Riots in poor urban districts of France and Britain are often regarded as touchstones of national models, leading observers to conclude that either Assimilationism or Multiculturalism has failed. Based on a qualitative study among young people living in working-class and immigrant neighbourhoods of Paris and London suburbs, this contribution investigates how national models impact everyday constructions of ethnicity. Rather than looking for the failure of one model or the other, it shows that respective contradictions of both open space for young people to articulate new forms of individuation. Faced with tensions between a « colour-blind » ideal of universality and discriminatory and segregative practices, young people from Paris banlieues struggle to conciliate a high sense of citizenship with reinvented cultural heritages. Their British counterparts, who tend to understand discriminations and racism as individual and moral problems, call for the fulfilment of the ideal of tolerance and still claim working-class identities.