WorldView / Enda O'Doherty: A week is a long time in newspapers. For most of the first half of November the rioting in the suburbs of a number of French cities regularly made its way on to the front pages of all the leading foreign broadsheets.
Then, a matter of days later, after a succession of quiet nights in the banlieues, it almost seemed as if the three weeks of destruction, 3,000 arrests and 9,000 car-burnings had never happened.
On the most obvious level, this is perfectly understandable: if there are no riots there is no story. True, the politicians continued to talk, but French politicians talking make for less of a story than French cities burning, though in reality, in spite of some incandescent headlines, relatively little burned except cars and buses.
We would be foolish, however, to conclude from this media silence that the issue of the banlieues has gone away, let alone been settled. Violence in these outer suburban ghettoes did not begin at the start of this month and it has not ended, merely returned to "normal" levels.
If foreign media attitudes to the story have evolved from enthusiasm to disengagement, French coverage has had its own progression, from an initial phase of analysis - much of a rather rarefied nature - through political and ideological point-scoring and finally on to scapegoating.
In keeping with their traditions, intellectuals of the left have seen it as their primary duty to equip these rather messy happenings with an appropriate theory.
This did not involve any investigation of who the rioters were, their experiences, life conditions and apparent grievances, but rather a politico-philosophical speculation on how the events might be understood in the light of France's national theology: the mystique of the Republic and its bestowal of égalité on every citizen.
Most creative, perhaps, was the theorist who explained in Le Monde that as the explosion was above all an urgent demand for delivery of the equality promised by the Revolution, it was to be seen not as a failure of French actuality but rather a triumphant endorsement of French ideology.
The right, less ingenious but more grounded, confined itself in the first weeks of the outbreaks to calls for the immediate restoration of order and condemnation of the rioters as "scum" and "thugs", the first theme a popular one with virtually all the electorate while the second also quite probably commanded the assent of a majority.
It was in the search for explanations, or if you like scapegoats, that right-wing thinkers began to lose the run of themselves. A number of early commentators, particularly transatlantic ones, were keen to identify the rioters as Muslims, and therefore Islamists.
But as no incendiary texts or mad mullahs could be found, this interpretation soon began to run out of steam.
Next to be blamed were blogs, apparently inciting youths to spread the troubles from suburb to suburb and city to city to overstretch the forces of law and order.
Then came polygamy, the practice of which was said by leading members of President Chirac's UMP party to be responsible for creating a generation of young men with few positive male role models and an inability to exercise restraint or accept responsibility.
But as Le Monde pointed out, polygamy is commonly practised in France only among the west African Mandé ethnic group, a statistically insignificant minority of immigrants.
The latest culprit has been rap music, and this week 193 UMP parliamentarians asked the minister for justice to prosecute seven rap groups for their incendiary lyrics.
It is certainly true that some of these lyrics are offensive, particularly in their attitudes towards women, but a juvenile sentiment like "Je pisse sur Napoléon et sur le général de Gaulle" should surely elicit more derision than alarm.
The question of what may cause people to turn to violence or crime is one which usually quite cleanly divides thinkers of the left and right.
Traditionalists, or right-wingers, will argue that nothing in fact "causes" anyone to commit a violent act, that it is purely a matter of individual moral choice. And they will point to the incontrovertible fact that the majority of people from "deprived" backgrounds are neither violent nor criminal.
Left-wingers, liberals or people who identify with a national or racial group seen as oppressed will emphasise the influence of poor social conditions and argue that people brutalised by "institutional violence" will often lash out with actual violence.
The Irish critic and poet, Seamus Deane, was obviously close to this latter tradition when he wrote in the name of "our own" rioters of a generation ago: "Stones grew in our hands."
Whatever the merits of these social theories, it is a pretty much undeniable fact that rich kids do not riot, either in France, Northern Ireland or anywhere else.
If the maintenance of order is an inescapable duty of the state, a fixation on condemning particular individuals or groups is at best the indulgence of a psychological need, at worst the dangerous game of an ambitious politician. To fulminate against thugs and scum may be emotionally satisfying, but it gets us precisely nowhere.
Many of the young men of the Parisian banlieues are the third generation of "persons of immigrant origin" occupying such places - and the third generation of poor. If the only change that November 2005 brings about is that black and Arab youths are treated with even greater hostility by the police, we will undoubtedly have many more hot nights and dramatic headlines in the future.