One, called Manuscript B and preserved inthe Institut de France in Paris, contains notes on everythingfromarchitecturetoflying machines, accompanied byexquisitedrawings.
To add to the security worries, a hologram stamp that was to be one of the safety features for euro notes was stolen from an Air France flight from Paris to Munich in May.
Jean-Paul Vermes, author of a recent report by the Paris Chamber of Commerce on the recruitment crisis in France, notes that many politicians conflate legal and illegal immigration, producing alarmist statistics about the number of jobs going to foreigners.
Widad, a 25-year-old secretary of Algerian origin, notes that when she was a schoolchild in Les Yvelines, in the Paris suburbs, four-fifths of her class were North African and only a handful went on to study for the baccalaureate, the school-leaving certificate that is the essential passport to a university or a reasonable job.