Exactly two years ago in France, riots took place in the suburban areas of the largest cities like Paris, Lyon, Marseille and diagnosed the failure of the French integration of minorities. Two years went by. Still no significant effort, not even a mere initiation of a draft policy emerged. Will it take even more extreme acts of desperation to have legislators feel at least concerned by the issue? The integration system was the cornerstone, the pride of the French state. Is it necessary to recall the Nation has successfully absorbed immigrants from Europe and all over the world throughout centuries? Is it worth reminding one fourth of its last names has foreign origins? Do we need to mention the Finkielkrauts, Sarkozys or other Zidanes? How indeed a country which always presented itself as a community of culture and ideas opposed to an ethnical identity is now observing the bankrupt of its system of integration?

Yes, it is a reality that the system of integration of this country is not efficient anymore. Denial and passivity nourish an imminent disaster. Whether you live in big cities, small towns or rural villages, you face entire parts of population left aside -often parked in adjoined locations sadly referred to as banlieues. Among these areas, the unemployment rate reaches 40% inciting youth idleness and criminality. In these low-income buildings, live French citizens mostly issued of immigration from Northern and Western Africa. The diagnosis easily comes to the mind of any inexperienced observer: severe ethnical, geographical and labor sclerosis.

For sure, the school system, unimaginably insufficient in these areas, is the vector of the pandemic. Then, how come does the public actor not emphasize it more in its diagnosis? Well, the reason is simple. The public representative will lecture to you that French are born with equal chances of success as education is free. Indeed, she is obsessed with this paraphrase. Gratuity of education surely is, still education does not achieve its promotion goal any more. Indeed, education and its gratuity were among the preeminent values of the French Revolution relayed by Napoleon and Jules Ferry in the nineteenth century. The claimed objective was to enable a peasant to become an erudite bourgeois in a conscious preoccupation of renewing the different classes of society. Until fifty years ago, the French Dream came true. Today, a lot of people from low-income classes live a malaise à la française. Have a look for instance at the origin of the entering student bodies of the prestigious Grandes Ecoles today and compare it with the origin of their peers fifty years ago. Today you find 2% of sons of blue collars on its benches compared to 25% following Second World War. In addition, today, the incoming classes count a majority of Parisians. The latter example is a perfect illustration of how the system has been corrupted. Protecting oneself behind the shield of free education is certainly the refuge of the privileged which benefited from the system and whose descendants will benefit from it. France has eventually created a system of insiders. In order to be part of its elite, you’d better be born Parisian and from parents already well socially established.

Therefore, the priority is to make sure that the elite of this country can still be accessible to anyone. Measures should be taken at regional and national levels. A regional sclerosis, more accurately a centralized atrophy, is a main issue. Almost all the prestigious establishments of higher education are situated in the Parisian region. More funding should be allocated to regions. Some of the elite schools should be decentralized: the Ecole Polytechnique could be resettled in Lyon for instance. Secondly, students independently of their socio-economic background should be given a chance to access these fine establishments. Special funds could then be granted to under served families so that college is made more affordable. Third, a positive discrimination policy or quota rule should be considered so that all parts of society can be represented and in order to do away with the existing feeling of exclusion.

It is a clear diagnostic that the French education system, pride of the Republic, does not fulfill its representative mission anymore. It is the duty of the new freshly elected President to ensure that his Hungarian-born father’s successful immigration to France, is made livable for any French.