The aide denied German press reports that Hollande was advised by Peter Hartz in his fight against France's stubbornly high unemployment during the meeting two months ago.

However, the mere suggestion that Hollande took inspiration from Hartz's labour reforms, which included reining in jobless benefits and more flexibility on working time, was enough to make unions see red.

"The president is always hiding in Angela Merkel's skirts. He's got to get out," said the head of the left-wing CGT union, Thierry Lepaon. "He's got to stop taking lessons from others."

Hollande said earlier this month that more needed to be done to fight unemployment and, in a stark shift of policy, announced plans to offer French companies 30 billion euros ($41 billion) of tax breaks by 2017 in exchange for accepting hiring targets.

The Socialist leader cast the plan as an overt move towards more business friendly policies, prompting comparisons from some unions and even Berlin with the reforms former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder pushed through a decade ago.

"Peter Hartz wanted to invite the president to a conference. The rest is not true," the aide said, confirming Hollande met the architect of the reforms that economists credit with turning round the German economy but denying he had been advised by him.

Adding fuel to the fire, Sigmar Gabriel, a former protege of Schroeder who is now the vice-chancellor of Germany's coalition government and in charge of a powerful new Economics Ministry, said at an event in Paris on Monday that Hollande's plans were "very close" to the measures Germany undertook in the 2000s under Schroeder.

Hollande's government was quick to insist that it had its own recipe for bringing down unemployment, running at nearly 11 percent.

French Labour Minister Michel Sapin described Hartz as "interesting", but added: "I don't think there is any question of him offering political advice to the president."

BROKEN PROMISE

Sapin rejected pressure from the opposition to resign over the government's failure to get unemployment falling last year as promised, insisting jobless totals had finally peaked.

In a setback for Hollande, data showing a rise in jobless claims to record levels in December crushed his promise of reversing a rise in unemployment by the end of 2013.

"We didn't reach the target," Sapin, one of Hollande's closest political allies, told France Inter radio.

"The overall unemployment trend was not reversed, but we are very close to doing it," he said, adding that the turnaround could be "a few days, a few months" away.

Sapin seized on the fact that the rise in jobless claims slowed in recent months as a sign that the government's efforts to fight unemployment were bearing fruit.

However, economists say that any improvement was mostly because of state-sponsored jobs rather than the strength of the economy, which the government forecasts will grow a mere 0.9 percent this year.

December's increase prompted calls from the conservative UMP opposition for Sapin to stand down for not meeting what Hollande had cast as his Socialist government's top priority.

"That's just low-ball politics as tends to be the case with Jean-Francois Cope," Sapin said, referring to the UMP's president.

A monthly survey by the official INSEE statistics agency found that the number of households concerned about unemployment rose again this month, although that did not prevent consumer confidence from rising.

In a further discouraging sign, temporary employment - considered as a bellwether for future hiring trends - eased in December, the Prism'Emploi recruitment association said.

French unions and employers met on Tuesday in their latest round of negotiations over reforming the heavily indebted state jobless fund with an end-March deadline to wrap up the talks looming.

($1 = 0.7313 euros)

(Additional reporting by Jean-Baptiste Vey, Elizabeth Pineau in Ankara; Writing by Leigh Thomas; Editing by Mark John and Alison Williams)

By Emmanuel Jarry