In January 2015, Manuel Valls, the then prime minister, spoke of 'a territorial, social, ethnic apartheid', explaining that there was a section of the population that lived in a 'peri-urban relegation, the ghettos'. Travelling between the centres of big cities, such as Paris or Lyon, and their peripheries, reveals how fractured urban France is. To live in France is to be confronted every day with the gap between the reality of exclusion and discrimination, and the universal egalitarian principles proclaimed by the political parties. The Declaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen from 1789, which dictates that 'human beings are born and remain free and equal in rights', is incorporated into the constitution and therefore, in theory, all laws are subordinate to this principle of equality.
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