WORLD REPORT PROFILE : Arlette Laguiller : ICON OF THE LEFT IN FRANCE : Loyalty to the cause of labor earns perennial presidential candidate respect as a firebrand.

PARIS —  Arlette Laguiller is a charming, petite 55-year-old who has toiled for the banking giant Credit Lyonnais for nearly four decades, living in a one-bedroom apartment in a working-class neighborhood of Paris.

But every seven years, she takes an unpaid leave from her job to enter the rough-and-tumble campaign for the French presidency, carrying the unlikely Trotskyite banner of the Workers’ Struggle Party.

In four consecutive campaigns, more than any other candidate in France, Laguiller has defended the workers’ cause, railed about the failures of capitalism, demanded broad nationalization and predicted an imminent uprising of the masses.

In the process, she has become a national icon, widely admired for honesty and, perhaps more importantly, for her unwillingness to change her views, especially in these politically expedient times.

“People used to say I was completely demodee (out of fashion),” she told a newspaper here. “But now they tell me I must be proud because I’ve stuck to my views.”

In an interview with The Times, she added: “Loyalty to one’s ideas in politics is, sadly, becoming very rare.”

Laguiller collected 5.3% of the vote in the first round of elections Sunday, eliminating her, as she had anticipated, from the May 7 final round. But it was her best showing ever, reflecting sweeping frustration and even anger with the state of mainstream politics in France today. Together, protest votes cast for fringe candidates on both the left and the right accounted for 40% of the vote Sunday.

A vote for Laguiller was “a vote from the heart,” said Marc Peschanski, director of research at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris.

“Although I didn’t believe that one vote can change the face of the world, I have to make my cry of indignation,” Peschanski said in an article he wrote for Liberation, a French daily. “Arlette has been loyal to her convictions, and that seems to me to be the best guarantee that my cry will be heard.”

The first round of the presidential campaign was dominated by the internecine battle between front-runner Jacques Chirac, the Paris mayor, and his fellow conservative, Prime Minister Edouard Balladur.

Even though Lionel Jospin, candidate from retiring President Francois Mitterrand’s Socialist Party, finished in first place on Sunday, he had difficulty securing the left-wing vote. Many leftist workers and intellectuals considered him too moderate and some found comfort further out on the political spectrum, in the Communist Party, for example, or in Laguiller’s unreconstructed, radical ideology.

Laguiller won especially high marks for her bluntness. Chirac and Balladur, she said, were “just two blows with the same club.” And even Jospin, she argues, was trying to win with promises of “gifts to employers.”

Her solution for France’s high rate of unemployment, at 12.3% the highest among major industrialized nations, was a state takeover of all companies making a profit or firing employees.

In addition, she called for nationalizing the banks, opening the books of big companies to worker scrutiny and a flat pay raise of $300 a month for everyone in the country.

“The workers must destroy the apparatus of the bourgeois state,” said a recent issue of her party’s 15,000-circulation monthly magazine, the Workers’ Struggle. “The workers must exercise power, themselves, directly, because elections won’t change their lives.”

Such ideas are rejected as impractical and outmoded by most French voters, who are also put off by her glowing references to Marx and Engels. But, some have to admit, they like Arlette Laguiller’s style.

Alain Souchon, a popular French singer, recorded a folk song last year about Laguiller, saying that, even though “her words are old, she tells them afresh. . . . Even if she’s wrong sometimes, she’s so nice, Arlette.”

“I love her consistency, her loyalty to her cause,” said a mid-level French executive, who described himself as a political centrist.

At a recent campaign rally on the outskirts of Paris, Laguiller appeared in a hall festooned with red flags and filled with nearly 5,000 cheering supporters. Several banners read: “With Arlette Laguiller, an Emergency Plan to Defend the Workers.”

Earlier, at a news conference, she showed off an engaging personality, unburdened by the pressure exhibited by the other eight candidates in the race.

A small woman with short, dark hair, Laguiller was dressed simply in a white T-shirt, red (of course) cardigan and black skirt.

When she sank into her chair, nearly disappearing behind the table, a photographer offered her a coat to sit on.

“No, thanks,” she said, laughing. “I’m small. I know I’m small.”

Laguiller credits her growing political support to a public “fed up with scandals.”

“There has been a veritable social catastrophe in France, especially with unemployment,” she said. “And the youth are realizing that the state is linked to corruption and that the politicians haven’t stopped watering the rich at the expense of the poor.”

Indeed, France is racked by corruption scandals, and the average citizen is getting angrier.

The run-up to the elections Sunday were marked, for the first time in modern-day presidential campaigns, by dozens of strikes, mostly by workers demanding a bigger piece of the economic pie.

Revelations of large salaries paid to company bosses, and improving balance sheets at some companies, have spurred growing dissatisfaction.

“Some people mock my call, ‘Workers, workers,’ ” Laguiller said. “But these are the majority of our population, they are all the people who work without exploiting anyone. They are factory workers, intellectuals and small merchants.”

Many blame the left’s troubles on retiring President Mitterrand, who in 14 years in power presided over the phenomenal growth of his Socialist Party as well as its precipitous fall.

But, through it all, Laguiller has remained a constant. Her philosophy is summed up in the titles of her two books: “I--A Militant” and “We Have to Change the World.”

She was born in 1940 in a neighborhood east of Paris. Her father was a laborer; her mother a secretary.

Although she wanted to go to secretarial school, her parents could not afford it. So she took a job as a trainee typist at a branch of Credit Lyonnais, where she still is on the payroll but now works full time as the union representative.

As a young girl, Laguiller remembers being greatly influenced by the Algerian independence movement, which was fighting to shrug off French colonial rule.

Later, she participated in the student protests of 1968. She came to national fame in 1974, when she helped lead a two-month nationwide banking strike that paralyzed Credit Lyonnais and was joined by workers at other banks.

That year, she managed to collect enough signatures to meet the law’s requirements and became an official candidate for the presidency, winning 2.3% of the vote. Seven years later, in 1981, she again collected 2.3% and, in 1988, 2%.

But, in the process, she has become a determined fixture on the campaign trail, earning the title, as one newspaper put it recently, of France’s “seven-year itch.”