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‘The NPA’s Summer University marked the huge step forward taken by the revolutionary left in France over the last year.

Jobcentre Plus worker Mark Anthony France has been sacked for organising a petition calling on his local MP Julie Kirkbride, who has been mired in the expenses scandal, to stand down.

Recent figures showing Japan, Hong Kong, France and Germany creeping out of the recession have been hailed in some quarters as heralding the end of the global economic crisis.

In the wake of the French Revolution of 1789 one of its leaders, Maximilien Robespierre, made a passionate defence of the use of "terror" against those who wanted a counter-revolution.

In the French port town of Calais over 700 refugees queue for food parcels from the Salam charity every day.

There are depressing similarities between the case of the two young French students Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez, brutally murdered in south London last July, and the case of Baby Peter, who died a slow and painful death in 2007 at the hands of his carers.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera Cosi Fan Tutte (All women behave that way) was first performed in 1790, the year after the French Revolution.

In September 1940 a German Jewish refugee committed suicide after he fled occupied France into Spain and was then told he would be turned over to Hitler’s Gestapo.

In February 1934, in the wake of a huge financial scandal, fascists in France led an attack on the country’s parliament.

At the close of the 1960s, saxophonist Nathan Davis was making records in praise of the civil rights movement and in opposition to war – from the relatively safe distance of France.

Thousands of demonstrators defied police repression and violence to stage mass protests against Nato in Strasbourg, France, last Saturday.

‘We could face situations where chief executives of companies are, as in France recently, taken hostage by protesters.’ Lisa Patmore, partner at Pinsent Masons law firm explaining that as economic conditions deteriorate, workers are more likely to take matters into their own hands