I can only speak from my mother's experience when she lived in France in the 60s (from about 58-61). This was during the Algerian indepence war, and what she told me about popular attitudes towards the Muslim immigrant community was pretty much on par with us and blacks in the 1920s. What HAL was talking about with their cultural chauvanism is completely right. They have a very distinct idea of what is French and what isn't, and if it isn't French, its lesser. Not to say its necessarily a bad thing to take pride in your culture, but to exclude because of it is going to cause you problems, which is what we're seeing here. You hear of the same problems in Israel, in the US, in a lot of the world. There is a dominant ethnic/cultural/social/whatever group that has its identity and because of it you wind up with other groups left on the outside in terms of social acceptance, jobs, education, and it leaves them angry and disgruntled, and in a lot of cases without hope. If you ignore a problem like that it boils over and you get what you're getting in France now.
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