Feeling French and Feeling being Seen as French

In this article I investigate the relation between the feeling of being French and the feeling of being considered as French. I shed light on the gap between these two feelings and how this gap varies with origin, how people acquire nationality, and the time they have lived in France. For the population of European ancestry, the feeling of belonging, while weaker at the beginning, gets stronger with time and is correlated with the feeling of being accepted. On the contrary, for people of African and Southeastern Asian ancestry, the results shed light on the gap between the two feelings: The feeling of being French is always stronger than the feeling of being accepted. This gap persists with the acquisition of nationality as well as among the second generation of immigrants.