After France was booted from this year's World Cup on Tuesday without winning a match -- amid scenes of selfishness, indifference and indiscipline -- the French news media piled on about the humiliation to the country and the misbehavior of its players. There were calls for a complete restructuring of the French team: its management, its method for choosing players, its training. But there is a more troubling aspect to the reaction to the defeat, which has focused on lack of patriotism, shared values and national honor on a team with many members who are black or brown and descended from immigrants. The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, who has often criticized the failures of French assimilation, compared the players to youths rioting in the banlieues, France's suburban ghettos. 'We now have proof that the French team is not a team at all, but a gang of hooligans that knows only the morals of the mafia,' he said in a radio interview. Fadela Amara, the junior minister for the racially charged suburbs who was born to Algerian parents, warned Tuesday that the reaction to the team's loss had become racially charged. 'There is a tendency to ethnicize what has happened,' she told a gathering of President Nicolas Sarkozy's governing party, according to reports in the French news media. She criticized Sarkozy's handling of a debate on 'national identity,' warning that 'all democrats and all republicans will be lost' in this ethnically tinged criticism about 'Les Bleus,' the French team. 'We're building a highway for the National Front,' she said, in a reference to the far-right, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim party founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen. Luc Chatel, the education minister, said on television Wednesday that he was 'terribly angry' and shocked that Raymond Domenech, the team's coach, who is blamed for some of the team's disunity and apologized to the nation for the failures, refused to shake hands with the South African manager after the team's final game. 'But I'm going to go farther,' he added. 'A captain of the French team who does not sing the Marseillaise,' the national anthem, 'shocks me, there it is. When one wears the jersey, one should be proud to wear the colors, you're an example.' He was speaking of Patrice Evra, who was born in Senegal and who found himself caught between players and managers as the team refused to practice after another black player, Nicolas Anelka, swore at Domenech and was removed from the team. This month, Marine Le Pen, the vice president of the National Front and daughter of its founder, said that she 'doesn't recognize herself in the makeup' of the French national team, whose players behave as individuals, not as a team, and who are 'dripping with dough' and 'fighting for advertising contracts more than for their country.' 