A full week of rioting by immigrant youths in the north eastern suburbs of Paris has revealed a profound cleavage in French society and the inability of its political leadership to tackle this effectively.
Some five or six million French citizens are immigrants from North Africa, most of them Muslim. Their effective cultural and political exclusion mocks France's official policies of assimilation and equality. It is a long-standing problem, which now threatens to erupt dangerously, as President Chirac publicly acknowledged this week.
Many of the suburbs involved are cut off from the rest of French society by barriers of poverty, social distance and cultural alienation. Unemployment there can reach 50 per cent, far in excess of the already high national norm. Little has been done to tackle the problem, despite widespread documentation of its depth and extent. "We need to reverse 30 years of injustice and discrimination," said a social worker in one of the estates. "Everyone has to have the prospect of a job and a home. Otherwise we're heading for meltdown."
The response by France's interior minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, to the riots has exacerbated the problem and prolonged the violence. He describes the youths involved as "riff-raff" and "scum" and ordered a major mobilisation of riot police in response. This is widely seen as an effort to strengthen his political hand ahead of the 2007 presidential elections. But his hard line has provoked opposition politically as well as on the streets and could rebound on him if the situation deteriorates. Ironically this would obscure his willingness to contemplate a more radical approach to these issues, including positive discrimination policies and the development of a European Islam more geared to contemporary life in France.
These riots can be seen as part of France's insurrectionary tradition, even though they are in fact far removed from it. They are unlikely to spread in a wider movement connected to the other substantial social discontents there. But they are a shocking reminder to France's leaders and citizens of the large number of impoverished people who remain excluded from its society. France's model of assimilation has worked well for other immigrants, such as Poles, Armenians and Jews. It has on the whole failed to absorb the North African immigrants who went there to work from the 1950s and some of whose children are now pitted against the riot police.
This is a warning that the problem cannot be handled by strong law-and-order policies but requires a much more imaginative approach.