Throw your mind back to June 9th last, the eve of the World Cup championship. The Air France strike was in its 10th day, had cost the national airline more than £140 million and made French pilots synonymous with greed. That night, dozens of youths from Paris's immigrant suburbs descended on the ChampsElysees to hurl beer bottles at riot police and break windows. British and German hooligans and a scandal over fraudulent World Cup ticket sales were looming. Women and French intellectuals denounced the championship as macho, vulgar and capitalist. Except for tourist souvenir vendors, there was little sign in the capital that anything out of the ordinary was happening.

Then a miracle occurred. The foundations were laid with each successive French victory, but it didn't really dawn on the country until France beat Croatia in the semi-final.

Suddenly, it was as if the French, and in particular Parisians, were tired of being the grouchiest, snobbiest, most depressed and racist people in Europe. On July 8th, then again on July 12th and 13th, record-breaking crowds of up to 1.5 million - more than at the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation - poured on to the ChampsElysees. There was not a word to be heard against football. The popularity ratings of the President and the Prime Minister reached altitudes worthy of Blair and Clinton. Young immigrants who earlier condemned the competition as entertainment for rich white people joined in the celebrations, waving tricolours and singing the Marseillaise, many for the first time.

The country seemed to emerge from a long, dark tunnel. For days, France lived out an intense, collective emotion, a moment of fraternity.

The power of football to change history has already been demonstrated. A qualifying match between El Salvador and Honduras provoked the "soccer war" of 1969. In 1978, the Argentine regime won a new lease on life with a World Cup victory. Fights between supporters of Dynamo Zagreb and Red Star of Belgrade in March 1990 foreshadowed civil war in former Yugoslavia. Last winter, celebrations in Tehran of Iran's World Cup qualification turned into a plebiscite in favour of President Mohamed Khatami and greater freedom for women.

So, will France's current state of World Cup grace have a lasting effect? Will France permanently shed its reputation for racism? Will Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front (FN) lose some of its 15 per cent of the electorate?

The winning team was, in the words of President Chirac, "tricolour and multicolour". Others called it "black, white and beur". (Beur is the term for French people of North African origin.)

Except for Brazil, no other country in the championship had a team as racially mixed as France. Zinedine Zidane, who scored two of the three goals against Brazil, is the son of Algerian Kabyle immigrants. Lilian Thuram and Thierry Henry are of West Indian origin, while Marcel Desailly was born in Ghana. Christophe Karembeu is a Kanak from the French South Pacific. Two of the players are French Armenians; another was born in Senegal.

For most of the 34-day competition, Mr Le Pen remained silent.

Newspaper editorialists kept writing that the team's success was a rebuttal of his racist, anti-immigrant policies.

This time, he refrained from criticising Les Bleus. But during the European championship three years ago, he said it was "artificial to bring foreign players and call them the French team".

He asked that the name be changed since "I never thought these 11 men represented France", and claimed that blacks and foreigners did not even know the words to La Marseillaise.

Always eager to provoke scandal, Mr Le Pen had the nerve to announce, on the eve of the World Cup final, that Les Bleus owed their success to him. He was happy that the championship pitted nations against nations, and the fact that the players now sang La Marseillaise showed "a certain Le Pen-isation of minds", he said.

But after the victory, there wasn't a Le Pen supporter to be found among the revellers on the ChampsElysees. The leader of the extreme right was miffed that football supporters chanted anti-FN slogans. He issued a statement saying his party "rejoices that this symbolic victory has . . . helped the French people rediscover their patriotism, their national anthem and their tricolour flag".

Then came the kicker. Mr Le Pen wished to congratulate Zinedine Zidane, whom he called "a child of French Algeria". Needless to say, Mr Zidane could hardly welcome the wishes of a man who wants to reconsider the French citizenship of those without at least one "pure" (de souche) French parent.

A recent government study concluded that the French, along with the Belgians, are the most racist nation in Europe. Asked to rate their own level of racism on a scale of 1 to 10, 38 per cent of French people marked themselves between 5 and 10, compared to 23 per cent of Germans and 22 per cent of British.

But if France has the highest number of racists, it also has the highest percentage of citizens of foreign origin in Europe - and the most vocal anti-racist groups. One quarter of the French population has a foreign parent or grandparent, so the French football team was truly representative of France's ethnic diversity. The support for Les Bleus high-lighted what sociologists have long known: that French society is more polarised between racists and anti-racists than any other European country. The younger, more educated and left-wing a French person, the more likely he will express anti-racist views.

Farmers, retired people, shopkeepers and artisans are more likely to support Mr Le Pen.

So, in the long term, the National Front may be doomed by demographics. The number of French people who believe there are "too any Arabs" in France is still high at 56 per cent, but that has fallen from 76 per cent in 1990. Hostility towards blacks and Jews has declined in similar proportions. Racism drops sharply where French marry or establish friendships with people of foreign origin. Less than one-third of French people fulfil the FN's definition of "pure French" - and it is this group which admits to the highest level of racism, 62 per cent.

The French sociologist Nonna Mayer says it is "absurd and naive" to believe the World Cup victory will profoundly alter French race relations. Eleven months will pass before the FN's popularity is again tested at the polls in the European parliamentary elections. But in the meantime, the World Cup has boosted spirits - at least temporarily - in the immigrant banlieues. Youths named Mokhtar and Nourredine, interviewed by French television, said they feel they will be "more respected" in the future, that "there are no more blacks and beurs - it is the French who have won."

History may judge President Chirac and Prime Minister Jospin by their ability to build on the goodwill created by the World Cup championship. With the collusion of TF1, the most watched television station, the President managed to give the impression that he was France's most ardent fan. He wore a football jersey (number 23) to the semi-final against Croatia, and a Les Bleus scarf to the final. By a happy coincidence for him, the final fell two days before Bastille Day, on which the President hosts the military parade and Elysee garden party.

It was Mr Chirac who launched the World Cup, and who served as master of ceremonies for the victory celebrations. He is now in the ironic position of being more popular with the French people - 68 per cent of whom support him - than with fellow Gaullists who are plotting against him.

In his Bastille Day interview, Mr Chirac said his cohabitation with the Socialist Prime Minister is "constructive" and made clear that his first priority is not to fight the left but to reunite his own fragmented centre-right coalition.

Mr Jospin showed himself to be an assiduous reader of the sports daily L'Equipe and delivered more learned commentaries than Mr Chirac, even if he was sidelined by the President's theatrics. Yet Mr Jospin is credited with managing France's economic recovery and the first significant drop in French unemployment in a decade. His popularity, at a record 70 per cent, still surpasses that of Mr Chirac, whose manner and rhetoric seem old-fashioned.

The new French epoch heralded by the World Cup victory values naturalness, simplicity, hard work, honesty, discretion and team work - not attributes associated with the French in the past.

These characteristics endeared Mr Jospin to France, and the country found the same qualities in the football coach Aime Jacquet. France has put the corrupt annees-fric (money years) behind it, Le Monde said. Could it be entering "les annees Jacquet"?