going through a crisis, she says, but through a change of civilisation which politicians have failed to recognise.

Society persists in humiliating the unemployed by forcing them to look for work when, statistically, it is proven that they will find none.

Governments cede to an unregulated, anarchical free market run by a privileged, computer-literate "caste" who are indifferent to the individual lives which they ravage and pursue profit at all costs.

In the world of high finance as described by Mrs Forrester, stock brokers "buy options on options on options" in a virtual market. Profit-making firms fire employees en masse. For firing - "downsizing" in American jargon - has become a source of profit. The human a.being is crushed and cast aside because, for the first time in history, he is no longer needed.

Computers, automation and third world workers with no social protection have replaced him. He or she is no longer useful; it is only a matter of time until some tyrant - National Front leader Mr Jean-Marie le Pen would be a candidate, she says - suggests simply eliminating the unemployed.

Surely the word "genocide" is too strong, I protest. Mrs Forrester knows about genocide; as a young woman she fled with her Jewish family from Nazi-occupied France to Spain.

"The danger is that people don't think about it," she says. "They are conditioned; they acquiesce. There are many cities in France that expel beggars now. Where will these beggars go?"

SOME 5 million French live in what the government calls "precariousness", a euphemism for poverty, and a draft law on "exclusion" being debated in the National Assembly this week offers no solutions. "People find their sense of indignation again when they read my book," says Mrs Forrester.

Now her ideas are spreading beyond France, even before a dozen translations are completed. She has been interviewed by Lithuanian and Dutch television and by 11 different Brazilian newspapers. Her book has been discussed in the Mexican parliament and the next stops on her speaking tour are Italy, Latin America, Germany and Korea.

In L'horreur economique, Madame Bovary and Pascal are interwoven with World Bank and US Treasury officials. While her taxi waits downstairs, Mrs Forrester's literary world again blurs into economics. "If Shakespeare came back to life, I think he'd write about the economy today," she says.