WHEN Lionel Jospin was a student at the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA) the French institute that trains high-ranking civil servants, he was given the choice of an internship at Le Monde newspaper or a coal mine in Nord-Pas-de-Calais.

Most people would have chosen France's most prestigious publication; Mr Jospin opted for the coal mine. It was typical of a man who seems always to choose the hardest path, who is serious almost to the point of masochism.

His ENA course earlier had been interrupted by military conscription. Despite his left-wing convictions, his hatred of the Algerian war and his disgust with Gen Charles de Gaulle's right-wing rule, the young Jospin served with an armoured unit in Germany.

"I didn't have the soul of a pacifist, of a conscientious objector, nor the mentality of a `funker', when young, working-class men didn't have the chance to get out of it," he later told his biographers, Gerard Leclerc and Florence Muracciole.

The same seriousness of purpose led Mr Jospin to leave the Quai d'Orsay, France's foreign ministry, in 1969. He had refused a posting in London, considered a plum job by most young French diplomats. "Can you imagine me passing the petits fours or escorting duchesses to the opera?" he asked a close friend.

Instead, Mr Jospin preferred to work in the foreign ministry's development aid section. But French civil servants are obliged to remain politically neutral. When the student riots of May 1968 occurred, Mr Jospin, then 30, longed to be on the barricades. After leaving the foreign ministry in the evenings, he wandered down to the Latin Quarter to sniff the scent of tear gas.

Mr Jospin, who will be 60 on July 12th, became France's Socialist Prime Minister yesterday. The descriptions are consistent: austere, honest, methodical and stubborn.

THE comparison to a Swedish pastor - first used by an Italian newspaper - has caught on. In his Haute Garonne constituency he is "Yonnel"; on the Guignois de l'Info, a satirical television puppet programme like Spitting Image, he is "Yo-yo", a naive character who drives around in a phut-phut car looking for ideas. Socialist party workers have nicknamed him "Albert" when he is happy and "Kim Il Sung" - after the late North Korean dictator - when he is angry.

The latter hints at a certain ideological rigidity; in his youth, unproven allegations in the French press said Mr Jospin was a Trotskyist mole in the Socialist Party.

Throughout the 1970s, Mr Jospin was happier teaching economics, playing basketball with his students and going to Socialist Party meetings than he had been as a civil servant. His father, Mr Robert Jospin, also a Socialist and a teacher, was decidedly politically incorrect - Mr Jospin snr opposed foreign intervention in the Spanish Civil War and supported the Munich agreement.

Lionel grew up in a Protestant household, where politics was the main topic of discussion at meals. "I am the son of a midwife and a teacher," he said during the election campaign. "I come from a simple background. I have absolutely no desire to belong to a sort of `upper class'. I get real pleasure out of being faithful to my origins."

Mr Jospin lacks the chummy, back-slapping style that made President Jacques Chirac appealing to voters. But the public does not find Mr Jospin arrogant, as it did his predecessor, Mr Alain Juppe

The late President Francois Mitterrand made Mr Jospin the first Secretary of the Socialist Party in 1981, a post he held until he became minister of education seven years later. Between 1988 and 1992, he established seven new universities- and reformed primary and secondary education, with the goal that 80 per cent of students would reach the Baecalaureat. He resisted the corruption that ate away at the Socialist Party: "As a minister, I never took a private aircraft on private business. I always paid my personal expenses, he later boasted.

Mr Mitterrand said back in 1981 that his protege was "capable of fulfilling the highest duties". But the new Prime Minister's complex relationship with Mr Mitterrand is summed up by the subtitle of Mr Jospin's biography: The Rebellious? Heir. Throughout the 1980s, the Machiavellian Mitterrand groomed both the former prime minister, Mrs. Laurent Fabius, and Mr Jospin to succeed him Mr Jospin was reportedly jealous of Mr Fabius, who had the ageing Mr Mitterrand's greater affection.

BY the time he left government in 1992, Mr Jospin was bitterly opposed to the turn the party had taken - especially the role played by Mr Bernard Tapie, the former cabinet minister who is now serving a prison sentence for financial corruption.

"The left has caused its own failure, through the acceptance of unemployment, the break with the working classes, the practices which are far from our ideals," he said in 1993, begging the party to change its ways. His detractors call his two-year estrangement from the party his "crossing of the sandbox", as opposed to Gen Charles de Gaulle's - much longer "crossing of the desert".

Mr Jospin consummated his rift with Mr Mitterrand in 1995 by demanding the "right of inventory" over the years of Socialist rule and by standing for the presidency without Mr Mitterrand's support. His resurrection of a party that suffered its worst defeat ever in the 1993 parliamentary election has vindicated his drive against corruption. He has refused to consider any politicians touched by scandals for his cabinet, saying he wants a morally unimpeachable government.

When Mr Mitterrand's daughter, Mazarine Pingeot, showed up at the Socialists' victory celebration on Sunday night, it was considered a sign that the party had healed its divisions.

Mr Jospin himself ran his 1995 presidential campaign and the legislative campaign of the past five weeks. He demanded that the Socialists present new candidates, and that 30 per cent of them must be women. He united more than a half-dozen leftist parties in an alliance which will now be tested in power.

President Chirac thought he would catch Mr Jospin off guard by calling a snap election. But the Socialist leader moved quickly, often travelling to four or five cities in one day, repeating everywhere that he would say what he was going to do - and do what he said.

He made euro-scepticism - or at least a softening of the Maastricht-criteria - an issue. "We want Europe without undoing France," he wrote in an open letter. "We do not want to dissolve Europe in globalisation. We will not allow the European ideal to lose ground in people's minds because they associate it with unemployment and hardship."

When the first results came in on Sunday night, Mr Jospin calmly jotted them down on a note pad, then - shut himself in an adjoining room to compose the short address which has been his only public statement since the election victory. Evoking the "profound demands" of the French people, he said: "It is not the demand for everything right away, which no one any longer believes in. It is not the naive belief in promises that have been reneged on in the past. It is the thought-out, pressing demand for real progress over time for French men and women, in particular the least fortunate among them."

In one short week, between the first and second rounds, Mr Jospin managed to transform a protest vote into a hesitant but hopeful vote of support. The task before him is huge and fraught with contradictions: to establish good working relationships not only with President Chirac but with his fractious Communist and ecologist allies; and to reconcile Maastricht criteria with the left's rejection of austerity measures and privatisations.

Most difficult of all will be the quest to lower unemployment. If he can solve that conundrum, Mr Jospin will truly find a place in French history.