FRANCE has failed miserably to integrate the millions of Arab and African immigrants who have settled in the country since the 1960s, according to two reports this week.

The findings, by the state court of auditors and senior business leaders, confirm a reality that is familiar to everyone in France and highlight the bankruptcy of a state policy that denies the existence of ethnic communities.

France’s longstanding policy has been to promote a “colour-blind” republic with notionally equal opportunities for all. Under left and right-wing governments the State has refused to acknowledge the existence of serious obstacles to integration.

Now the approach has come under attack, led by Nicolas Sarkozy, the outgoing Finance Minister and new leader of President Chirac’s Union for a Popular Movement party.

The State’s refusal to accept reality and help minorities is promoting Islamic extremism, M Sarkozy said yesterday. “Our system of integration has broken down.”

According to the auditors’ court, a powerful body headed by Philippe Séguin, a former minister and Gaullist party leader, “the French model of integration has failed”. France faces a “crisis situation that is not the result of immigration but the way that immigration has been treated”, it said.

Arab and African immigrants and their descendants have too often been shunted into ghetto-like housing estates and discriminated against over housing, jobs and education, the auditors said. M Séguin said that the state’s refusal to gather statistics based on ethnic origins made it hard to analyse the lot of immigrants.

The French immigrant population is estimated at about seven million out of sixty million, most of them originally from France’s former colonies in North Africa.

The business leaders’ report, drafted for Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the Prime Minister, said that France was not only inflicting injustice on generations of ethnic minorities but also depriving itself of a vital economic resource.

According to the report, young people of Arab and African origin are five times more likely to be unemployed than the rest of the French population. In education the number of Arabs and Africans gaining access to top university courses and the elite “grandes écoles” is decreasing, while problems at primary and secondary level mean that schools are “incapable of ensuring basic literacy among non-French-speaking immigrants ”.

The two reports called for far more active measures to help minorities, but stopped short of supporting the idea of race quotas.

Such “positive discrimination” is enthusiastically backed by M Sarkozy but opposed by President Chirac and most of the political world as contradictory to France’s doctrine of the homogenous, egalitarian republic.

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