PARIS — Prime Minister François Fillon of France announced a few symbolic measures on Monday to provide concrete results from France’s bitterly contentious debate over “national identity.”

In a special cabinet meeting, Mr. Fillon also threw the discussion, initiated several months ago by President Nicolas Sarkozy, to an “experts committee” of politicians and historians, bringing the debate to an end in its current public form.

Mr. Fillon disclosed a set of new requirements that the French news media mocked as small measures designed to extract him from a discussion that appeared to lead nowhere except toward France’s regional elections in March, in which the governing conservative party hopes to pull votes away from the far right.

Mr. Fillon said that French schools will now be ordered to fly the French flag and to have a copy of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in every classroom.

There will be a form of young citizens’ manual for students, and new citizens will have to speak better French, know more about “the values of the republic” and take part in a more solemn but undefined ceremony — but the details were vague.

“The emphasis will be put on the respect for the values of the republic,” Mr. Fillon said, “notably the principle of equality between men and women,” language aimed at the perception that Muslim immigrants are suppressing women by forcing them to wear head scarves or veils.

The debate on national identity, fiercely defended by Mr. Sarkozy, has been attacked by the opposition Socialist Party as aimed at immigrants, much like the discussion of banning the full facial veil, which has produced much heat but few results so far. There has been little discussion of expanding the idea of French identity to include the values and contributions of immigrants, but much oratory about the need to enforce existing norms and principles.

The minister of immigration and national identity, Eric Besson, a former Socialist, has led the debate, and it is viewed as having damaged his political prospects. But the government said that more than 58,000 people have participated in the debate on an Internet site.

Mr. Fillon said that the debate would continue in various forms through the government’s term and that Mr. Sarkozy would make another speech on the subject in April. “Nothing is worse and damaging than things unspoken and stigmas that we know have always played into the hands of extremists,” Mr. Fillon said, arguing that the debate over identity could not be left in the hands of the far-right National Front.

Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, a historian, dismissed the initiatives as insignificant. “The mountain has given birth to a mouse, and none of these measures will change anything,” the newspaper Le Monde quoted him as saying. “The crisis of national identity has been created by the government. All this agitation is only an electioneering business.”

The former Socialist leader François Hollande said ironically on his blog that the whole debate “has given birth to a commission,” a device that he said “Clemenceau used, under the Third Republic, to mock governments that no longer knew what to do with their bad projects.”