Va va boom

After the 7 July bombing in London, French commentators and politicians could be found falling over themselves to praise the country's republican model as the best way to curb 'Islamic fundamentalism'. In the wake of serious rioting in suburbs across France, this analysis seems more difficult to sustain – despite the fact-defying attempts of some right-wing commentators to 'Islamise' the issue. But this does not mean that the opposite conclusion – namely, that what France now needs is a strong bout of British style multiculturalism, should now be drawn.

For one thing, neither Britain nor France quite lives up to its own model of integration. As of last month, Britain now routinely imposes citizenship tests upon new, non-EU migrants, whose Britishness is marked on their ability to correctly identify the head of the Church of England or deal with a spilt pint. The French government, meanwhile, has appointed Azouz Begag as minister for the promotion of equality of opportunity. This is a step in the multicultural direction, although the government's failure to consult him at all in the first days of the riots shows that lessons could still be learnt from the British, who will happily listen to all kinds of 'challenging things', as Home Office minister Hazel Blears said in response to a recent report commissioned from Muslim 'community leaders', before implementing any measure that coincides with existing government thinking.

The idea that such communities have leaders at all raises questions of its own about the limits of the multicultural approach. More often than not, it tends to promote the idea that ethnic and religious groupings are homogeneous. And the co-optation of certain figures as 'representatives' tends to separate them out from the very people they are said to represent. This is true of France as much as Britain, where groups such as SOS Racisme and Ni Putes ni Soumises are taken far more seriously by government than by anyone in the suburbs. More widely, the recognition of 'minority' status can itself become a trap – since it sets an upper limit to peoples' engagement with a society whose whole terms of reference remain pre-determined by an ethnic or culturally defined 'majority'.

At the most fundamental level, though, debating the merits of these ideal types of integration – multiculturalism versus republicanism – misses the point. The main challenge for France, as François Gèze argues above, concerns not its model of integration but rather the extent of racism and the impunity with which the country's police force discriminates against its urban youth. Whether or not France's republican ideals are worth fighting for, there seems an urgent need to discard the republican myth that they can be achieved without the careful monitoring and challenging of discrimination in employment, housing or education.

The French education system merits particular attention, since delinquent youths were largely blamed for the recent wave of violence. Many of the problems are, in fact, a more general consequence of ghettoisation, with the polarisation of French education along class and racial lines being largely the result of failed urban policies.

But questions also need to be raised about the curriculum itself, which glosses over France's colonial crimes. A law passed in February 2005 requires French teachers to stress only the positive aspects of colonialism. By perpetrating a negative image of France's formerly colonised peoples, this simply contributes to the sense of alienation felt by the country's suburban youth – who are caught between the stigmatised culture of their parents' and grandparents' generation, and the white history of a France with which they cannot positively identify.

It is a striking fact that the majority of those rioting in les banlieues were born in France. For this generation, treated as perpetual 'immigrants' to the society into which they were born, talk of 'integration' strikes a sour note – and will continue to do so for as long as they are expected to integrate into a society that refuses to recognise them as full citizens.