HE HOPES that France carries off the World Cup in Berlin tonight, but Kader, an unemployed 25-year-old, has little patience for the idea that victory will herald a new era of harmony among whites, blacks and “beurs” — French slang for Arabs.

“That’s exactly what they said when we won it in 1998,” he said, sitting at a table outside the Beurger King Muslim, a fast food restaurant in the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, where he lives. “It hasn’t brought any blacks or Muslims into power though. I don’t see that the French football team can do much about that.”

Football was widely perceived to have united the nation in 1998 when Les Bleus, as the blue-shirted national team is known, beat Brazil in the World Cup final in Paris.

The resulting euphoria spawned hopes that France’s revolutionary credo of “liberté, égalité, fraternité” might become more than an empty slogan.

Instead, the divisions in French society have intensified to the extent that most commentators now dismiss as “naïve” the idea of a racially mixed French football team becoming an engine of integration.

Although it brought welcome cheer to a nation racked by doubt and decline, the success of the black, white and Arab Frenchmen led by Zinedine Zidane, the midfielder of Algerian descent, has also highlighted festering national divisions.

Zizou, as this footballing icon is affectionately known, was the most popular man in France — not to mention Algeria — after scoring the only goal in the semi-final victory over Portugal on Wednesday night.

Chants of “Zizou” echoed into the early hours as the crowd expressed its gratitude to the captain.

Even so, some expressed disgruntlement at the failure of Zidane and most of his team-mates to sing the words of La Marseillaise, the national anthem, at the start of their game on Wednesday.

This was not the only grumbling on the radio chat shows on Thursday. Beyond initial qualms about the team being over the hill — it contained most of the old heroes from the 1998 victory — there were complaints about its composition from Jean-Marie Le Pen, the ultra-right-wing leader of the National Front. He wondered how a “bunch of blacks” — the team is dominated by black players — could be regarded as representative of France.

Others expressed dismay at the violence that seems to accompany any large public gatherings in France these days. After coming under fire from Molotov cocktails, police made 250 arrests on the Champs Elysées on Wednesday night in running battles with gangs of youths who were described by officials as the same “troublemakers” who throw rocks at them in the suburbs.

There were complaints, too, about the appearance of so many Algerian flags in celebrations all over France after the semi-final victory.

This prompted recollections of a notorious encounter between France and Algeria in Marseilles in 2001, when President Jacques Chirac stormed out of the stadium after French youths of Arab origin booed the national anthem and chanted in praise of Osama Bin Laden.

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