We are assured by the indignant franchouille that there is no racism in France, that things are rosy, and the muzzy modèle social français is most excellent and most excellently suited to the French.

We have a French social model and we want to keep it. And the point is that we cannot accept to leave people out of the society. Exclusion, we cannot accept that. It is not in the French culture.

Jack,
interviewed by PBS
NEW YORK June 8, 1998 (PBS/Élysée)

The French social model is neither inefficient nor outdated. It has a great ambition which can be expressed simply: permanently to level up. We must keep it. In a way it's our national genius. It's a necessity.

Jack,
in annual National Day ("Bastille Day") television interview
PALAIS DE L'ÉLYSÉE, July 14, 2005 (Élysée)

This model is right for us. And, above all, it is extremely well tailored to today's world, provided of course we find the way to keep on modernizing it.

Jack,
valedictory lies and self-congratulation on bowing out
PALAIS DE L'ÉLYSÉE, le dimanche 11 mars 2007 (Élysée)

Yes. [Pause.] Well, you can imagine our consternation when we run across reports like this:

ESCAPING FRANCE'S GHETTOES
France has one of the worst youth unemployment rates in Europe
and jobseekers from ethnic minorities face an additional hurdle - racism.

March 28, 2007 (BBC) - Every year 15,000 people leave France to start a new life in the UK. Most of them are young and go there looking for work.

A few years ago Hamid Senni was one of them. The child of poor Moroccan immigrants, he learned about discrimination early on. At school in France his history teacher said he should change his name to Lionel.

"I know that teacher meant well," he said. "She was no racist but she told me that with Hamid as a first name I stood no chance in French society. Throughout my youth, what she said turned out to be true."

... He said his father pushed him to study hard at school: "He told me, you are the needle and your brothers are the thread. If you succeed, your brothers will follow you, so get every qualification you can."

Although Hamid followed this advice and got a good economics degree he could not find work, not even as an unpaid intern. He eventually went to Sweden, got a grant to study for a masters degree in business administration and worked for a machine tool company in the UK. He then landed a well-paid job at telecommunications giant Ericsson.

But his mother begged him to return to France, so a few years later he tried, yet again, to find work closer to home. He sent off dozens of CVs, and after several weeks was offered one job as a travelling salesman. Hamid:

I had an MBA and a few years of management experience in a top European company and they wanted me to go door-to-door selling vacuum cleaners.

At that point Hamid decided he had no future in France and moved to the UK where he worked for BP and Philip Morris before setting up his own consultancy firm. Hamid has since written a book called De la Cite a la City about his journey from an immigrant ghetto in Valence to the financial centre of the world.

... He believes if France does not now pull itself together, the country will enter a period of irreversible decline. And he warned that France was now paying a high price for racial prejudice both in terms of the economy and social unrest.

I feel French thanks to London but in France I am an immigrant.

The French are making discrimination accepted but now the country is struggling to create jobs, the country is struggling to create values, the country is struggling because people are filled with hatred.

They don't respect each other or the Republic. So what goes around comes around.

The day you start thinking 'diversity', maybe all of this will stop and the country will start creating jobs again."

Here we are told everything in France is super fabulous -- only to discover everything is just fabulous (and here and here).

PFFT (What is this?): Super fabulous France 0 | Fabulous France 4 | Rayonnement français 0