A story about what was happening in France

About 35 years ago, a teacher at a French state high school described classrooms with mostly black students, half-siblings from different marriages and men with several wives collecting state benefits. She told it as an integration problem that was already on the horizon.

About 35 years ago, a teacher at a state high school in France described to her family what she saw in class. It was not an academic diagnosis or an official report. It was the bitter complaint of a young teacher, around 24 years old, who had been teaching for a couple of school years. Her account, told from memory, helps explain a debate that is still alive: how far the French state school system has managed the cultural diversity of its classrooms.

## Classrooms, ghettos and benefits per vvife

The teacher talked about classes where most of the students were black. She mentioned siblings with different mothers but the same father. And she described men with three or four wives who collected state benefits for each vvife and child. Her parents were astonished by the figure she gave them, though the exact detail was lost over the years.

She also pointed out that those students were failing to integrate: they spoke their own language, kept their customs and lived in ghettos. There were already neighbourhoods it was best not to walk through at certain hours, she said. All of this was told by a young, indignant teacher in a summer living room.

## What France was debating then and is still debating

France has a tradition of republican integration that recognises no intermediate communities: the citizen is equal before the State, with no quotas or ethnic statistics. That model clashes with realities such as the weight of polygamy in some settings, which the French state itself has had to address. In **2005**, then Interior Minister **Nicolas Sarkozy** put the number of polygamous families in France at **20,000**, an estimate that caused controversy.

French family benefits are calculated per child and not per vvife, but the existence of several households under one roof raises questions about how they are distributed. The teacher spoke of men who collected benefits for each vvife and child. It is a testimony, not a statistic.

## A warning lost over dinner

The scene has something of a domestic prophecy about it. A 24-year-old woman described what she saw in her school and the adults listened with a mix of astonishment and discomfort. Nobody took notes. Nobody turned it into a report. Three decades later, the debates about integration, ghettos and welfare benefits in France are still open, and that dinner-table complaint sounds less exaggerated than it did at the time.

Any conclusions about migration or social policies should be drawn with caution: aggregate data are scarce and personal perceptions are no substitute for official statistics.