The State-as-Purveyor Encounters Revolt

A friend called me a few nights ago from Paris. Paris? Not quite. My friend is of Indian origin and comes from a rundown cité in a suburb called Choisy-le-Roi, a housing project plopped down in an 18th-century royal park. The park retains a Louis XV elegance and grace. But as you walk by the project's windows, my friend says, on a good day only a trash bag will land on your head; on a bad day, it could be a washing machine.

Last Friday, as his mother was having a bite in a restaurant at the local mall, a gang of 20 or so angry youths from the neighborhood stormed into the restaurant, terrorizing customers, poaching food and drinks and ransacking the place. His mother, who is severely disabled and survives on a modest state pension, was frightened. And my friend was frightened for her, but angry as well.

In Paris last week, I was struck more than ever by the frustration and anger in the air. There is a joke about France being a nation divided in two: those who complain and those who complain about those who complain. But the joke is no longer funny: As Frenchmen, we grow up with the idea that our national unity is built upon diversity, and that our chronic division against ourselves is, on rare occasions, redeemed by brief periods of national unity.

As the first depressing news and images began to pour into our living rooms, however, there was a sad recognition among many French nationals that we did not expect any political leader to give credible political expression to the complex emotions and issues involved -- not Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, not Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy (who angered many when he called the rioters "scum"), not any of their counterparts on the left.

As I was telling my friend how appalled and angered I was by everything I had seen, he started suggesting extreme measures -- like sending in the army or financially penalizing those parents unable to control their teenagers. "They talk about the almost 3,000 cars that have been burnt in the past few days," he said. "But no one talks about the 28,000 cars that have been burnt since the beginning of the year."

In many respects his words echoed those I'd read earlier on a French music blog whose writers alternated between empathy for the rioters and dismay at their destruction: "They criticize Sarkozy for calling them 'scum.' But burning our cars, our buses, our schools, what would you call them? Scum, that's what they are."

Despite my friend's instinctive call for law and order, he could not help also sharing much of the anger in the air in the cité. "I remember," he said, "that when my best friend, Iskander, and I were 18 and we got back home, we were stopped and searched every night, by the same cops, who knew us and knew that we were not part of any gang. Just to put us down, humiliate us, remind us who had the power."

While the French left has been for many years in denial about the real situation in the suburbs, the right has more often than not limited its counterrevolution to blindly encouraging the local police forces. But to persecute is not to repress, and humiliation does not thwart crime. Sarkozy claims the overall crime rate is on the wane, but life in the worst cités of France has clearly grown worse.

The unemployment rate, 10 percent nationally, can rise as high as 50 percent in some areas; violence and fear reign in some schools; verbal abuse is everywhere. In many respects, the situation in the cités evokes prison: The inmates' life sentence is the color of their skin.

Meanwhile, the engine of French politics -- the state as Great Purveyor -- has stuttered and stalled. To acknowledge this, however, would require a political courage that clashes with most politicians' personal ambitions. The outcome of this crisis may very well be that more money will be spent without any serious review of the failings of the welfare state (What is the name for a "welfare state" when welfare is gone?).

Over the years, billions have been poured into a whole array of "social" projects. (A cruel paradox is that the government recently granted Clichy-sous-Bois, where the riots began on Oct. 27, some 330 million euros for renovating its worst housing projects.)

But the central failure of this policy, which goes beyond the dubious boundaries between governments right, left and center, is that it has never managed to provide job opportunities for the children and grandchildren of immigrant workers.

I asked my friend what he thought about the ebullient creativity the government was trying to show. He replied by recalling 2002, when the anti-immigrant politician Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the runoff for the presidency, and last May when voters rejected the European Constitution. "All the politicians were on TV, claiming that they got the message and things would change," he said. "How long did that last?"

And indeed, de Villepin's "Marshall Plan" for the suburbs seems to be a combination of wishful thinking ("We should all change our behavior"), posturing worthy of the era of Charles de Gaulle ("All those in our republic, whatever their age, have duties toward the nation") and good old fashined pork-barrel politics as practiced everywhere.

With the rioters having no articulate political expression beyond anger, and with cities and towns starting to impose curfews, it seems unlikely that the current unrest will develop into a full-fledged rebellion. But the crisis has once more exposed the shortcomings of a society that no longer knows how to enforce its own rules or how to create the dream of a better life for its new generations.

Antoine Audouard is working on a book about French identity. This comment first appeared in The New York Times.