As the riots in France spread around the country from the low-income North and West African immigrant suburbs of Paris, it's useful to consider Theodore Dalrymple's 2002 essay in City Journal, titled "The Barbarians At The Gates Of Paris." A physician, prison psychiatrist, noted author and journalist, Dalrymple describes how the parents and even grandparents of today's disaffected Muslim youth around Paris and other French cities were originally drawn by jobs in the booming economy of the 50s and 60s. Huge, brutally-designed, subsidized housing projects were built to house the immigrants, and keep them apart from polite society. Their population swelled, but during an economic downshift in the 80s, their geographic isolation augmented a burgeoning sense of "otherness" and resentment which is at the root of today's troubles. Here's Dalrymple, from '02:

Where does the increase in crime come from? The geographical answer: from the public housing projects that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size, Paris especially. In these housing projects lives an immigrant population numbering several million, from North and West Africa mostly, along with their French-born descendants.....The cités are....social marginalization made concrete: bureaucratically planned from their windows to their roofs, with no history of their own or organic connection to anything that previously existed on their sites...A kind of anti-society has grown up in them—a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, “official,” society in France.....

Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete with graffiti—BAISE LA POLICE, fuck the police, being the favorite theme.....There are burned-out and eviscerated carcasses of cars everywhere. Fire is now fashionable in the cités: in Les Tarterets, residents had torched and looted every store—with the exceptions of one government-subsidized supermarket and a pharmacy. The underground parking lot, charred and blackened by smoke like a vault in an urban hell, is permanently closed.

...Though most people in France have never visited a cité, they dimly know that long-term unemployment among the young is so rife there that it is the normal state of being. Indeed, French youth unemployment is among the highest in Europe—and higher the further you descend the social scale, largely because high minimum wages, payroll taxes, and labor protection laws make employers loath to hire those whom they cannot easily fire, and whom they must pay beyond what their skills are worth.......Having been enclosed in a physical ghetto, they respond by building a cultural and psychological ghetto for themselves. They are of France, but not French.

John Thornhill of the Financial Times writes from Paris today:

The escalating disorder challenges the credibility of France's model of immigration and integration and its entire political class.

For the political class of France to now regain credibility, they will have to take far-reaching steps. As Stephen Schwartz writes today in a Tech Central Station essay titled "Red Belt Riots," France does have a history of real antipathy and racism not just toward Africans, but Jews, as well. Yet he notes the prevailing welfare state ethos of leftist municipal governments in Paris' African immigrant suburbs over the years has helped fuel the rise of an angry underclass.

As near as I can tell, wage, labor, welfare and educational reforms, plus, probably, the destruction of the housing projects, are necessary. A tall order for sure, but what's happening now didn't just ignite overnight.

In my part of Seattle, I see Muslim immigrant families almost daily, many from Somalia and Eritrea, the mothers and daughters always in their hijabs. This much I can tell: they are making it in America: the men are well-dressed, the families arriving at the supermarket in their own minivans. They come here - in most instances - for religious freedom, economic opportunity, and education. Some have landed in our city's public housing facilities to start with, but it does not define who they are or what they can become in America.

I sense that - while our government needs to do a far better job of rooting out the small minority of Muslim immigrants who are here to eventually attempt acts of terror - we are also doing something very right in the United States, when it comes to the possibilities for advancement available to people of all colors and creeds. France, it seems, has quite a bit of work ahead.

TECHNORATI TAGS: FRANCE, RIOTS, ASSIMILATION

TO COMMENT: The regular "comment" feature is not in operation. E-mail comments to address under "Contact" on main page masthead, and I'll add them, here.

Tom Rekdal: Here we go again. Neither the French nor the analysts seem to have learned anything from the urban riots in America between 1965 and 1970. Dominique de Villepin seems destined to replay the role of the Kerner Commission, calling for more governmental assistance to uplift the down-trodden populations that generated the riots, while the political Right blames the turbulence on alien faiths fueling an "intifada," just as the American Right blamed the our urban upheavals in this country on left-wing ideologies and "outside" agitators. The former, of course, only invites more of the same, while the latter threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It is important to distinguish between the sources of discontent and the dynamics of rebellion. Dalrymple is quite right about the conditions that produced the festering anger of the Muslim ghettoes of France, but discontent does not, by itself explain how and when a social explosion will occur. For that, I believe the best explanation is still the chapter entitled "Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit," in Edward Banfield's book, "The Unheavenly City," which locates the dynamic force of the riots in the motives of apolitical, asocial juvenile males who simply enjoy the exicitment of the conflict.

This is not to minimize the gravity of the social problem France faces, but if the government believes it can quell an insurrection of juvenile delinquents by promising to relieve their grievances, it is destined to repeat our mistakes.

The only long-term solution to the problem of integration is the "savage liberalism" France identifies with American labor and welfare policies, which French voters are unlikely to support within the foreseeable future.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at November 7, 2005 05:05 PM