THE biggest explosion of street violence in France since the late 1960s has jolted the country into confronting its failure to include its seven million residents of Arab and African origin in the national mainstream.

President Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, his Prime Minister, seem at a loss, however, to propose anything beyond the “republican” strategy that successive governments of Left and Right have followed since the first riots erupted on the immigrant estates 15 years ago.

M de Villepin has promised a “major plan” to ease the plight of the immigrant communities — the latest of many over the past two decades — but, meeting community leaders on Saturday, he made clear that this would be more of the same: a mix of tax incentives for business in “difficult districts” plus more money for schools, police, other public services and better counselling for jobseekers.

Under the ethnically colour-blind “French model”, the immigrant workers who came in the 1950s and 1960s from the former colonies in North and black Africa were to be regarded as equal citizens. They and their descendants would take advantage of the education system and generous welfare state to assimilate with “white” France. To promote the idea of assimilation, neither the State nor any other body publishes statistics on ethnic or national origin.

In practice, France turned its back on the minorities, shunting them into suburban cités denying access to the so-called ascenseur social (social elevator) that was supposed to lift immigrants into the mainstream. Unemployment on the estates is up to three times the 10 per cent national average. Laws supposed to promote integration and oppose multiculturalism, such as the ban on Muslim headwear in schools, have often heightened resentment and the feeling of exclusion. This has in turn fed the rise of Muslim radicalism, which has now become the dominant creed of the young in the French ghettos.

France has always deemed its model superior to the Anglo-Saxon approach of diversity, which has enabled ethnic minorities to retain strong bonds in cultural and religious communities. France calls this “comunitarism” and says that it promotes ghettos, exclusion, poverty, race riots and religious extremism that can ultimately lead to actions such as the London bombings.

Three decades on from the big inflow of immigrants, everyone now agrees that the French model has not worked, although almost no one says that the American and British approach has produced better results. Some, such as Nicolas Sarkozy, the iconoclastic Interior Minister who is at the centre of the present crisis, have provoked outrage by saying that France should copy aspects of the Anglo-American model, starting with policies to favour the entry of ethnic minorities into education and jobs. M de Villepin slapped down M Sarkozy last week for promoting dangerous “un-French” ideas that could encourage the Muslim extremism that has recently infected Britain.

Mainstream Muslim leaders who have been consulted by the Government have all hammered home the message. “The young have the feeling that they have been abandoned, left at the roadside,” Larbi Kechat, rector of the rue de Tanger mosque in Paris, said.

Some change in the French approach has been appearing over the past couple of years. Proposals are afoot to take a firmer hand with the racial discrimination that is still widely applied with impunity to jobseekers.

Paradoxically, the figure most associated with a radical new approach is M Sarkozy. His proposals for a break with the French model have received little welcome. Both Left and Right see them as a breach of France’s republican tradition and believe that affirmative action would play into the hands of the anti-immigrant Far Right, led by Jean-Marie Le Pen.

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