European governments, struggling with the incorporation of diverse immigrant populations, introduced integration contracts. Through language training and compulsory civics courses, the goal is to induce immigrants to adopt host society culture and respect its values. Despite their popularity, little empirical evidence exists whether they catalyze integration or trigger a backlash. To shed light on this question, we leverage the staggered introduction of France’s integration contract across metropolitan departments between 2003 and 2006 to implement a regression discontinuity design. We use census and labor force surveys to precisely estimate the effect of the contract on standard integration outcomes, and conduct our own survey of refugees to enrich our integration measures. We find that the integration contract did not increase economic and social integration, nor immigrants’ identification with France. However, we also do not find evidence of a backlash, suggesting that both hopes and criticisms of civic integration policies are exaggerated.