France is again the target of barbaric acts of terror.
The perpetrators of the January attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket were born and raised in France.
The first individual formally identified after the weekend's horror in Paris is also a child of France.
As a Frenchman living in Sydney, I feel a historical perspective is required to help Australians understand why so many French youths take up arms against their own country.
In the 1950s and '60s, France invited hundreds of thousands of people from its then African colonies to come to the mainland because we needed help to rebuild the country's economy after the war. The period is remembered in France as "les trentes glorieuses", the glorious 30 years between the end of the war in 1945 and the oil crisis of 1975.
There was plenty of work and many jobs didn't require much qualification. The Arabs were cheap labourers and prepared to work hard. Everyone was happy.
We built cheap "temporary" accommodation in the suburbs and concentrated all these newcomers there, along with young French families who needed a cheap flat and a good start in life.
My family was one of them. We had limited means, just like most people around us, but I remember these years fondly. My friends were called Laurent or Pascal, but also Rida or Abder. In our apartment block, we had many factory workers like my parents, but we also had a young surgeon and his wife, as well as three or four small-business owners.
Then came the late '70s and the economic crisis. Factories closed and unemployment skyrocketed.
Move the clock forward to 2015. The economy has never recovered; the "temporary" accommodation is still there and now badly derelict; those who had the means moved on, but many never did.
The suburbs have become lawless ghettos and are now populated exclusively by people of very low socio-economic background. The kids who live there still look like Arabs and they still have Arabic surnames such as Benzema, Zidane or Ben Arfa, but they are third- or fourth-generation French.
You can't "send them back to where they came from" any more than you can send white Australians back to England or Ireland.
And France is not Australia. There is no such thing as multiculturalism in France; the motto is "integration", but without official support.
Ethnic minorities have no political representation – out of 925 parliamentarians in France, there are less than half a dozen with Arabic names, despite the fact the North African minority represents close to 10 per cent of the French population.
After all these years, French schools teach English, German, Spanish or Italian, but almost none teach Arabic. Parents wanting their children to learn Arabic have to send them to a mosque or to a local association rarely funded by government. Arabic language news come unfiltered from sources often worrying.
In contrast, my kids were given the opportunity to learn French at their school in Sydney and I watch the daily French news bulletin on SBS. My children were born here, they are Aussie kids, they have a strong sense of belonging to the Australian community, but they also have an awareness of their ancestral culture.
To make matters worse, prejudice and discrimination are rampant. The few youngsters who happen to beat the odds, get an education and apply for a good job, often get knocked back. Countless studies have shown that if two identical CVs are sent, the one with the French-sounding name will get an interview and the one with the Arabic name won't.
We have created a whole generation of people who have no hope and who don't feel like they belong to anything. Deep down, they don't feel French, because they have been rejected all their life by the French nation. They aren't Algerian or Tunisian or Moroccan either, they are just "of the ghetto".
So, when some murderous fanatic turns up and offers them an ideal, a sense of purpose for the first time in their life, they are easily convinced. Islam is not the issue here; hopelessness is. Many of the jihadists who leave France to go and fight in Syria are very recent converts to Islam; some don't even understand its basic precepts. These kids could just as well have been recruited by Jehovah's witnesses or any other religious organisation.
It must take a very deep feeling of anger and injustice to agree to blow yourself up. These home-grown terrorists have the rage –we, the French people, have helped foster it for decades.
We must come to terms with this, because we will never kill enough jihadists to stop the kind of horror we saw on the weekend. And closing our borders won't help either, because the cancer is inside.
Herve Maurin has lived in Sydney for 20 years. He is originally from Roanne, France.
