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After France were booted from this year's World Cup on Tuesday without winning a match amid scenes of selfishness, indifference and indiscipline the French news media piled on about the humiliation to the country and the misbehavior of its players. There were calls for a complete restructuring of the French team: the management, the method for choosing players, the training.
But there is a more troubling aspect to the reaction to the defeat, which has focused on lack of patriotism, shared values and national honour on a team with many members who are black or brown and descended from immigrants.
While most politicians have talked carefully of values and patriotism, rather than immigration and race, some legislators blasted the players as "scum," "little troublemakers" and "guys with chickpeas in their heads instead of a brain", according to news reports. Fadela Amara, a junior minister who was born to Algerian parents, warned on Tuesday that the reaction to the team's loss had become racially charged.
"There is a tendency to ethnicise what has happened," she told a gathering of President Nicolas Sarkozy's governing party. "Everyone condemns the lower-class neighborhoods. People doubt that those of immigrant backgrounds are capable of respecting the nation."
She criticised Sarkozy's handling of a debate on "national identity", warning that "all democrats and all republicans will be lost" in this ethnically tinged criticism about Les Bleus. "We're building a highway for the National Front," she said, in a reference to the far-right, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim party founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen. Philippe Ttart, a sport historian, said that the undercurrent of racism was "very unhealthy, but one of the predictable negative outcomes of the defeat".
France is confused about its identity and uncomfortable with the growing numbers and sometimes the attitudes of its immigrants and their children, he said. "What is certain is that we are going through in France questions of disobedience, of incivility, of loss of bearings, and this group of irritated young kids is an excessive reflection of those questions."
In 1998, the French team that won the World Cup was widely praised for its multiethnic nature black, white and Arab, and seen as a symbol of a more diverse nation. But today, Mr. Ttart said, the talk is the opposite. Today's players, he said, "come from a generation who come from the banlieues, and they don't necessarily have the cultural background to understand what they did."
Luc Chatel, the education minister, said on television Wednesday that he was "terribly angry" that Raymond Domenech, the team's coach refused to shake hands with the South African manager after the team's final game. "But I'm going to go farther," he added. "A captain of the French team who does not sing 'The Marseillaise,' " the national anthem, "shocks me, there it is. When one wears the jersey, one should be proud to wear the colours."
He was speaking of Patrice Evra, who was born in Senegal and who found himself caught between players and managers as the team refused to practice after another black player, Nicolas Anelka, swore at Mr. Domenech and was removed from the team. The racial makeup of the French team has long been an issue on the far right, even in a country where all the French are "citizens" and are supposed to have equal rights. Of the 22-man squad, 13 are men of color.
Driven by money
This month, Marine Le Pen, the vice president of the National Front and daughter of its founder, said that she did not see herself in the makeup of the team, whose players behaved as individuals, not as a team, and who were "fighting for advertising contracts more than for their country". "Most of these guys," she added, "consider at one moment that they represent France at the World Cup, and at another they are a part of another nation or have another nationality in their heart."
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