The experience still gives Gabrielle nightmares. A normal morning at the Tolbiac faculty of Paris university a couple of years ago, a crowded lecture hall, a group of sleepy first-year political science students, a sudden commotion.
"They came in so fast nobody knew what was happening," she said. "They were all wearing scarves or masks. They sprayed tear gas everywhere, and amid the shouting and the uproar they released a whole bunch of rats. It was revolting but also very, very frightening."
Gabrielle, 25, and her fellow students were lucky that time. A leftist student union pamphleteer was beaten with baseball bats later outside the Sorbonne and a passerby with the wrong colour skin was stabbed after the Groupe Union Défence left the Les Halles restaurant, where it had been celebrating its 30th anniversary.
Generations of Paris students have learned to fear the GUD. Its déscentes éclaires may be less frequent than they were in the 1980s, when one of hundreds of such "lightning descents" left 12 victims in hospital, and it has now been banned from its longstanding HQ at the Assas law faculty near the Panthéon.
But France's ultra-right student movement is still very much alive - and has some disturbing links not only to the legitimate far right of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his former lieutenant Bruno Mégret, but to some prominent figures on the mainstream right as well.
Most of the GUD's rats noirs (so called after their emblem, a black rat sporting a celtic cross and a martial arts truncheon) now gravitate around Unité Radicale, a federation of France's disparate ultra-right clans whose best-known member, since last weekend, is the man who pulled out a rifle on the Champs-Elysées and tried to kill Jacques Chirac.
"Maxime Brunerie was a young militant like lots of others: enthusiastic, determined and serious," said a UR leader, Guillaume Luyt.
"It is not for us to approve or criticise his act; simply to show, in his present distress, that camaradarie is not, for us, an empty word."
Both the GUD and UR, founded in 1998, are rabidly racist, anti-semitic and anti-American, declared enemies of "global, cosmopolitan finance", supportive of the September 11 attacks and believers in la France blanche .
While they profess to be genuine "nationalist revolutionaries" rather than neo-Nazis, the paraphernalia of the Third Reich is never far from their gatherings.
When the UR celebrated the summer solstice in the woods near Montségur a few weeks ago, the swastikas were hanging from the trees along with the banners proclaiming "Europe, Youth, Revolution" and "In Paris as in Gaza, Intifada!"
The group is closely associated with a skinhead record label, Bleu-Blanc-Rock, and the guest speaker at its latest meeting in April was Horst Mahler, a former member of the Baader-Meinhof group who is now the defence lawyer of choice for Germany's neo-Nazi NPD movement.
But if their words and acts go way beyond even those of the legitimate far right of Mr Le Pen's National Front and Mr Mégret's National Republican Movement, France's hardcore ultra-right is not so far removed from the political mainstream as all that.
A number of former and current conservative MPs have passed through its ranks. Two of them, Alain Madelin and Gerard Longuet, went on to become ministers.
Mr Madelin was briefly economic development minister in the ill-fated 1995 government of Alain Juppé, and Mr Longuet once held the education portfolio in a right-wing administration headed by Eduard Balladur.
Both were leading members of Occident, the immediate and equally violent predecessor of GUD, in the mid-1960s, alongside the prominent Paris conservative MP Claude Goasguen. Mr Longuet, who wrote the GUD's founding charter, is now a senator; Mr Madelin ran in this year's presidential elections under the banner of the free-market Liberal Democracy party.
All three men now angrily refuse to talk about their student political involvement, dismissing it as a youthful if instructive adventure comparable to the early flirtation with Trotskyism of the former Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin, which was revealed only last year.
They also insist they were never part of the movement's violent fringe, and they have subsequently moved smoothly up to the highest ranks of national politics.
The movement's links to the racist far-right are far stronger. Guillaume Luyt is a former head of the Young National Front who resigned from the party in 2000 mainly because an activist of North African origin was elected to its national committee.
Past and present members of GUD have long appeared in the ranks of the National Front's black-gloved security service, at rallies and demonstrations. Despite Mr Le Pen's recent drive for respectability, a small group of UR militants managed to take part in this year's National Front May Day parade.
In black leather jackets, sunglasses and boots, they dodged the security men to chant "Burn the immigrants" and "Anarchy today, the New Order tomorrow".
And since the foundation of Mr Mégret's MNR in December 1998, Unité Radicale has consistently backed the party's racist and nationalist line, even fielding candidates - including Mr Brunerie - on the MNR's electoral lists.
According to the UR's website: "We do not compete with the MNR, but we aim to complete it by creating room for expression for those who could be left unsatisfied by its necessary moderation. We do not want to be a mass party but an avant-garde; our tough, organised structure compensates for our numbers."
Commentators have raised the spectre of a resurgence of ultra-right violence triggered by resentment at the outcome of this year's general elections, which saw the legitimate far-right parties fail to win a single seat despite Mr Le Pen's record 18% score in the presidential poll.
Disappointed at the polls, more UR militants could yet turn to direct action.
Reached by telephone, Fabrice Robert, another of the group's leaders, said Mr Brunerie's assassination attempt was "an act of desperation" that should have surprised no one.
"When the 20% of the French population who voted for the far right find themselves without a representative in parliament, such acts cannot, I'm afraid, be excluded," he said.