Has Aissa Dermouche, an Algerian-born educator, been given the job of prefect of the Jura region, near the Swiss border, because of affirmative action or because he is the best candidate?
The appointment on Wednesday of Mr. Dermouche, 57, makes him the only prefect (department head) who is foreign-born or Muslim in France. But it was announced without fanfare along with others at the weekly Council of Ministers meeting.
After all, affirmative action or "positive discrimination," as it is called here, is not supposed to exist in France, which does not gather data according to race, religion or ethnicity, even in its census. The practice has been seen as an ill-conceived American invention that encourages divisivness.
But in a television debate last November, the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, broke a political taboo and touched off a fierce public debate by arguing in favor of the practice to help raise Muslims out of poor suburban ghettos and give them a place in French society.
Since then the French government has found itself caught between the impulse to respond to the needs of its large ethnic Arab and Muslim population and the desire to reject any practice that threatens the French republican ideal of equality.
"There are parts of France and categories of French citizen who have loaded on their heads so many handicaps that if we do not help them more than we help others, they will never escape," Mr. Sarkozy, who is said to have presidential ambitions, said in a debate this month.
By contrast, in a meeting with high school students in Tunisia in December, President Jacques Chirac said that discrimination could not be positive and that it was not "acceptable" to "appoint people based on their origins."
Then last Friday, during a New Year's reception for the press at Élysée Palace, Mr. Chirac said that he had told his ministers in July that they had to come up with a candidate for prefect from "immigrant origins." Otherwise, he would not approve any new appointments, he said. And the palace announced last week that someone of "immigrant origin" would be named one of the country's 200 prefects.
On Wednesday, in a statement released from his office, Mr. Chirac said that the nomination was based on "a basic republican principle — that top civil service appointments are based on the recognition of merit, whatever the origins of the persons involved."
Sensitive to the fact that the expression "positive discrimination" is a loaded one, French officials are hunting for alternatives.
Mr. Sarkozy proposed on Wednesday that it be replaced by "republican voluntarism." The phrase, which he did not define, could be interpreted to mean the granting of jobs and educational opportunities to further the cause of the French republic.
In an interview with Europe 1 radio last November, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said he preferred "positive mobilization," adding, "The idea that there are good forms of discrimination on the one hand and bad ones on the other might be seen as a confused notion."
Despite the center-right government's official position against affirmative action, there are exceptions. As Mr. Sarkozy said in his debate, "When we create quotas for the disabled, when we pass a law so that half the people on party lists at elections are women, when we set up economic and educational priority zones, what is that if not positive discrimination?"
In 1982 the then Socialist government created zones of priority education in poor neighborhoods throughout France, which receive special funds for extra teachers and aides and salary increases for them.
Within the regular police force are security officers of Arab or Muslim origin often recruited from the tough, largely immigrant suburbs of major cities.
Although the first Muslim prefect was appointed in 1942, there have been few others, despite France's growing Arab and Muslim population. (Although there are no official figures, there are an estimated five million Muslims in France, about 8 percent of the population.)
Mr. Dermouche came to France when he was 18. Since 1989 he has headed the Audencia school of management, one of the selective grandes écoles where France trains its elite.
In a telephone interview from Nantes, Mr. Dermouche called his appointment "a great honor" but declined to speculate on why he was chosen.
He also declined to say whether he favored affirmative action, adding, "I can't cast judgment, which would be a political judgment, on positive discrimination."