It was 40 years ago and it was a different world. The children of immigrants, who called themselves "beurs" (a colloquial French term for people whose parents or grandparents come from North Africa), dreamed of finding their place in a France that despised their parents and made them invisible, workers convinced that one day they would return "to the homeland." At the Elysée Palace, former socialist president François Mitterrand promised to change people's lives, while at the municipal elections, Jean-Marie Le Pen, father of Marine Le Pen and leader of the French far-right, emerged from electoral purgatory when his party's candidate was elected mayor of Dreux in western France. The Algerian war was not so far away, and trigger-happy nostalgics were targeting Arabs. In social housing estates, immigrant workers lived side-by-side with doctors, teachers and French workers for the first time; left-wing municipalities, with their volunteers and union activists, created a tight social fabric.

On October 15, 1983, just four decades ago, a handful of young people decided to set off from Marseille, amidst general indifference, for a March for Equality and Against Racism. At the time – although it's tempting to idealize the era – violence, impunity and discrimination were widespread, mostly going ignored by politicians and the media. That generation of sons and daughters of immigrants, the vast majority Algerian, had quite simply decided to stop kowtowing to society's expectations like their parents had done, and demand their rights as French citizens.

What sparked it (as has been the case so many times since then) was an incident with the police. Toumi Djaïdja, a son of a Harki (Harkis are Muslim Algerians who fought on the side of France during the Algerian war of independence) from the Minguettes housing estate in Vénissieux, near Lyon, was accused of driving into France's riot police after trying to escape a police roadside check. Legend has it that, on his hospital bed, after being injured by police in another altercation, he took up the idea of a march inspired by Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" march "for jobs and freedom" in Washington in 1963.

It was the priest Christian Delorme and the pastor Jean Costil who strove for a dream of equality attained without violence. The march arrived in Paris on December 3, 1983, and 100,000 people with a shared ideal burst into the streets, leading to the then-president François Mitterrand receiving a delegation of marchers at the Elysée Palace.

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