Why Paris Is Burning

By James Graff / Paris

The young men in hooded sweatshirts go by rapper tags--Spion, El Pach, Benou and K-Soc--and like thousands of others from the grimy, soulless apartment blocks that ring France's big cities, they were out cruising the mean streets of Paris' banlieues, or suburbs, last week. Near the city hall of Bobigny, a rough town on the northeastern outskirts of Paris, a circle of fire marked where a trash container had been set alight to provoke a police patrol. "People mix it up with the police every day around here," says Spion, 19, who is of Moroccan origin. But this is different, says his friend Benou, whose parents came from Algeria. "This is May 1968--but in the banlieues."

France won't soon forget that spring, when ferocious student riots brought down a government, and at times last week Paris seemed to be reliving those tumultuous days. Night after night, another set of embittered citizens turned their forgotten wastelands into a battleground. The skies burned red. Crowds of stone throwers clashed with police, while shadowed figures hurled Molotov cocktails at cars and buses. The rioters were mostly Arab or black, but they were also mostly French, born and bred in the neighborhoods they were setting ablaze. Their anger spread in an arc across northern Paris, just a few miles from the city's glittering heart, as one desolate neighborhood after another joined in the mayhem. Thousands of police and firemen struggled to douse the rebellion and found themselves inflaming it. In one suburb, four shots, a rarity in France, were fired at the cops. French leaders tried to strike a balance between condemning the violence and seeking to understand it, but they seemed powerless to impose order on the streets. Above all, the rage expressed by alienated youths dealt a crushing blow to France's self-image as a model of tolerance and social equality. "It's like a forest that's dried out," says Malik Boutih, the Socialist Party national secretary on social issues. "Things heat up, a wind starts blowing, and all it takes is a spark for the whole thing to go up."

Banlieues like Bobigny, Aulnay-sous-Bois and the original flash point of Clichy-sous-Bois make up a tinderbox that few foreigners see and no one in France wants to talk about. The working-class suburbs of Paris are dominated by sterile high-rise public housing, where Arab immigrants from North Africa were shunted when they started arriving in the postcolonial years. Now their children and grandchildren subsist in squalor alongside fresh waves of African and South Asian immigrants and their French-born children. Families struggle to hang on to their dignity, while drug dealers and petty criminals exploit the only business opportunities to be found in those barren towns. Unemployment in some neighborhoods surpasses 40%, and hope is a rare possession. "Look, these are all kids who feel they're not considered really French," says Sidaty Siby, a native of Mali, who heads the Franco-African Association in Clichy-sous-Bois. "When they look for work, they don't find it. When they ask for housing, they don't get it. We want everyone to stop burning cars, but people have to realize that there was a reason for all of this."

The spark for last week's chaos came on Oct. 27, with the deaths of two teenagers from the jumble of apartment blocks that make up Clichy-sous-Bois. Bouna Traore, 15, of Malian origin, and Zyed Benna, 17, whose parents are Tunisian, thought they were being chased by police. When they took refuge with a third teenager in the relay station of a high-voltage transformer, Traore and Benna were electrocuted. Locals blamed overzealous policing for the deaths, although an official inquiry late last week found that there had been no pursuit. That evening an angry group demonstrated in front of a nearby fire station, setting off a rolling wave of nightly clashes between young Arabs and French riot police that leapfrogged across the suburbs of Paris. After nine nights of rage, the uprising had reached as far east as Dijon and south to Marseilles, as rioters torched thousands of cars and set fire to buses, schools and government buildings.

Nearly as stunning as the outburst of violence was the French government's failure to stop it. In an embarrassing admission of its loss of control, the government was forced to suspend some train service from Paris to Charles de Gaulle Airport after two trains were targeted by a mob of youths. As the unrest mounted last week, the political left and the rioters themselves laid blame on the zero-tolerance policies of Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, the ambitious crime fighter who is vying to succeed President Jacques Chirac in 2007.

Sarkozy's law-and-order campaign to crack the crime and drug rings in immigrant neighborhoods has raised hackles. So has his penchant for tough talk: he once said criminal elements should be cleaned out with an "industrial power hose." Just days before the mayhem ignited, he went into a troubled banlieue and slammed rebellious youths as "scum"--which some protesters say stoked their anger. The rioting "is going to go on until they pull Sarkozy out of office," says K-Soc, 19, in Bobigny. "He heats things up and then leaves us here to deal with the police." But backlash against the violence is rising among the residents of the banlieues, who marched in silence through their charred neighborhoods on Saturday in a call for calm. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, considered Sarkozy's main rival for President, met with a group of teens and vowed to unveil a plan by the end of the month for aiding poor neighborhoods.

But that alone won't be enough to defuse the anger. "The French just don't think the political class can attack these problems," says Stephane Rozes, a political analyst and pollster. "They see gestures, not problem solving." For years, disgruntled immigrant youths have been trying to attract government attention--occasionally by mounting violent disturbances like last week's. But France has clung to its belief that once black and Muslim and Arab newcomers arrive, they are officially French and do not need special treatment to guarantee their equality. While in theory the children of immigrants have the same rights as their white counterparts, many suffer persistent discrimination when it comes to jobs, decent housing and upward mobility. They have virtually no political leaders--just one current Cabinet minister is Algerian-born--to carry their interests into the halls of power. Many of France's estimated 5 million Muslims feel the country has promised more than it has delivered. Not surprisingly, despair and anger run deep.

Liberte, egalite, fraternite are ideals that France has nurtured over the centuries. But they were in little evidence last week around Paris. Changing that will require the French to confront the widening disparities between those in the banlieues and the rest of the country. Until then, the rage and resentment inflaming the streets will surely continue to smolder.

With reporting by Bruce Crumley, Grant Rosenberg/Paris