How French

is a writer based in Paris. This article was translated from the French by Keelin McDonell. France, they say, only reforms under the cover of revolution. Here, rebellion precedes dialogue, strikes precede negotiations, and recourse to violence is systematic. This is a country where authority has always assumed the face of the Jacobin state--of a paternal figure who reacts only to threat or attack. In this way, the young rioters in the French suburbs are far more French than many commentators presume. The troubled suburbs are not foreign lands within the Republic, but rather are increasingly a mirror of all French passions, the best as well as the worst--a reserve of talent and energy, but also a melting pot of racism, homophobia, machismo, and anti-Semitism. That is the enigma: These towns behave as if they are under siege by France, which herself behaves like she is under siege by the world.The juvenile rioters--some are barely twelve or thirteen--are French-born; they want to make something of themselves but feel trapped on the wrong side of an invisible window as they watch their compatriots succeed, work, and travel. They don't burn cars out of hatred of capitalist society, as the children of the bourgeoisie did in May 1968. Rather, they do it because they want into that society--they want one of those BMWs or Mercedeses they see around the city, and they cannot afford one. The very vehicles they burn symbolize social mobility, and their lack of it. Unhappy, unemployed, wanting everything right away like the rest of us in this society of individualists, these teenage rioters have nothing to lose but their lives, nothing to cling to, no great cause to support. Yet, as disenfranchised as these young people are, they are first and foremost children of television and supermarkets--they understand perfectly the mechanisms of the media. So they seek to recreate the disorder and vandalism of Baghdad or Gaza (so familiar to them from television) in their own streets, to rival other neighborhoods in destruction. They find validation in the images of their exploits broadcast on television and shared on their cell phones. Their rebellion is a form of negative integration, an initiation ritual where fighting with the French riot police takes the place of adolescent revolt rendered impossible because the father is absent or nonexistent and the mother is overwhelmed. It is their rite of passage into French society. These young suburban rioters know that others at the margins of French society have had their own chance at revolt--and they have learned from the response to those provocations. In September, the employees of the Societe Nationale Corse-Mediterranee, a French ferry company, opposed a plan by the state to privatize their previously public company. Work came to a halt during the seemingly interminable strike. The employees finally made a more extreme gesture, hijacking a boat to protest the privatization and necessitating an intervention by French commandos in helicopters. The most astonishing part of this whole affair was that the pirates seemed not to be worried about the legal consequences of their actions, and the government--fearful that violence would escalate in Corsica and reinvigorate the nationalist movement there--gave into some of the mutineers' demands. The moral was clear: For certain social groups capable of paralyzing a port or a city, impunity is guaranteed, no matter the gravity of the offense. It is a lesson that has not been forgotten two months later. And, yet, infatuation with violence as a form of social protest can get out of hand. It approaches the suicidal when these aggressors systematically demolish gyms, pools, schools, and nurseries, destroying more and more of their own communities. It becomes abject when excited rioters douse a bus with gasoline and burn a handicapped woman passenger, harass drivers and train conductors, fatally beat a retiree, shoot real bullets at the police, and show no remorse or respect for the law, all the while cloaking themselves in the beatific look that only the most barbarous possess. For the most furious among them, killing is just a game--death inflicted or suffered by chance. Have no doubt about it: If a significant fascist party existed in France, it is among these young Arab and North African children of immigrants--the so-called black- blanc-beurs--that it would recruit for its storm troopers. Confronted with such brutality, too many members of the press and the intelligentsia have chosen to play an ambiguous role. They engage in reflexive "Third Worldism," justify the riots as a reaction against French colonialism, and display a pernicious fascination with the violence of the lumpenproletariat and contempt for an open society. It is ironic, because the principal victims of the rioters are the little people, workers of all origins who live in the same apartment buildings and have watched as their cars and other belongings go up in smoke. Where is the indignation of the majority of the French against these insurgents who terrorize the weakest members of our society? Why have groups of citizens not banded together to peacefully protect public and private property? In contrast, the measured response of the police has been admirable-- a fact too rarely acknowledged. One senses that the beginning of the state of emergency here this week marked an uneasy reminder of the beginnings of the war in Algeria--there was again the disarray of a government faced with an insurrection and a society that had never resolved its deeper ambivalence about the use of force. The current riots have many causes. One is, of course, the death of the two teenagers from Clichy-sous-Bois, who, thinking that they were being pursued by the police, hid in a power substation and were electrocuted. But, before that, there were 15 years during which the suburbs simmered under the neglect of public officials who contented themselves with conciliatory words, throwing themselves into "urban politics," which they then forgot about until the next explosion. This feeling of abandonment, confirmed by workplace discrimination and harassment by police, was reinforced several years ago when the government of then-Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin brutally decided to cut funding for certain municipal programs and civic associations--funding that was essential to maintain the fragile unity of those populations. (Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin promised to reinstate it this week.) The alienation was even highlighted by French President Jacques Chirac's three-minute speech on the riots on November 6, when he seemed at a loss for words, reciting mechanical phrases and looking completely disinterested in a subject that could not be more important. The outburst in Clichy-sous-Bois, once it began, would not have reverberated so loudly if it did not also correspond to a profound division at the top of the government, where de Villepin and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy have been locked for months in a merciless battle over the 2007 presidential elections. No doubt, the prime minister and the president put too much pressure on Sarkozy to stop the riots. This may explain Sarkozy's cowboy rhetoric--but his verbal provocations put him on the same level as those disaffected young people whom he has stigmatized, labeling them "scum" and promising to turn the "Karcher," a type of power washer, on them. Now, even if order is swiftly restored, the needed remedies will take years to implement. Today, our country needs a new social contract that takes diversity into account. How will we provide a future for these uneducated young people, discredited by recent events, when France already has a 10 percent unemployment rate? How will we transform their mode of integration into French society from negative to positive? We hesitate between three predictions. One, pessimistic, sees this anarchy as the final proof of France's decline after ten calamitous years under Chirac; the second, more optimistic, highlights the benefits of this shock, which will finally force us to open our eyes to the deep wounds in French society. The third interpretation is paradoxical: Sarkozy, with his own bellicosity, has lured those armed bandits--the truly criminal, as opposed to the mere teenage rebels--out of the shadows and engaged them in a war with the state. So could this anarchy mark the beginning of the liberation of the suburbs, which may soon be rid of the influence of thieves and drug dealers? Perhaps. But one suspects that, for those street fighters, those throwers of rocks and Molotov cocktails, there may not be a future after this party is over. They will remain a fractured, lost generation that will inevitably oscillate between prison, gangs, or Islamism.

By pascal bruckner