Burning cars, fire engines under attack - who would have thought the immigrant slums of northern Paris where six firemen have been wounded since the weekend, could resemble Belfast and Derry?
But the French sapeurs-pompiers learned so much from the Northern Ireland Fire Service that they're renewing an exchange programme which was started last summer.
"Our colleagues from Belfast know a lot about urban violence," says Col Serge Garrigues of the Paris headquarters of the sapeurs-pompiers.
"They taught us a lot about how to intervene, contact with the population, self-protection. Our Plan Troubles Urbains is five years old, but we refined it with the help of colleagues from Northern Ireland."
Two French officers will spend a fortnight in Belfast in September, followed by a return visit from Northern Ireland firemen.
The first lesson was tactical - "to work more closely with the police - not to intervene without them," Col Garrigues explains.
His service is modifying fire engines to resemble those in Northern Ireland, with automatic closing mechanisms to protect equipment lockers and crews inside trucks.
The French now train firemen on "what to do when they find themselves facing hostile gangs - how not to provoke them."
Sixty-nine sapeurs-pompiers were wounded in violence in the Paris region last year, a 32 per cent increase on 1999 figures.
Col Garrigues praised the North's fire service for maintaining employment parity between Protestants and Catholics. The French have tried to recruit officers from the predominantly North African and African districts, "but it doesn't work," he says.
"We find a few exceptional ones, who are horrified by what happens in their home areas."
The main difference, he says, is that violence in the North is "political" but "purely gratuitous" in France.
"We're the only ones who go into these areas at night. They attack anyone who wears a uniform - postmen, bus drivers. It's a total rejection of society. They use kitchen appliances as weapons, dropping them on us from rooftops. We had the cab of a truck split when a fridge was thrown on it."
Col Garrigues also believes fire-fighting in Northern Ireland is more predictable. "There are certain times - the marching season - that they know are very, very hot. In France it can explode any moment. It's enough for a drug dealer to be arrested."
Divisional Officer Chris Kerr, in charge of operations at the North's fire service, agrees. "It is, I believe, worse for the French, and indeed, in Britain," he said.
Yet the events he recounts seem to indicate otherwise. In Lurgan on Monday, "a firefighter had a gun put to his head and a trigger pulled, but it didn't go off".
It's a worrying trend. The Northern Ireland service's neutral image helps. "We tend to be attacked if the crowd believe we are entering their area to extinguish a barricade. If someone sets a fire and there's a crowd in the area, we will allow it to burn out unless there's a threat to life."