Something To Be Proud Of?

I sometimes feel that France is ill-served by its status as the home of The Declaration of the Rights of Man in the sense that success, victory and achievements always carry within them the seeds of failure, defeat and complacency. Back in Britain, look at how our imperial past prevented us from grasping the extent of our decline. It took the shock of the Suez Crisis to bring us to our senses. At a more trivial level, our proud position as the home of football for long stood in the way of any attempt to get to grips with the rest of the world.

Similarly, France’s revolutionary past makes it all too easy for successive governments not to come to terms with their own shortcomings. Take the question of ethnic minorities and their representation in parliament: of the 555 députés elected to the National Assembly from metropolitan France, just three are from minority backgrounds. (This compares to 15 MPs in the UK.)

Comparisons:

In 2007, 0.4% of members of the French National Assembly were from an ethnic minority, compared with an estimated 12.6% of the general population. The figures for Germany were 1.3% of members of the lower house representing 4.8% of the general population, and for the Netherlands 8% and 10.9%.

In addition, “We have European, local, and legislative elections, but we don’t have one mayor from an ethnically diverse background in any French town with a population of more than 10,000,”  says a parliamentary attaché.

If women are the issue (and they often are…), the figures show that 18% of the National Assembly are women, compared to 32% in the Bundestag and 20% in the UK.