Nothing had changed, he said, in the more than six months since that nationwide bonfire of the motorcars - a conflagration that the distant inhabitants of the smart quarters of inner Paris call les émeutes (the riots), but the spokespeople of the outskirts call les événements, recalling "the events" of May 1968, or simply la révolte. Last week, when protest flared up again in Montfermeil, the police were back in force, circulating overhead in helicopters and lurking in their Black Marias. But otherwise they leave the people of the outskirts to stew: packed into overcrowded, decaying high-rise blocks covered in graffiti; up to half of them unemployed and living on state handouts; nothing to do all day except watch television, or kick a football around in the yard, or do drugs; cut off by poor public transport and poverty. And then insulted by the interior minister and presidential hopeful of the right, Nicolas Sarkozy. Challenged by a resident of Montfermeil on his recent visit to a nearby town, Sarkozy used the familiar "tu" as he berated him.

"Respect above all," said a woman of Algerian origin when I asked what they most needed to improve their situation. "Above all, respect." "We live in France," explained Zoulikka Jerroudi, a community activist who came to France from Morocco when he was nine months old, "but they don't treat us as truly French". "Zidane is French," said Mehdi, a social worker, referring to the French football hero of Algerian origin, "but if he was burning cars then suddenly he wouldn't be." "Moi, je suis la France!" cried Abdelaziz Eljaouhari, an activist from another community, decrying Sarkozy's habit of treating him as if he were not.

All they ask of the French republic is that it should practise what it preaches: the equality of all French citizens, blind to race and religion. In the wake of les événements, a group of local activists in Clichy-sous-Bois set up an association with the acronym ACLEFEU, which, pronounced in French, sounds like "enough of fire". The LEF stands for liberté, égalité, fraternité. But the reality is that, even if someone from these communities can get a reasonable education - and here the French state is visibly trying to do something; the schools in Clichy-sous-Bois are well funded and apparently not so bad - their job application is likely to be turned down simply on the basis of their address and "foreign" name. If by some miracle they get to an interview, the job opening mysteriously disappears as soon as the interviewer sees the colour of their skin. I heard this story so many times and from so many different sources, including independent analysts, that there is clearly truth in it. If what has happened over the last 20 years in the French labour market is not racism, I don't know what is. The lofty ideals of republican egalitarianism that they imbibe at school only add insult to injury. "It's a country of hypocrisy," said Oussine, who trained as a book-keeper but could not find a position.

Meanwhile, they are almost entirely unrepresented in French public life. The appointment of a black man as a prime-time TV anchor was recently hailed as a breakthrough, but over several days of relentless channel-flicking here I have seen nothing but white faces presenting to camera. In politics the faces are almost all white too. Only on the football pitch is the real France of multiple ethnicities, cultures and colours represented - even over-represented. When France won the World Cup in 1998, with a mixed-colour team and the genius of Zinedine "Zizou" Zidane, there was a flurry of enthusiasm for the new French national colours: not bleu-blanc-rouge, as in the tricoleur, but black-blanc-beur - roughly speaking "black, white, brown" (beur being the French word for people of north African origin and black the new French for noir). Yet look at the rest of French public life and you have to conclude that there ain't no beur in the tricoleur

"It's too late," several people told me in the battered housing estates. A generation has been lost. Despair has turned to fury. Every little spark will produce another explosion. A community activist who has worked on one of the worst estates for 14 years told me that, if something radical is not done to improve the life-chances of the young, "C'est la guerre ... c'est la guerre avec madame la France."

To my own surprise, I came away thinking that it's not too late. The people I met had not abandoned hope and were clear and articulate in explaining what is needed. Of course they are, so to speak, the elite of the ghettoes: I did not meet the despairing homebound, the criminal elements, the drug dealers or the extremist Islamists. But these were people born and living there, and they were quite different from anything you would expect from television and newspaper reports. Some of their demands will be hard to meet: the over-rigid French economy is unlikely to create that many new jobs any time soon; nor is the French state likely to be able to redirect the large resources needed to turn their stinking high-rise blocks (Le Corbusier's dream become a nightmare) into decent, human-scale housing. But some can be realised.

I asked a group of women on the worst estate in Montfermeil what they thought of the socialist presidential hopeful Ségolène Royal's controversial suggestion that delinquent youths should have to do national service under military supervision. "Absolutely right!" they responded in unison. More suprising still, a group of 15- to 17-year-old volunteers from the local school agreed. And they'd like a local community police, on foot, to replace the remote bullies who descend from armoured lorries to insult and beat them.

Above all, they want what one might call the three Rs: respect, recognition, representation. To achieve this, policies of positive discrimination will be needed to compensate for the negative discrimination seemingly widespread in French society. Role models will be needed to change the attitudes of that society. One man more than any other could lead that change, when he retires from the football field: Zinedine "Zizou" Zidane, the hero alike of the richest, whitest and the poorest, brownest suburbs of Paris. The politicians have failed France; the hour of the footballers has come. Farewell, the old regime of Dominique de Villepin. Hail the new France of Zizou Zidane.

www.timothygartonash.com

British men came towards the middle of the Europe-wide list, with 22% admitting they rarely lifted a finger at home. They were shamed by their Swedish counterparts, with only 8% saying they did nothing, or nearly nothing, at home.

The study also found a huge discrepancy between the number of men who thought they should be sharing housework equally and the number who actually did so, across all the countries.

More than three-quarters of Spanish and Portuguese men, for example, thought they ought to be doing half the housework, but at least a quarter of those men admitted doing nothing. Only 10% of British men thought there was no need to share housework equally, but 20% said they hardly did anything at home.

Spain's socialist government is aware of the problem. Last year it passed a law that obliges men who marry in civil ceremonies to pledge to "share domestic responsibilities and the care and attention" of children and elderly family members.

"The idea of equality within marriage always stumbles over the problem of work in the house and caring for dependent people," Margarita Uría, a senator who backed the law, said.

Spanish women spend, on average, five times longer on housework than their husbands. Even where both have jobs outside the home, Spanish women still do three times as much work in the house.

A study published last year showed that, if you combined their hours at the office with the work they did at home, Spanish women worked an average of an hour a day more than their men.

The sociologist who presented the study, María Angeles Durán, said young Spanish women had opted for the easiest "solution" to the problem of squeezing children into their busy timetable.

"Given that they take up so much time, we have decided not to have them," she said, explaining the country's low birth-rate.

The survey also revealed that southern Europeans and people from former communist countries were the least interested in politics.

Mr Glaubitz said: "It is not very nice to be regularly abused by drunken skinheads as a 'nigger' and to be continuously gawped at as if you have just stepped out of a UFO."

His partner has been named in the media as Raúl García Lao, a Cuban dancer. In 1997 the couple were based in post-apartheid South Africa and did not have problems there, said Tessa Martens, a spokeswoman for the Dutch foreign ministry. She said there were "some severe incidents" of racist and homophobic abuse in Tallinn that had gone on "long enough". She declined to give details, but said the incidents were the sole reason for Mr Glaubitz's transfer request.

He has been ambassador since September and he will leave for Montreal in the coming months.

She said the Estonian authorities said they "regretted the incidents very much".