Seething underclass awakes in France

The video pitches made by London and Paris to gain support for their rival bids for the 2012 Olympic bids are a telling tale of two cities.

London's video was a bouncy tribute to multiculturalism, a four-minute portrait of a fast-changing, vibrant and open city where people of white, black, brown or yellow skin lived, worked and mixed.

Paris' video, by contrast, spoke of a city preserved and unchanging. Charles Trenet crooned in the background to images of Paris the timelessly beautiful, Paris the romantic, of the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, of fashion, elegance and Catherine Deneuve.

Inconceivable a decade ago, the British video shows how far, and how boldly, Britain has jettisoned its white colonial past and sought to redefine itself as a mixed society.

In contrast, the French video showed a fetishistic preference for the securities of the past. Its message was nostalgic-but-modern: the social cosiness of the 50s mixed with the technology of the 00s.

Time, though, has at last caught up with France. The self-image of a country at ease with itself and confident in its systems has been shattered, possibly forever, by two weeks of rioting in its high-immigration suburbs.

The nightly images of curfewed towns, torched cars, wrecked buildings and running battles between youths and police have been a traumatic awakening for France's white majority.

Many are beginning to realise that far from being a cohesive nation united under the republican principle of equality, France has been breeding a poor and resentful underclass.

Beneath its gleaming exterior, it was a country riddled with faultlines, liable to crack open with a single, sharp tap.

Mending these fractures will take more than the short-term police crackdown ordered by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, more than the pledges of spending made by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, more than the words of reconciliation offered by President Jacques Chirac.

Blame for the unrest of 2005 can be most easily laid at the feet of the planners of the 1960s and 70s.

Its economy booming, France recruited masses of workers from its former colonies in North and West Africa to do the work that was being shunned by the more prosperous native French.

To house them quickly and cheaply, state-owned apartment blocks sprung up in suburbs, "la banlieue," around Paris, Lyons, Marseilles and other cities. The complexes, initially proclaimed as architectural marvels, quickly showed their flaws, in the quality and designs of the homes, lack of nearby shops and schools and remoteness from the city heart.

The results of this reverberate today among the descendants of the immigration wave.

The housing estates are grim and decrepit (although they are not the ghettos often described by foreign media), many households are dysfunctional, unemployment is chronic, crime rates are high, drug dealing is rampant, and the quality of schooling is mediocre at best.

The policing policy in these tough areas is interventionist rather than preventive - patrol cars rather than neighbourhood cops on the beat, with frequent ID checks and squads of helmeted riot police on call in the event of a flareup.

One in 11 of the French working population is unemployed, but in the suburbs the rate can be more than triple that.

The few jobs available to minority groups are of low-grade manual labour, such as cleaners, night porters, petrol station attendants and pizza deliverers. They are almost invisible to the average white citizen.

Better-paid or more interesting jobs do exist, but they can be agonisingly out of reach for someone with a black or brown skin or an Arab or African name. Seventy per cent of immigrant descendants who have a higher qualification - university degree or similar level in professional training - say they have suffered discrimination in appointments or promotion.

SOS Racisme, a grassroots association, highlights the problem by a clever tactic. It gets an immigrant to make two applications for a job or for an apartment, using different names but using the same qualifications or income level.

The results show that Michel Dupont will probably get the offer whereas Mohammed Aziz is likely to be told the position has been filled and the flat is no longer available.

WITH the exception of sport (France's 1998 World Cup champions were almost all the sons of immigrants), there is a glaring lack of advancement of immigrants in almost every important area of French life.

In the business sector, the sole big success is Yazid Sabeg, the chief executive of CS a large communications group. Sabeg is the son of a North African immigrant.

There is no black or brown newsreader on nationwide television. Only one immigrant actor, Jamel Debbouze, can be described as being known nationally.

There are almost no immigrants in the senior levels of the judiciary, universities or hospitals, and apart from harvest-gathering, they are unknown in agriculture, the country's biggest income earner.

At the La Defense business district on the outskirts of Paris, the vast majority of office workers who stream off the subway trains and into the skyscrapers are white.

In politics, immigrants are usually given token roles in the cabinet, usually as junior-level ministers with responsibility for social integration. The senior jobs go to white men who are invariably graduates of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA) and other elite schools. All of the mainland France legislators in the present 577-member National Assembly are white.

As a result, a whole generation of young people has grown up adrift, alienated and feeling unwanted, bereft of role models and locked in a futureless existence where the only hope or solace lies in sport, crime or Islam.

They are technically French, but do not feel that way, nor do they have allegiance to their parents' country of origin.

Some early steps can be taken to break down these walls, provided France's elite is willing to surrender some of its grip and learn from successful initiatives in other countries that have also faced the challenge of integration.

Britain's wakeup call came with race riots in 1981, which prompted a now-famous inquiry by Lord Scarman that put the finger on insensitive policing and lack of opportunities to help immigrants to rise.

Brixton, the London district where the riots flared, is now a changed place thanks to neighbourhood policing, initiatives to encourage racial and social harmony and incentives to set up businesses, says Ruth Ling, a Labour councillor in the borough of Lambeth.

"Brixton now has a large number of black entrepreneurs running successful clubs, bars and other businesses. Race is no longer the social divider it was 24 years ago. This kind of long-term investment is in stark contrast to the present situation in France, where the disaffected youth from minority groups are saying that they get no recognition or support from the Government."

Other initiatives that have worked in Britain, Germany and the Netherlands include helping high-flyers from minority groups into top schools, political parties and religions and encourages the appointment, on a merit basis, of immigrants in television.

Esther Benbassa, a senior lecturer at the Practical School of Higher Studies, says integration is a long-term task of awareness, public goodwill, patience and bridge-building.

"There is still time for setting in place the conditions to make ours a pluralistic society," she says. "It entails positive discrimination, changing mindsets, setting up programmes to fight racism, providing access to a job, to housing and to an education worthy of the name."