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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.