The Other France, Separate and Unhappy

The problem is not recognized partly because of France's unique approach to absorbing immigrants. The republican model stresses the individual over his community or group, and directs that all individuals be accorded equal treatment. Under this model of mandatory assimilation, there is no room for the identity politics so common in the United States or for separate cultural and ethnic enclaves; newcomers are expected to learn French values and customs, and essentially to become French. And one of the pillars of republicanism is a strict separation between church and state, which explains, for example, why a law prohibiting Muslim girls from wearing head scarvesin public schools was overwhelmingly endorsed by the French population; the head scarf was a direct affront to the notion that no student should be different or stand out.

Faith in this model of assimilation runs so deep in France that it is considered unlawful even to keep statistics by race, religion or ethnicity -- thus making it virtually impossible to tell exactly how well represented the French Africans and French Arabs are in business, in government, in journalism and in academia. As a correspondent working there for five years, I was constantly asking the question, and I was told repeatedly -- and often rudely -- "In France, we don't keep such records."

For believers in this model, its validity comes from France's proven success over the decades in absorbing wave after wave of new immigrants -- and they insist it will work, too, for the young French Africans and French Arabs rioting in the banlieue. "It will take time, because in France, it always takes time," Guillaume Parmentier, the director of the French Center on the United States, told me over drinks last week. "We need them to speak French like the French. If they go through the French school system, they'll be fine."

"We have ghettos," Parmentier said. "But we can integrate them. Look at the Armenians. Look at the Italians. Look at the Jews. I'm convinced that most Muslims want to integrate."

But the young French Arabs and French Africans are different in many ways from the Armenians and Italians, or the Portuguese and Spanish who came to France in the last century, or the Poles and Romanians and other Eastern Europeans arriving now. Their religion -- most are Muslim -- sets them apart from earlier, Christian immigrants. Their very appearance is different. They are in France at a time of high unemployment and economic stagnation. And France's elite-based system -- where the top positions in government and business are reserved for graduates of a handful of top schools -- is tough for even France's native underclass to crack.

Moreover, there is the ugly truth of racial discrimination. "The French have made a fetish out of the notion of an egalitarian society, but in these poor neighborhoods, these kids don't feel their chances are the same," said Nancy L. Green, an American professor who has done comparative studies of immigration in France and the United States. "As wonderful as the ideology is, there has to be a recognition that discrimination exists, and has existed, and is not going away by repeating a mantra of equality."

One who saw what was coming was Patrick Lozes. Born in Benin, educated in France, Lozes is a pharmacist by training. When we met in early 2002, he was trying to break the color bar in politics as the candidate of a small center-right party for a seat in the French National Assembly in elections held that spring. The Paris seat he was campaigning for -- and lost -- included my neighborhood, the Marais, in the center of town. We would meet, usually in a cafe near Paris City Hall, and he would tell me about the difficulties of being a minority in France, and how an explosion of rage was possible -- indeed likely -- if the underlying problems were left to fester.

After the rioting started, I caught up with Lozes on his cell phone. "It's been three years [that] we've been talking about these things, so I'm unfortunately not surprised," he said.

"When you're black and when you're Muslim, you are discriminated against," Lozes said. "It is this discrimination that France has been denying for a long, long time. . . . France still doesn't understand that being French is today very different than being white and Catholic."

Lozes is also an optimist, and I found myself agreeing that out of the current upheaval, France could emerge a better place, just as the United States did after the 1960s riots, which served as a wake-up call . "Now people will realize they have to include black people," Lozes told me, "they have to include minorities, they have to include people who are not white and Catholic."

"I hope, I hope, I hope," he said. "I'm trying to tell this to the people in place -- now is the time to take advantage of this situation and to fight discrimination."

The Frenchcan take a lesson from what we learned in this country after the 1960s riots. They can start by correcting the national phobia against anything that smacks of an American-style affirmative action program, and embrace some method of bringing its minority populations into the mainstream. Some -- like Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy -- have advocated "positive discrimination." Others, like Parmentier, have suggested a system of "preferential promotion."