FRENCH LESSONS: A leading advocate of racial spoils looks at Paris burning and concludes the best way to extinguish the fires is to implement racial and ethnic preferences. Doing so will "cure racism." The idea is, of course, nuts. As highly overrated, pompous, pretentious, and exhausted as French culture has become, the nation still has one big idea going for it, namely that a French person's identity is, first and foremost, to be a citizen of the French Republic. For all the right reasons, racial identity is an affront to the French ideal of citizenship. Does French racism exist? Without doubt. But the solution to apartheid is not further separation; the solutions is a commitment to assimilation. Easy? No, hard — very hard. America's Civil War and the subsequent civil rights movement makes that clear enough. If France goes down the road of left-wing multiculturalism, the results will leave a once-great culture in shambles.