IN THE gilded quiet of the Elysée Palace, President Chirac made a confession. He told a visitor on Monday that France was to blame for its suburban mayhem because it had relegated its immigrants and their descendants to ghettos, and “had not done everything possible for these youths, supported them so they feel understood, heard and respected”.

The private remarks, reported by President Vike-Freiberga of Latvia, were not only a contrast with M Chirac’s stern public demand for calm. They also amounted to self-indictment because he said the same in 1995 in a diagnosis of France’s ethnic malaise that helped him to win the presidency.

National unity, he said then, was menaced by a “social fracture”, in which high unemployment and prejudice were excluding a generation from the mainstream. He promised to remedy “these difficulties that threaten to grow into a fracture that is urban, ethnic and even religious”.

Those words have returned to haunt M Chirac. Even if les jeunes des cités put away their petrol cans, November 2005 will serve as an epitaph for M Chirac’s presidency, like the 1968 student-worker revolt did for Charles de Gaulle. Making the point, Libération, a left-wing daily newspaper, said yesterday that the arson rampages “show that Chirac’s reign has been a tragic farce”.

Although May 1968 was a true cultural and political revolution, there are parallels with the rampages of 2005. De Gaulle resigned, weary and discredited, a year after the revolt. M Chirac’s term ends in 18 months, which he will eke out as the lamest of ducks, humiliated in the referendum on the European constitution last May and then battered by this autumn’s crise des banlieues.

In 1968 de Gaulle fled as the May revolt raged outside the Elysée, leaving crisis management to Georges Pompidou, his Prime Minister. This time, an absent M Chirac has shoved to the fore Dominique de Villepin, 52, whom he appointed as Prime Minister in April.

If proof were needed that France’s fracture sociale still yawns, M de Villepin provided it when he promised on television to impose order on Monday night. The Prime Minister, the first since Pompidou never to have been elected to any office, lectured citizens on the “republican responsibility” that each bore for the social ills.

Le Figaro, a Gaullist newspaper, gushed that M de Villepin had an air of the late general about him. For many French, however, the image of the dashing, intellectual and aristocratic M de Villepin really spoke for the continuing failure of the elite to connect with the masses beyond Paris. The blame for the blighted estates does not just fall on the Centre Right, but on the whole governing class, which remains dominated by the É cole Nationale de l’Administration, training school of the top Socialists as well as M Chirac and M de Villepin. The opprobrium has fallen hard on M Chirac because he had raised hopes by promising to heal the divide that he so accurately defined. At moments, such as the World Cup victory by France’s “Arab-black-blue” national team in 1998, it seemed that the fracture was closing. In 2002 he was given a second chance when the anti-immigrant extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen won through to the presidential election run-off. In the campaign to block M Le Pen, M Chirac won the vote of the estates. He promised again to bring the minorities into the mainstream, but has failed to do so. The Le Pen shock forced the Government to focus on crime, while rising unemployment kept the minorities out of work, and the budget-conscious Government cut schemes for blighted districts. In the heat of the riots, M de Villepin has promised to reverse the cuts. Few imagine that results will come in M Chirac’s waning tenure.

WHAT THE PAPERS SAY

Le Figaro “It is as if children of immigration had decided to devastate whatever looks like Establishment in a country that is not theirs. It is as if they wanted to set on fire all shared buildings that are a symbol of a fragile possibility to ‘live together’.”

Le Monde “This . . . is an obvious proof of Chirac’s failure, as he promised in 1995 to reduce social gap and in 2002 to rule out insecurity . . . Exhuming a 1955 law is sending to the youth a message of stunning brutality: 50 years on, France is treating them as their grandparents.”

Les Echos “It is as if Chirac’s words were weakened by power erosion and his recent political failures. His situation looks like the one of Pompidou, who, during the crisis in May 1968, took charge of everything in Matignon while the events were beyond de Gaulle.”

La Tribune “This requires a long-term strategy: making strong political choices, showing off clear priorities — house-job-school would be an interesting triptych to start — and taking up hard economical decisions without which these choices would be only mirage.”

France Soir “The helplessness of the Government to restore order and to propose a political solution is shaking citizens’ trust in the republican pattern. Can republican fraternity still win, or is our country turning to social apartheid, which we thought was the privilege of US society?”

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