France has always been very much egalité, fraternité, liberté and making everyone conform to french values, and not multicultural as an idealogy, like in England.
Pros and cons.
It’s remarkably easy to find areas of England where people don’t understand English, and I’m not referring to first generation immigrants either. Some have come over and created enclaves, for lack of a better word, actively refusing to integrate with English culture and norms.
And no I’m not referring to the normal process of concentrations of, say, Poles, speaking mostly in Polish, because they learn English quite quickly.
This kind of thing is heavily frowned upon in France, and practically celebrated in England.
My local council has things available in about 10 different languages, of which about 7 are non-European.
If I remember the council when I was in France right, it was French or get the fuck out.
Superbly arrogant about maintaining certain things, e.g. a creme brulee has to be a creme brulee, and god forbid you change it, and you must speak French if you want to live in France.
Note at this point, I am not passing judgement on either system, and I am relying on my memory of living in France for a year. It was a while ago, but I’m not speaking out of my arse. I’m attempting to explain/mansplain/eurosplain/britsplain/keyboardwarriorsplain potentially why the Ambassador was unhappy.
So, French people, and especially French politicians and foncionnaires, tend to buy heavily into the idea of French is French,
Also, recall that their colonial policy was of assimilation. Being from Algeria when it was a colony was, ideally, the same as being from Calais.
So, french people, even allowing for the racial tensions (especially in Marseilles, I’ve heard that place is…tense) identify themselves as French first, with possibly a parent or grand parent from somewhere else.
it’s a great point of pride for them.
So, that football team was French, and for a French person, especially a french politician, and especially an AMBASSADOR, saying that the team was in fact foreign, not French, is a bit of an insult.
Plus, that statement, that “Africa won the world cup,” is essentially meaningless. I hasten to remind you all that Africa has some 50 odd countries, with disparate languages and ethnicities in each country (exception Somalia, ironically the most violent of them all is the most ethnically homogenous) so sweeping statements such as “Africa this or that,” (or Europe this or that for that matter) are not just useless, but imho counter productive.
To then infer that from a very French team composed of all sorts of colours, that the world cup somehow was won by a different continent altogether, smells to me of attempted political or other agenda pointscoring.
To illustrate the silliness of the concept, this is the New England Patriots team. They won the superbowl in 2017.
I count a whopping 58 black people there.
From this I can confidently assert that Liberia won the super bowl.