Thirty years ago this week, 17 young men and women of Arab descent made history as they arrived in Paris at the climax of a 1500km march against racism and police brutality.
What had been launched in Marseilles as an act of despair by a marginalised group little by little captured the public's imagination.
Community groups, trade unions and political parties started to join in. As the peaceful march wound through towns and cities and headed towards the capital, the cause was taken up by Left Bank philosophers. As it snowballed, a Government minister gave it her blessing.
By the time the foot-weary little group arrived at the end of their trek, they had an army of more than 100,000 people behind them, earned an audience with President Francois Mitterrand and sowed the seeds for a popular movement against racism.
Memories of that extraordinary and passionate event have been stirred by a new film, La Marche, with an often-painful assessment of France's record in combating racism.
"There was a lot of discrimination at the time and violence was at its peak," said Toumi Djaidja, who conceived of the march after he was gunned down by Lyons police while interceding for a friend who had been arbitrarily arrested. "We needed to stop that. I think that the march allowed us to do something fantastic."
Father Christian Delorme, a local priest who was a key figure in advising the protesters, said the march had removed the blinkers from many eyes: millions of citizens of Africa, Caribbean or North African descent were no longer invisible.
"These young people were reaching out and saying, 'We belong to France. We are French just like you and we want to love you and be loved by you'," he said.
"Let us walk against racism before racism walks on us,'' says a banner held by marchers in Marseille last week. Photo / AP
Fellow marcher Djamel Atallah said violence by police in the crime-ridden housing estates had clearly fallen as a result of the movement.
"But on the question of equality, we haven't progressed. In fact in some areas, we've even gone backwards," Atallah wrote in a blog for the left-of-centre Le Nouvel Observateur. He described a "ghettoisation" of the housing estates, which 30 years ago had a more diverse, if similarly poor, population.
Worse still was unemployment, which is having a corrosive effect on the young today, but especially those from minorities. "Some of them have even got masters degrees, but they can't find a job. They are still victims of discrimination, on the basis of their name, their skin colour or their home address," says Atallah.
According to the national statistical agency Insee, around 11.8 million people, or 19 per cent of France's population, were either immigrants or their direct descendants in 2008. Of these, four million came from North Africa and a million from south of the Sahara.
Unemployment affected 10.6 per cent of the working population in October, but among those aged 15 to 24 it was 24.6 per cent, according to official figures. A study published this year found that unemployment among young French people of African descent is typically six percentage points higher than among their white counterparts.
As times get tougher, racism that was previously voiced only at the dinner table is now heard more and more openly, says Harry Roselmack, a news journalist.
He is one of the tiny number of blacks to appear on French TV other than as an athlete or entertainer.
"The crisis is feeding xenophobia with that weird fuel - jealousy towards someone who is worse off than yourself," Roselmack wrote in Le Monde.
In October, Anne-Sophie Leclere, a candidate for the far-right National Front in next year's local elections, compared Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, of French Guyanese background, to a monkey.
"In fact, I'd prefer to see her stay up a tree in the branches rather than see her in government," she told a TV programme. The party said it had made a "selection error" and withdrew her as its candidate in the eastern Ardennes region. Things got worse. When Taubira - a bogey figure to conservatives for pushing through laws on same-sex marriage - visited the middle-class town of Angers, children taunted her with the cries of "monkey" and one taunted her with a banana skin. This was followed by a front cover in a rightwing news weekly, Minute, that had the headline "Smart as a monkey, Taubira gets her banana back" (in French, "retrouver la banane" means to find one's smile again).
There has been a strong verbal outcry to these incidents, but mobilisation on the street has been a flop. Compared with the 100,000 people who marched through Paris 30 years ago, only a few thousand people turned out across France last Saturday.
Those hoping for a 1983-style resurgence to stymie the National Front before the March 2014 elections are worried.
"The anti-racism struggle is in a bad way," said Serge Romana of CM98, which works for the integration of French people of Caribbean descent. "The poison of racism has entered society," said the deputy head of the League of Human Rights, Pierre Tartakowsky, adding it was no longer fashionable to turn out for an anti-racism event.
