THE French are a very private people; they do not usually interrupt other people's public conversations. So when last week, two businessmen at an adjoining restaurant table broke into a discussion I was having with a journalist from Le Figaro, Jean Michel Decugis, it was a rare occurrence.
What we were talking about was racism, and particularly the growing antagonism towards the million or so young people born in France of North African, mainly Algerian, parents: 90 per cent of them live in the so called cite's, the high unemployment housing estates.
Decugis - co author of a controversial book giving voice to the experience of these young people - was putting forward the thesis that French society has effectively turned its back on them. For 30 years or more it was happy to have their hard working, discreet, usually invisible, parents doing the dirty jobs the French did not want to do.
However, it does not like their highly visible offspring demanding, often in violent, anti social ways, the same right to the "good life" as other French people. At a time of economic stagnation, its leaders are not prepared to take the electorally unpopular course of properly integrating these alienated young people through massive spending on jobs and education. Neither will a proudly secular society encourage the respectable channelling of their separate, usually Islamic culture, through, for example, the construction of mosques.
Decugis argues that in this situation, with few models of successful people from their background in French public life to follow, it is no surprise when they turn back into their concrete ghettoes, to the worlds of the black market, drugs or Islamic fundamentalism.
The two men at the adjoining table took passionate exception to this. They said that since the turn of the century successive waves of immigrants to France - Jews, Italians, Poles, Russians, Spaniards, Portuguese - have all successfully integrated into mainstream French society by obeying its laws and accepting its secular, republican culture. Within a generation or two they stopped even talking about their foreign origins and were as proud of their Frenchness as any Norman or Gascon.
The problem, said one man, was that too many of these young North Africans - beurs as they are called here - weren't prepared to make the effort to become French and live by French rules. They wanted the best of both worlds: the material prosperity of France and the culture of the Arab world.
No, argued Decugis, these are young French people: few of them speak Arabic; none of them feel they belong in North Africa; they are interested in money and sex just like other French people. Like them, only turn to crime and violence of frustration at unemployment and idleness; unlike them, some beurs also turn to Islam identity of which to be proud, the desperate often to its more extreme, fundamentalist version.
However, it is the argument of the two businessmen in the restaurant which is heard more and more often these days. It can be summarised as: "We're not racist, but immigrants, and especially Arabs and Muslims, don't respect our laws; they don't integrate; they're not people like us."
It is an argument western Europe's most influential racist leader, Jean Marie Le Pen and his Front National, are happy to exploit. An opinion poll last month in Le Monde showed the front's influence was on the increase, with 33 per cent of those polled agreeing with Le Pen's central policy of getting rid of France's immigrants.
Last week, in his May Day address, Le Pen's language was cataclysmic: The forecast that a "civil war" would be the consequence of the government's extremely conservative policies on immigration and urban redevelopment in poorer areas. Again and again he used the fantastic language of an Islamic tidal wave menacing prance.
The statistics may show that immigration has declined by more than half since its high point in the 1960s and early 1970s. However, the spectre of an immigrant majority in some deprived Parisian suburbs and southern French towns, together with the high proportion of young criminals of immigrant origin, make Le Pen's wild rhetoric attractive to economically insecure and politically nationalistic people.
Le Pen is also broadening his social base, organising among transport workers, shopkeepers, flat dwellers and even the liberal professions. "The front, not the Communist Party, is now the first political party of the working classes," says Mouloud Aounit, head of France's most active anti racist movement, the MRAP.
With little sign of any significant upturn in the economy, the chance of any sizeable injection of new jobs in the foreseeable future - by far the best antidote to the problem of racism - is remote.
Both commentators and anti racism activists are pessimistic. "We will never defeat the National Front by demonising them," says Philippe Benassaya of the International League against Racism and Anti Semitism. "We have to oppose their values with our values of tolerance, integration and respect for the Republic and its laws which have made France strong. But if the economy gets worse, the big winner will be Le Pen."