Less than a year since France abandoned its "ecotax" on truckers after protesters destroyed the equipment built to collect it, similar strongarm tactics look to be working for the nation's farmers, cab drivers and ferry workers.
Livestock producers struggling with low prices won a hastily assembled package of loans and debt relief this week after blocking motorways and dumping manure outside supermarkets.
Socialist President Francois Hollande, keen to avoid such outbursts of anger coalescing into a wider anti-government campaign, met farmers' leaders on Thursday and urged processors and distributors to raise the prices they pay producers.
Weeks earlier, authorities forced the closure of the Uber ride-hailing app and summoned its bosses to court after taxi drivers furious at low-cost competition overturned cars and injured police.
Ferry workers who have repeatedly blocked the Channel Tunnel entrance with burning tyres, paralysing traffic between Britain and the continent, won government intervention this week to help secure their jobs after their ships are sold to a Danish buyer.
Now the men and women who run licensed tobacco stores are hooding roadside radars with bin liners at night to deprive the government of revenues from speeding fines in a bid to make it drop plans to ban brand names from cigarette packs.
Critics of Hollande say his concessions to lawlessness are typical of a leadership style that avoids confrontation - and painful decisions. Some note he helped broker a European bailout deal for Greece that includes far tougher reforms than anything he has chosen for France.
His predecessors' record was not much different.
"France has had a long history of demonstrations, protests, and strikes in some of these sectors, especially transport," said Kerstin Hamann, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida who has analysed the outcome of strikes in Western Europe from 1980 to 2009.
Supporters of the ecotax - a pro-environment levy on heavy goods vehicles that had won broad parliamentary support - predicted that its withdrawal would encourage copycat campaigns.
"It's because such tactics work - and they are clearly doing so again," said Alistair Cole, a professor of Politics and France specialist at Sciences Po university in Lyon.
Although steeped in a tradition of direct action dating back before the 1789 revolution, France has no monopoly on effective acts of protest, civil disobedience, and withdrawal of labour.
In neighbouring Britain, riots and mass non-payment that followed the introduction of a "poll tax" for households in 1989 led to its swift withdrawal.
France has near the lowest rate of union membership of OECD and European Union member states, with fewer than 10 percent of workers affiliated.
Yet the country lost the most work time to strikes in a selection of 17 European countries between 2008 and 2012, a European Commission report showed. Apart from France, only Denmark showed an increase on the previous five years.
Protest a 'civic function'
The 2014 study also distinguished between strikes, which are waning generally in Europe, and other forms of protest, which are on the rise.
It is those sectoral protests and the accompanying maximum mayhem tactics that are seen as a French speciality.
"There is what might be called a cultural assumption in France that whoever is in power will abuse that power unless kept in check," said James Shields, professor of French politics at Aston University in Britain.
"This forms part of the continual tension between government and the citizenry... the muscular action that often accompanies it is part of the negotiating framework, a show of brute strength prior to seeking peaceful resolution. Not for nothing is "boss napping" (sequestering managers) a French invention as a means of opposing layoffs or plant closures."
The authorities' response to such illegal acts usually involves a handful of arrests, but rarely prosecutions.
In the ecotax protest, led by hauliers and others worried the tax could make them uncompetitive, the government resisted for months before first postponing then abandoning the tax.
The blockades and acts of sabotage had morphed into a wider protest movement called the "Bonnets Rouges" (red caps) that risked uniting the entire Brittany region against Hollande.
This time, the government has acted more quickly to appease the beef, dairy and pork farmers, conjuring up hundreds of millions of euros of rescue funds to avoid the danger of a long hot summer of discontent.
While some complain that those interest groups with the ability to cause disruption are at an advantage over others, such muscular protests look set to stay.
"Protesters are seen to be performing a civic function," said Shields. They are reaffirming the egalitarian rights of ordinary people to challenge officialdom and seek redress for perceived injustice."
