KEY POINTS:
PARIS: The election of Barack Obama to the White House has prompted difficult questions in France, as in other European countries, about the poor integration of ethnic minorities.
The idea that the keys of the Elysee presidential palace could one day be handed to a "French Obama" causes smiles or derision, so deeply mired is the underclass of ethnic minorities.
Discrimination based on quiet racial prejudice, poor economic opportunities, setbacks in education and near-invisibility in public life are key reasons cited for poor advancement.
Even the size of France's ethnic minorities is unknown. The French Republic, by its doctrine of liberty, equality and fraternity, is officially colour-blind and does not count people based on their skin colour.
According to 2004 figures compiled by the national statistics institute Insee, the country had 4.9 million people who were born abroad, in a population of 62.5 million, including its overseas departments and territories.
But this does not include the descendants of the waves of immigrants who came in the 1960s and 1970s from the former colonies of North Africa and West Africa and who were born in France and have French citizenship.
The vast number of French blacks and browns are locked in menial jobs and live in poor housing, in apartment blocks in grim suburbs on the outskirts of big cities. Less than a handful are heads of prominent corporations.
To the white majority, minorities are visible only as sports stars, such as Zinedine Zidane and Yannick Noah, or entertainers, such as the actor Djamel Debbouze and rap group Sniper.
Only one black MP has been elected an MP to the current National Assembly from a mainland French constituency and the Cabinet has three non-white members, whose appointment by President Nicolas Sarkozy last year was considered a ground-breaking encouragement.
It took until 2006 for the country to have its first black newsreader, Harry Roselmack, 32, whose rise was considered an astonishing achievement - or tokenism - in the white, bourgeois-bohemian elite of French TV.
The November 4 United States vote has triggered a clarion appeal for change.
"Barack Obama's election should sound a call for us to mobilise, too," says Human Rights Minister Rama Yade. "It is a challenge sent to a large part of the world. Now it is up to us to rise to it."
Yazid Sabeg, a millionaire child of Algerian immigrants, launched a petition last weekend calling for affirmative action programmes to help give immigrants genuine, as opposed to theoretical, equality. It has been called "Oui, Nous Pouvons", or "Yes, We Can" in French, in tribute to Obama.
It has been backed by numerous celebrities, including Sarkozy's model-singer wife, Carla Bruni, who said she could not sign it because of her position, although she identified with it.
"Power has often had the same face: that of men who are white and ageing," she told the Sunday newspaper le Journal du Dimanche.
Another sign of changing mood are amendments tabled by the ruling conservative party, the UMP, in a proposed law on broadcasting. The country's TV and radio watchdog will be asked to present an annual report to Parliament on programmes "reflecting the diversity of French society".
And on Wednesday, the country appointed its first black prefect, Cameroun-born Pierre N'Gahane, 45, a former vice-president of the Catholic University of Lille and a French citizen only since 1997.
N'Gahane will be prefect - the highest representative of the state - in the Alpes de Haute Provence region in southern France.
He was plucked from his university job last year by Sarkozy to be a deputy prefect in the Marseilles region, tasked with "equality of opportunity", and says he was promoted on September 20, before the US election.
Overall, the problems of integration seem enormous. One cause is the often latent prejudice among white French people. Then there is the hurdle of "republican values" by which the state, by seeing everyone as equal, is poorly equipped to deal with it. Action that discriminated against other citizens, such as ethnic quotas for housing, education or jobs, would be illegal.
The American dream embodied by Obama "could never happen in France", said Cindy Danin, 29, an accountant living in Paris whose parents were born in Guadeloupe, in the French Caribbean. "The French just aren't ready. There needs to be a change of mentality."
France is not alone in its problems. Britain does somewhat better, but even so, it has only 15 non-whites among its 646 MPs in Westminster.
Germany, which has 2.1 million Turkish "guest workers" and 800,000 naturalised Turks in a population of 82 million, has just five ethnic Turks out of 613 members in the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament.
France's immigration minister, Brice Hortefeux, chairing a European Union meeting in Vichy last week, urged his counterparts to show humility and acknowledge their failures.
"Our immigration policies are at the end of their tether, in terms of housing, employment, language learning, education," he said. "All the countries of Europe are affected."
