What Makes Someone French? - New York Times

What Makes Someone French? - New York Times: "PARIS, Nov. 10 - Semou Diouf, holding a pipe in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood amid the noisy games of checkers and cards in the dingy ground-floor common room of a crowded tenement building and pondered the question of why he feels French.


'I was born in Senegal when it was part of France,' he said before putting the pipe in his mouth. 'I speak French, my wife is French and I was educated in France.' The problem, he added after pulling the pipe out of his mouth again, 'is the French don't think I'm French.'

That, in a nutshell, is what lies at the heart of the unrest that has swept France in the past two weeks: millions of French citizens, whether immigrants or the offspring of immigrants, feel rejected by traditional French society, which has resisted adjusting a vision of itself forged in fires of the French Revolution. The concept of French identity remains rooted deep in the country's centuries-old culture, and a significant portion of the population has yet to accept the increasingly multiethnic makeup of the nation. Put simply, being French, for many people, remains a baguette-and-beret affair."