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1998   In the summer of 2006, at a bar off Odéon, a girl I didn’t know drew a French flag on my cheek with a blue-white-and-red roller It was the World Cup quarter-final and France were playing Brazil When that game ended (1-0 from a Thierry Henry goal in the fifty-seventh minute), my friends and I ran outside to Boulevard Saint Germain to hear the cacophony of car horns and watch a group of young men spreading a French flag so large it stretched across the boulevard, enveloping the cars on the road, turning Saint Germain into a river of the three-coloured fabric As we walked towards the Seine, the Saint Michel fountain was full of people singing and shouting ‘qui ne saute pas n’est pas Français!’ (‘You’re not French if you don’t jump’)   That summer, I learned the words to the Marseillaise Although at that point I’d lived in France for three and a half years, I’d never picked up anything beyond ‘Allons enfants de la Patrie / La jour de gloire est arrivé!’ Perhaps because that idea, patrie, which impossibly combines homeland, nation, birthplace, feels untranslatable Or maybe it was the feeling that the anthem creates an image of France that feels white and monolingual and Catholic — an idea of France that includes few of its people I knew that football players were often criticised for not singing along to the Marseillaise before matches, because they felt the song did not represent them I understood them I was still looking for a France that I could celebrate   *   The celebrations of that summer, with people pouring into the Paris streets, marked a distinct shift from the intense demonstrations in the city that year The previous autumn, dissent arose following the death of two teenagers, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, who were electrocuted when police chased them to a power substation The demonstrations in response sparked violence across Paris and the rest of the country Months later, in the spring, students were demonstrating over a new labour bill that introduced ways for employers to fire workers under