French unions have traditionally given Alcatel’s chief executive a bit of a rough time at annual meetings, but no one expected the treatment dealt out at June’s gathering in Paris, when the American chief executive of the newly created Alcatel-Lucent took the stage from her French non-executive chairman, Serge Tchuruk.

Cat-calls, whistles, and foghorns from 260 angry French employees protesting at wholesale job cuts left Pat Russo shaken, undermining the words she had prepared to laud the success of the merger between France’s Alcatel and Lucent of the US only six short months before.