One in four French citizens has a parent or grandparent who were immigrants, while foreigners currently make up 6.4 per cent of the country's population. The number of immigrants entering France has declined from 150,000 during the 1980s, those seeking rights of asylum from 15,000 to 6,000. It is necessary to bear these figures in mind when examining the controversy surrounding the French government's new immigration bill. Following the National Front's victory in the Vitrolles mayoral election this month the bill has suddenly become a touchstone of attitudes towards French identity. It has galvanised intellectual and left wing opposition to the National Front's racism and the success that party has had in blaming immigrants for most of the ills of French society.
Such a polarisation of opinion is typical of many previous confrontations in French political history, but this does not mean that the bill will be defeated. Opinion polls show that 69 per cent approve of the bill's provisions and that up to half the population share many of the National Front's attitudes towards, immigrants. There is a gulf between elite opinion in Metropolitan Paris and popular views elsewhere in France. The government is determined to press ahead with the legislation, despite having withdrawn Article 1 of the bill, which required people to inform on foreigners who stayed with them illegally.
Explaining its attitude the Prime Minister, Mr Alain Juppe, has distinguished between traditional immigrants to France, who aspired to assimilate into its society, and the current generation of immigrants who have refused to do so. This is a questionable approach historically, given the hostility that greeted successive waves of immigrants from Russia, Poland, Italy and Portugal over the last hundred years. But Mr Juppe is right to emphasise the assimilationist tradition. Immigrants became French citizens as part and parcel of the nation building exercise that saw modern France created over the last two centuries. A civic model of citizenship and culture based on republican values proved adaptable over the long term and successfully absorbed successive generations into French life. There were major discontinuities in this tradition, notably during the Dreyfus and Vichy periods when Jews were demonised or deported, but it remained sufficiently intact to justify the political mythology of French nationalism as a "community of citizens".
The sad, significance of the latest round of hostility towards immigrants is that this proud tradition seems to be at an end. The refusal of many North African immigrants to conform to French cultural norms coincides with and is caused by a convulsive post colonial hostility towards them, following a generation of assimilationist experiments in social engineering, in which there were more failures than successes. As may be seen from the figures, the flow of just grants has substantially declined in recent xenophobia has followed the curve of increasing unemployment very closely, however; and the National Front has drawn its protest votes from precisely those poorer members of the French population who believe they have been displaced by competition with immigrants. Economic recovery and a different, multicultural rather than assimilationist model of integrating immigrants will be needed to convince them otherwise, not harsher legislation.