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."