Sons of immigrants lift France with World Cup win

Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Emmanuel Macron and Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic with France's Kylian Mbappe.

They are known as "les bleus," but now they are the champions.

As France's national football team soared to victory in the 2018 World Cup, defeating Croatia, 4-2, the jubilation was palpable in staggering summer heat from the iconic Champs-Élysees boulevard in Paris to cafe terraces across the nation.

The instant the clock ran out, a cacophony of shouts and car horns began, the sounds of a long-awaited victory that showed little signs of abating anytime soon.

Recent years have not been kind to France, which has suffered the brunt of Europe's recent struggles with terrorist violence; more than 240 have been killed since 2015 in such attacks.

Despite the lofty pledges and promises of President Emmanuel Macron, the unemployment rate - for the moment - is still high, and culture wars, mostly over immigration and Islam, have continued to polarise an already-embittered electorate.

But then came today, when the football team took home the title for the first time since 1998.

This was a moment that all of France felt deeply, but it was particularly emotional in Bondy, a low-income community that belongs to the galaxy of Paris suburbs only a short train ride from one of the richest cities in the world.

Bondy is the home of Kylian Mbappé, 19, the breakout star of the team.

Like many Parisian suburbs, or "banlieues," Bondy is a community populated heavily with immigrants and their descendants, the kind of place that French and especially foreign media tend to portray as depressed and isolated, breeding grounds of petty crime and, most recently, hotbeds of terrorism.

The phrase many use to describe these suburbs is "territories lost to the Republic," which either no longer - or no longer wish - to belong to France and its universalist values.

But the 2018 World Cup has changed that narrative, at least for now. In a country at times obsessed with national identity, France's team is a decidedly multicultural squad, presenting an image of a diverse nation that has become a national success story, if not a fairy tale.

People take to the streets around the Arc de Triomphe to celebrate France's World Cup victory. Photo / AP

Nowhere was that clearer than in Bondy, where a mural of Mbappé's face hangs high over a highway, the pride of a nation but especially of this particular community, the place he was born and raised. "Welcome to the city of possibilities," that mural reads.

The French national football team has long been caught up in the discussion over national identity and especially racial diversity.

Previous iterations of the team were attacked for being too multicultural, mostly by far-right hardliners such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front, who maintained that dark-skinned players were somehow less French and did not know the words to the national anthem.

This year, there was also a bit of controversy when some supporters heralded the French team as an African team, given the number of players with ethnic origins in Africa.

French President Emmanuel Macron reacts during the final match between France and Croatia at the 2018 soccer World Cup in the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow, Russia. Photo / AP

Today, hundreds of people gathered inside a Bondy stadium to watch the final match, broadcast live from Moscow. Children and adults alike had painted their faces with the famed "tricolour," France's blue, red, and white flag.

Others were draped in the flag; others wore jerseys emblazoned with the names and numbers of their favourite players. The crowd was seized with raucous cheers each time France scored.

But here in Bondy, it was Mbappé most people had come to celebrate.

Binguisse Traoré, 21, was wrapped in a French flag and wearing large sunglasses that bore the flag's colours on the frames. He came early and was seated in the front row of the crowd, closest to the screen.

A rooster, a symbol of France, and two stars indicating two World Cup wins, are projected onto the Arc de Triomphe. Photo / AP

"He's a young man from Bondy, just like us," Traoré said, claiming that he knew Mbappé when they were children in the area. "Frankly, Mbappé is an idol for us. We hope to become like him. It's a town where everyone waits to have a life like Mbappé."

Moussa Khoma, 27, a friend of Traoré's, pulled out his iPhone and showed a Facebook photo of himself and Mbappé on a childhood football team in Bondy. "He's from here," Khoma said, pointing to Mbappé's face, in the corner of the screen. He noted that because of their age difference, Mbappé had merely trained with them for a while.

There was also what Mbappé - and the team in general - had come to represent for so many.

"It represents France well, in the spirit," said Mélodie Goinga, 19, a lifelong resident of Bondy too young to remember the 1998 victory. "Especially in terms of diversity."

Goinga wore a veil, banned in certain areas of French public life as an affront to the national ideal of secularism. But her cheeks were painted with the tricolour.

For Rokhaya Diallo, a French journalist and activist who writes often on race in French public life, the widespread support for the French team represents an important shift in public opinion, however long it lasts. The 2018 World Cup would have been a French victory even in defeat, she said.

"It's a victory because at the end of the day, it shows that sometimes the people who are rejected belong. That's changed the atmosphere for a couple of days at least."