ISN'T IT AN ANTI-PRINCIPLE?

Founding principle called into question (Jon Henley, November 8, 2005, The Guardian)

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. [...]

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.

Gee, there are practical problems to trying to build a society without common beliefs?

MORE:
Civil Unrest in France Enters 12th NightCivil (Jocelyn GECKER, 11/07/05, Associated Press)

France will impose curfews under a state-of-emergency law and call up police reservists to stop rioting that has spread out of Paris' suburbs and into nearly 300 cities and towns across the country, the prime minister said Monday, calling a return to order "our No. 1 responsibility."

The tough new measures came as France's worst civil unrest in decades entered a 12th night, with rioters in the southern city of Toulouse setting fire to a bus after sundown and pelting police with gasoline bombs and rocks.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 8, 2005 12:14 AM