PARIS — The French have renewed their very favorite love affair. With themselves.
Suddenly, "La Marseillaise" is cool again. Waving the tricolor flag no longer means a person sympathizes with the far-right, immigrant-hating National Front party of Jean-Marie Le Pen.
A stunning upset victory in the World Cup, the quadrennial international soccer tournament, has given the French immediate reason to feel good about themselves again. But it also has forced this ancient people--whose history texts once led with a controversial passage about "our ancestors," the blond and blue-eyed Gauls--to rethink who they are.
The new answer, in a phrase: black, blanc, beur. Black, white, French-born Arab.
"Of course I'm proud that France won," remarked one beur, Rachid Bourguiba, 20, whose mother and father come from Morocco. As he sat, smoking one evening with friends in a park near the Canal Saint-Martin in northeastern Paris, he added: "I was born here, and this is my country. This is where I'm going to live."
But citizens like Bourguiba who have black, brown or yellow faces are nearly invisible on French television. They are absent from the country's political and business elite. And they have been driven to the fringes of most cities over the decades.
Disenchantment with immigrants, especially the nonwhite, had grown so widespread that former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, a figure of the establishment right, last month suggested a nationwide debate on whether there should be a "national preference" for some jobs.
Then came Les Bleus (the Blues)--the 22-member French soccer team, whose players could trace their ancestry not only to Normandy and Provence but also to Algeria, Argentina, sub-Saharan Africa, Armenia, Brittany, the Basque Country, Portugal, the Pacific isles and the West Indies.
The squad was a living reminder that the land of the Gauls has become, at the end of the 20th century, a "rainbow republic." Its shocking 3-0 victory over Brazil on July 12 was an unassailable argument that generations of immigrants have brought into France a rich flow of talent, physical strength and brains.
"The team of France is a symbol--that France is a mixed country but with a common ideal," said Fode Sylla, president of SOS Racisme, a grass-roots organization that battles racial prejudice. "They proved that far from being a handicap, that diversity could lead to victory, and that they are all defenders of the republic."
In fact, the hero of the semifinal win over Croatia was Lilian Thuram, 26, a black man from the "overseas department" of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. He scored both French goals. In the final, France's first two points came on headers from Zinedine Zidane, 26, son of an immigrant construction worker from Algeria's Kabyle minority and native of the slums of Marseilles.
"Now the young beurs can say, 'We too can be part of France,' " said Monique Boisserie, 69, a widow from the upscale Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.
Demographer Michele Tribalat gushed: "The French team has done more for integration than years of pro-active government policies."
It is more than that: Its victories suddenly have gotten many French discussing the virtues of the U.S.-style "melting pot," rather than insisting as before that newcomers must "integrate" themselves into French society and embrace its culture and "republican" traditions.
Even Le Pen, who turned 70 during the World Cup and was caught flat-footed by the outburst of joyful patriotism, was forced to backtrack on his statement two years ago that immigrants should not be allowed to play on the national team.
Meanwhile, some of France's European neighbors have been looking on enviously. In Germany, it is much more difficult for a Turk or immigrant of another foreign ethnic stock to obtain citizenship than in France. Staunchly Teutonic, anchored by players with names like Matthaus, Klinsmann, Kohler and Koepke, the German World Cup squad was blown away by Croatia, 3-0. "White, old and tired," was how one German TV commentator summed up the losers.
Italy, another ethnically homogeneous European squad, was bested by France, 4-3. "If we want to save the Italian team, we should build our soccer fields near refugee camps," a commentator for La Repubblica, a Rome daily newspaper, concluded.
Victory brought more than 1 million of the French onto the Champs-Elysees, the biggest crowd since the Liberation in World War II. Beurs and blacks mingled with stylishly attired bourgeois from Passy and other chic capital neighborhoods. Longtime Parisians said they never had seen such a sea of blue-white-and-red French flags brandished by ordinary people. Crowds sang the stirring national anthem out of sheer pride and pleasure--another reported first.
Bourguiba, the Parisian of Moroccan lineage, was there, waving a tricolor with friends. "It was a joy for everybody--we're in France after all," he said.
