France’s World Cup victory looks like a turning point for a divided nation

Even as French fans celebrated a stunning World Cup win this weekend in glorious unison, in many ways France has never been so divided from itself as it is today.

It is stuck between past certainties about the vitality of the post-war French social model (a generous welfare settlement combined with high in-work privileges) and a ‘mondialised’ world economy of frictionless trade, multinational companies and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ corporate culture.

It is stuck between De Gaulle’s ‘certain idea of France’ – forged from the war experience of occupation, collaboration and then resistance – and an increasingly diverse nation, divided along ethnic and religious lines, for whom that story has little resonance.

Under pressure from vast structural changes, the vision of a post-war resistance France has morphed into a kind of schizophrenic mania, vacillating between a viciously intolerant form of secularism – which creates ‘colour blindness’ as a societal value – and ‘Front National’ romanticism advocating a racially pure nation.

There isn’t much space there, either for religious minority groups, or indeed for minority groups of any kind. That conflict is expressed as much in geography as anything else, in the contrast between life in the city centre and in the poor and ethnically diverse banlieues that lie on its periphery.

“It’s the story of a society in free fall. To reassure itself, it repeats endlessly ‘So far, so good’ ‘So far, so good’ ‘So far, so good’.”

That’s the voiceover that fades out over the end of the 1995 film ‘La Haine’, directed by Mathieu Kassovitz – a graphic depiction of life in the Parisian banlieues. It shocked the French establishment – Alain Juppé, the then Prime Minister of France, even organised a special screening, compulsory for all government Ministers. A spokesman said that, although the film portrayed institutional police racism and violence, “this film is a beautiful work of cinematographic art that can make us more aware of certain realities”.

We follow a day in the life of three young men, one black (Hubert), one Arab (Said), and one Jewish (Vinz, played by Vincent Cassel). They find a gun. They go into central Paris on a day trip where they get arrested and beaten up. Vinz tells Hubert “I feel like an ant in intergalactic space”, while Hubert rolls up a joint with the Eiffel Tower glimmering in the background of the shot.

It’s a powerful image that is designed to show how very far away they are from the old French haute bourgeoisie, how distant they feel from the patriotic symbols of French nationhood.

Just three years later, in 1998, the French football team won the World Cup on home soil with generation black, blanc beur – a genuinely diverse team whose talismanic captain Zinedine Zidane was of Algerian heritage. Many had grown up in the banlieues. Sport has a remarkable power to preserve images of national life in enduring aspic, and here surely was an image of a modern France no longer divided from itself: diverse, patriotic and talented.

After 1998, the situation in the suburbs worsened, culminating in extended riots in 2005. And that’s partly because that new image of modern France was up against some serious competition – the torn and divided landscape of post-war French identity was always going to take quite some time to heal.

So in 2018, France has won the World Cup again, with a new generation black, blanc, beur – and perhaps this new image of collective effort and ecstasy will make a difference. And when each member of the French squad was beamed onto the Arc de Triomphe, all I could think of was Hubert rolling up his joint, an ant in intergalactic space, telling himself “So far, so good”.