France's Kylian Mbappé and Ousmane Dembélé after the Russia 2018 World Cup final | Jewel Samad/AFP via Getty Images

‘African World Cup winner’ goes down badly with French

A nation officially blind to race grapples with reality of a multiethnic national football team.



PARIS — They're French. Got that?

That was the forceful retort from athletes, journalists and even an ex-U.S. president to people who suggested that France's World Cup-winning team was more African than French due to the origins of their parents or grandparents.

France has been celebrating non-stop since its 4-2 victory over Croatia on July 15. Drivers continue to honk their horns spontaneously, days later. And polls suggest the country's spirits have already been lifted by the victory, France's second-ever in the World Cup.

But foreign commentators are dousing the good feelings — by suggesting the win was not quite French.

"Africans and Muslims delivered you a second World Cup," wrote Khaled Beydoun, a law professor in Michigan, in a tweet on July 15 that has been shared over 216,000 times.

French President Emmanuel Macron, center, celebrated France winning the 2018 World Cup | Alexey Nikolsky/AFP via Getty Images

Daily Show host and TV comedian Trevor Noah chimed in, exclaiming: "Congratulations to Africa on winning the 2018 Men’s World Cup!"

"In reality, Africa won," said Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Such suggestions did not go down well in France, hinting as they did that the players' skin color — denoting African origin — was more important than their nationality. The French state does not officially recognize the concept of race due to a constitution grounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and its literal view of the idea that all humans are created equal.

The first to react were French athletes themselves, saying that they considered themselves, first and foremost, as French citizens.

Casually alluding to religion or national origin is typically considered a faux pas in work and school environments.

"Stop it with this 'Africa won the world cup for France' non sense [sic]," tweeted French basketball star Evan Fournier. "We are all french deal with it," he added.

After Anglophone sports publication Sporf listed the ancestral nationalities of France's players on July 17, French defender Benjamin Mendy replied with his own list, marking every player as French. "Fixed," he said.

An article from news radio RTL summed up common French views on the issue in an article headlined "Les bleus face racist commentary from abroad," which pointed out that some want to place "the origins of certain players at the forefront."

France's race-blind policy — at odds with suggestions that players are "African" due to skin color — is frequently at the center of controversies over whether such statistics should be used, for example to enact quotas in the university system. But so far, the French have stuck to their guns, with the French parliament unanimously voting this month to remove the word "race" from the constitution.

The term, considered outdated, has been largely dismissed as a social construct at odds with republican ideals of solidarity and brotherhood. In 2013, France's left-wing parties led a successful effort to scrub the term from French legislation, saying that it has "no scientific basis." Casually alluding to religion or national origin is typically considered a faux pas in work and school environments.

The race-blind school got some foreign backing, from no less than former U.S. President Barack Obama. During a speech in South Africa commemorating Nelson Mandela, he said: "Not all of those folks look like Gauls to me. But they're French. They're French."