Once again, the shifts deep within French society have set off violence in the streets. After two youths riding a motorbike died in a crash with a police cruiser last Sunday in a suburb north of Paris, young men from the housing projects there set fire to a library, a nursery school, and parked vehicles. When the police arrived, they were greeted with rocks and pellets.

President Nicolas Sarkozy was pandering to popular passions when, speaking to 1,800 police officers and gendarmes rejected any attempt “to find in each delinquent a victim of society, in each rioter a social problem.” This may have been what his uniformed audience wanted to hear. It may also have been what the public expected from a politician who made notoriously disdainful remarks about rioters in the past, when he was a Minister of the Interior with a reputation as a law-and-order hardliner. But Sarkozy’s

own policy proposals betray an understanding that France has allowed grave social problems to fester for too long.

Unlike Britain, France today does not face a serious threat from radicalised Muslim youth. But if it does not soon open doors to the marginalised people of the neglected minority neighborhoods, the aimless riots of the past two years may become a foreshadowing of something much more destructive.