Comment: The last thing France needs is a debate on national identity

The idea of French national identity is still tied up in outdated caricatures. 

Some Britons, for example, view all Gallic men as shoulder-shrugging whingers who wear black berets, striped jerseys and a string of pungent onions around their necks.

They think Parisian women, meanwhile, always have a manicured poodle in tow as they set off for exquisite lunches lasting at least two hours (and that is just on work days).

Laughing about such stereotypes is largely harmless, and we all know they have very little to do with the actual profiles of the 66 million citizens living in mainland France.

The modern republic is as diverse as it is vibrant, as you would expect from a land with eight direct land borders, and a long history of immigration from all parts of the globe, not least Africa and south-east Asia.

An imperial past, and a particularly troubled period of decolonisation, have also muddled the entire notion of conventional ‘Frenchness’.

Hence, opposition anger at Prime Minister François Bayrou trying to highlight differences through a “national debate” on what it actually means to be French in 2025. 

He said that such a frank discussion should “not be postponed forever”. 

This is despite it being just 15 years since former president Nicolas Sarkozy organised exactly the same kind of stunt. 

At the time, the right-wing conservative was a law-and-order extremist, and not yet the convicted criminal who is currently in house arrest and wearing an electronic tag.

Needless to say, Mr Sarkozy’s debate led to a mass upsurge in racist discourse, as unashamed bigots were emboldened to say what they really thought about ethnic and religious minorities.

Anonymous online forums were still relatively new in those days, but this did not stop them being inundated with expletives and gruesome insults.

Those with dark coloured skin suffered the worst, as “common sense” populists let rip, without fear of prosecution. 

Comment: My new French passport poses all sorts of questions about self and identity

In short, nobody learned anything at all from the “debate’ except for how abhorrent many voters were. 

Unusually, Mr Sarkozy later apologised for causing a horrific amount of division and ill-feeling, and rapidly

dropped all plans for a national identity ministry.

Mr Bayrou, who was already a very high profile politician at the time, clearly has a short memory, or is being disgracefully cynical. 

His extremely unstable government – that could be voted out of power at any time – relies on the support of parties such as Rassemblement National, which began as the far-right Front National under the late Jean-Marie Le Pen, a convicted racist and Holocaust denier. 

That is presumably why Mr Bayrou is trying to impress those who look back on France’s imperial past with fondness. 

The prime minister recently referred to immigrants “flooding in”, and his senior lieutenants are looking into abolishing jus soli – the “right of soil” citizenship that anybody born in France logically enjoys automatically. 

Hence, Mr Bayrou asking questions such as “What does it mean to be French?” and inviting the vitriol to flow.

Such malice completely ignores rapid societal changes and the overhaul of geopolitical landscapes.

The development of mass communications, including easy travel and online information gathering, has led to an intermingling of populations that will continue apace. Ignoring such realities is like not bothering with

the global economy, or issues such as climate change or the increasing power of artificial intelligence.

Nobody is saying that everybody should be allowed to settle in France – of course citizenship comes with rights and responsibilities – but there has to be an acknowledgement that hot air discussions about differences between people, and which types you do not like, do not solve immensely complex problems. 

They simply exacerbate them.