The President of the Republic

The second reason is that French culture treasures the events of 1789, the revolutionary violence of that time, as if it were a great achievement. In fact the French Revolution was a tragic disaster, but few will admit that. There is a strong view in France that political crises can be solved by revolutionary action, last seen in 1968 and one decade before as the Fourth republic collapsed.

The third reason for the failure of the Fifth Republic is the republican policy towards her immigrants which we are constantly told is based on “republican values”, but seems to depend on physically separating the immigrants, and putting them in vast satellite public housing estates outside the cities.

Immigrants and the children of immigrants are hardly found in positions of power in France, unlike Australia, Canada, the United States or the United Kingdom.

(Yes, the United States is a republic, but if you ignore the civil war, and the excessive rigidity in the system, it does works. But it has never been successfully exported, unlike the Westminster system.)

This concentration of large but separate immigrant communities has not appealed at all to the rank and file French people, who are attracted to the anti- immigrant Monsieur Le Pen, who replaced the socialists as Monsieur Chirac’s opponent in the last presidential election.

Julian Tompkin, in The Australian of November 15, 2005, (“Revolutionary sound inspires music to burn for”) tries to give some cultural context to this. He writes:

When riots broke out in Paris on October 27, the world looked on in confusion. How could this happen in one of Europe's last utopian welfare states? By the time the entire country was engulfed by firebombs the commentators had pens drawn and aimed directly at the heart of the republic.

Why wasn't this crisis uncovered before it spilled over into violence and destruction? The truth is it had been, but the authorities and the newspapers didn't want to know about it. You needed to buy a CD to discover the reality of France and its “crise des banlieues” …

He cites an anthem, L'etat Assassine, featured in director Mathieu Kassovitz's groundbreaking 1995 film, La Haine (Hate): "From black Africa to North Africa to Corsica to Ireland, the minorities are rising, our blood comes from the same sap … The government is the head of state that is the assassin."

By the 1990s, France had become hip-hop's second most creative and lucrative market after the US, but mainstream France did its best to ignore the army that was congregating at its ancient walls … But while hip-hop in the US collapsed under its own weight into a more malleable world of commercial pop and oversexed ramblings, its French counterpart was bracing for its biggest attack on the republic yet. Poverty was worsening, the ghettos were becoming even more alienated and the right-wing, anti-immigration political party the Front National was gaining momentum.

There are lessons in the French experience. The most elementary is that any flirtation with the Fifth Republic as a model for Australia would be not only unwise, it would be foolish.