Paris: Emmanuel Macron has warned against the dangers of US-style woke culture, saying the debate in France was becoming increasingly divided along racial lines.

The French President said creeping racial and identity politics risked “fracturing” the foundations of French society.

“I see that our society is becoming progressively racialised,” he told Elle magazine.

In particular, he took aim at “intersectionality”, a notion popular in American academia that examines discrimination and poverty through the lens of social and political identities, such as race and gender.

“The logic of intersectionality fractures everything,” Macron said.

“I stand for universalism. I don’t agree with a fight that reduces everyone to their identity or their particularity. Social difficulties are not only explained by gender and the colour of your skin, but also by social inequalities.”

The centrist 43-year-old, who is expected to run for re-election next year, added he could think of young white men in his home town of Amiens or nearby Saint-Quentin in northern France “who also have immense difficulties, for different reasons, in finding a job”.

Compiling racial statistics is illegal in France, which is scarred by wartime ethnic profiling and is officially colour-blind. To many scholars on race, however, this is part of a long history of denial over discrimination.

Inspired by Black Lives Matter, the country has seen a string of protests denouncing racism over the past year, notably where it has been linked to cases of police brutality, and the legacy of its colonial past.