The government cannot admit it, but more and more voices in France are being raised to say that the country's worst urban unrest since the student uprising of 1968 reflects the failure of a whole model.
"The crisis is total," one leading sociologist, Michel Wievorka, said yesterday. "This is a structural problem that neither the right nor the left have dealt with for 25 years. France cannot cope with the shortcomings of its republican model. The whole system needs to be rethought."
The modèle républicain d'intégration is based on perhaps the most sacred article of all France's grand republican creed: that everyone is equal and indistinguishable in the eyes of the state. No matter where they come from, all French citizens are identical in their Frenchness.
It is a fine principle born of the ideals of the 1789 revolution. But it has practical drawbacks. For example, statistics based on ethnicity or religion are illegal in France; no one knows how many residents are of Arab or African origin, how they perform at school compared with white pupils, or what percentage are jobless or in prison. If analysing a problem is halfway to solving it, it is not a good start.
Under the model of integration, the idea that ethnic, linguistic and religious groups might enjoy rights and recognition due to their particular minority status is unthinkable. The model is defended on both political wings. When the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, suggested last year that affirmative action was needed in education and jobs, he was slapped down by both President Jacques Chirac and leftwing leaders for propagating "anti-republican" and "un-French" ideas.
Yet experts and youth workers recognise the failings. "Our approach to integration, based on the concept that everyone is equal, is part of the problem," said one analyst, Christophe Bertossian. "The idea that we are equal is fiction. Ethnic minorities are being told they do not exist."
The integrationist approach worked for earlier waves of European immigrants from Poland, Spain, Italy and Portugal. But they were white and Catholic, and arrived when France needed labour. It has not worked for postwar immigrants from north and black Africa; some 7 million (an unofficial estimate) now live in France, many on the kind of rundown estates that are going up in flames. Some 750 estates are classified as "difficult". They are where the model has broken down, where the French republic, to most intents and purposes, ceases to exist.
"The people who live there live next door to France," said student Yasser Amri, a third-generation immigrant and one of the very few to have escaped his estate, west of Paris. "The republic deals with citizens, not with individuals. But we're not citizens. We don't know what we are. Not Arab or west African, but not French either. We're unrecognised and unremembered. No wonder people rebel."