France’s claim to be a meritocracy is based on its revolutionary heritage. However, for Anyss Arbib, a 21-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent who grew up in the tough Paris suburb of Bondy, the claim looks clearly wrong these days.

« It’s a myth, of course, » he says. « We should stop being hypocritical and talking about meritocracy. There will be no meritocracy until there is equality of opportunity. »

The claim took a battering this week when France’s elite universities, or grandes écoles , rejected changes to their admissions procedures to take in more students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

France’s grand écoles absorb only 6 per cent of high-school graduates. A clutch of top institutions, such as the Ecole des Mines for engineers or the Polytechnique for mathematicians, account for only a fraction of that.

Various studies show that the student intake to the grandes écoles became more socially diverse in the 40 years after the second world war but the trend levelled off in the 1980s and may have even gone into reverse.

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Par Ben Hall, Financial Times