Revolting in France

...He imports memory sticks from China and sells them on eBay...

...Bewitched, accursed, frozen in time, France sleepwalks while trouble brews...

...That explains why the Islamist umma looks attractive to some...

...Rachid prays five times a day and fasts during Ramadan, but he parties year round...

...Revolting in France The labor-law protests pitted the privileged young against disaffected immigrants By ROBERT S. LEIKEN God gave Noah the rainbow sign No more water, the fire next time...

...They told us that if we prayed, Allah would find us work...

...Then in Clichy-sous-Bois, north of Paris, two boys fled from a rumored police identity check and got electrocuted hiding near a power station...

...The unions, the students, the professors, and the sects rallied for a system of privileges...

...Nonetheless, the polls are suggesting that next year's election will bring the ghosts to power...

...Instead, France's conservative leaders must sit, fingers-crossed, hoping vainly that the volatile second and third-generation immigrant suburbs—now deprived of even the slim promise of a shot at stable employment held out by the cashiered labor reform—will not burn again...

...The young men I meet in the banlieues (or in similar neighborhoods of Amsterdam, or in Molenbeek in Brussels, or in East London or Bradford) feel like strangers in the land of their birth, but also in the land of their forebears...

...But uninvited to the protest party, unmen-tioned on any of the banners and posters and pins and leaflets, were the angry young men of the banlieues, the bleak suburbs of French cities where less than six months earlier 9,000 cars were torched, 500 public buildings attacked, and nearly 5,000 residents arrested in three weeks of rioting sometimes called "the French intifada...

...Soon not just cars and buses but schools, warehouses, factories, and police stations were ablaze as each quartier sought face time in a bizarre competition for recognition, and then the thymotic rivalry spread to other French cities...

...The head of the Paris branch of the French domestic intelligence agency, the Renseignements Généraux, told me that, of the 3,000 rioters arrested in and near Paris last fall, there was "not one known as belonging to an Islamist crowd and we monitor them closely...

...The DST told me that just as the cars started burning, agents were poised to arrest two jihadists preparing to leave for Iraq...

...They heard them bemoaning the riots: "Now the cops, may Allah curse them, are everywhere...

...Yet a recent survey of French university students found that a government job is exactly what 70 percent of them aspire to...

...Word spread of murder by cops...

...Thirty cars were burned and scores of police were stoned...

...The lifetime job is on its way to extinction...

...Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has blown his scripted Reagan/Thatcher moment from which he was to have emerged strengthened by a duel with the unions...

...And some of last fall's car burners knew it...

...Crédit Lyonnais and Société Générale refused to open him an account...

...At length President Jacques Chirac, who withstood U.S...

...The people are wild...

...Walled off by cavernous superhighways, the quartiers in a supreme irony have turned into homelands, the source of a sort of stunted nationalism aroused once in places like Belfast...

...The Saudis have taken a leaf from the Marxists: "All our books are Salafist," says one young resident...

...The boss hires you only if you have an in...

...In the months preceding the riots, 28,000 cars had been torched around the country...

...The marchers thus have secured for their country economic stagnation and political paralysis...

...To secure it, student leaders reached out to the unions, whose main strength (virtually their only strength) is among public sector workers, no trifling constituency in a country where railways are run by the state...

...In Paris, as in Brussels or Rotterdam, young people of immigrant background can't get past the night club door...

...pressure on Iraq, surrendered to marching unions, students, and radical sects, and withdrew the modest labor-law reform his government had backed in an effort to create jobs...

...Air Jordans Rachid purchased in Chicago and resold in the banlieues and odds jobs in Quebec fetched some start-up money...

...Together with government monitoring and stiff hate crime punishments, that French apartheid helps explain why its Muslim slums are less Islamist than the British...

...France still "shows the way to Europe...

...Willy-nilly France will stumble one day into a world in which recognition is secured by adaptation, steady work by lifetime learning...

...Scorned in Paris, they are viewed as tourists when they visit family in Algiers...

...The banlieues were already seething because Sarkozy, accosted by the street kids, had called them racaille, or "scum...

...The intelligence services and the police say the Salafists have gone underground for fear of the new rapid-deportation policy adopted to counter hate speech...

...In America no one cares where you came from as long as you can bring in the bucks...

...This class war is being fought on the terrain of the "insider-outsider" labor market...

...But in France you have to know the right people, come from the right neighborhood with the right last name...

...But at three marches, I saw no sign of any other Islamic group...

...Lenin, who coined the term "worker aristocracy," came closer, for today's class struggle sets privileged workers against French citizens of immigrant background...

...The modernist housing experiments of the sixties have produced apartheid du Corbusier...

...But that's only because they're free...

...The casseurs—literally "breakers"—assembled along the march they planned to attack, just as they had at another demonstration a week before, ripping off a cell phone here, breaking a store window there, and sending chills through the bourgeois neighborhoods...

...He told me the Salafists have worn out their welcome in the banlieues...

...The marchers saw the February law (establishing a new "First Employment Contract" or CPE) as a threat to the lifetime job that most of them devoutly wish to inherit from their parents...

...The more peaceful of them belong to the official French Muslim Council...

...that's all we're asking for," I was told in Asnières, Saint-Denis, Garges, Stains, Pier-refitte, and Aubervilliers, quartiers where cars burn and youth unemployment reaches 50 percent...

...The marchers paused and unfurled their umbrellas, chanting solidarity with the sans papiers, France's undocumented workers...

...A Socialist government will then have to cope with the economy its supporters have stymied, further stultifying a labor market that deters investment and invites stagnation...

...Rachid is a Muslim as well as an Arab, and Islam was the other notable player unrepresented at the recent demonstrations...

...But now that promise has become a snare, a delusion, and a relic...

...But that night in Clichy, there were TV cameras nearby, coinciden-tally covering another event...

...A massive identity crisis, prompting an assertion of neighborhood pride, not Islam, torched those cars...

...Radical Islamists took no part in the violence," stated Pascal Mailhos, director general of the central office of the Renseignements Généraux...

...Well before the riots, such burning traps had become a tried and true bait and switch...

...Causes and ideas that were young in 19th-century Europe had escaped from their nursing homes in Pyongyang, Havana, and Minsk...

...It's the cash nexus...

...I spent the next day in the banlieues with Rachid Ech Chetouani, whose father came from Morocco in 1967...

...Officials from two French intelligence services told me that at any moment an incident could spark more riots...

...The chief operating officer of France's other major internal intelligence service, the DST (Directoire de Securité Territorial) added that the local Muslim Brothers and other Islamist groups tried unsuccessfully to quell the riots...

...The marchers in their millions around the country would soon be celebratRobert S. Leiken is the director of the Immigration and National Security Program at the Nixon Center and author of Bearers of Global Jihad: Immigration and National Security After 9/11...

...In a packed Paris Metro train, I watched a team of them in hooded sweatshirts and baggy pants follow a strapping African teenager who might have a future as a NFL offensive lineman...

...Modern Luddites, burning cars instead of breaking machines, sans culottes storming a 21st-century Bastille, the rebels from the slums were aligned not, as the Frankfurt philosopher imagines, with the ghostly marchers, but against them...

...At 27, Rachid has given up his career as a rapper and labors long weeks trying to start a small business...

...As one told me, "When I go back to visit my grandparents, I want to come home after a few weeks...

...Postponing the collar till the banlieues quieted, they maintained surveillance on the jihadists...

...What such marchers used to call "objective forces"—in China and India, Vietnam and Eastern Europe—are shaping economic reality far beyond their own poor power to add or detract...

...Unlike the marchers, Rachid admires the New World: "In America, the boss looks to make a buck, and he expects you to work hard...

...ing victory, but when viewed from the standpoint of economics and history, they had joined a funeral procession...

...Everyone was talking about Clichy-sous-Bois...

...Epigraph to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963) Gallic reason has succumbed to French revolutionary reaction...

...It conducted a survey and found that applicants with French surnames secured interviews five times more often than those with Arab names...

...Nor did the Muslim groups join in last fall's riots— still less, orchestrate them, as many at first assumed...

...With their signs excoriating the "precari-ousness" of "savage capitalism," they were marching against history and economics and the hopes of the banlieues...

...Followers of Mao Zedong and Lyndon LaRouche strolled with aging militants of the French Communist party...

...Young men from the banlieues rather fancied the new law mandating a two-year trial period during which an employer would be entitled to fire a young worker...

...More strongly felt is the tie to quartier or banlieue...

...But the class struggle has taken a form that Marx and Engels never imagined...

...It made for riveting television, and it was watched eagerly in the banlieues...

...Later, I would learn from the news that attacks had indeed occurred at the Place de la République...

...But French employers now rarely hire, precisely because they cannot fire: They cannot adjust the size of their work force to the demand for their product...

...In the far-off future, if and when labor conditions themselves become globalized and standardized, there may be new promise of a shorter work week...

...So, sad to say, there is no future for France's lifetime job, with its 35-hour week, six-week vacation, and medical package that the World Health Organization rates best on earth...

...Here we can't get work because everything is based on affinities...

...It pits the insider labor aristocrat and his offspring against the progeny of the colonies, mostly the children and grandchildren of laborers recruited from North Africa half a century ago...

...The local street kids set cars burning to attract police and fire fighters, whom they then pelted with stones...

...But you could easily find Wahhabi books in the banlieues, and for the same reason that a generation ago Mao's Little Red Book and the Collected Works of Kim Il Sung stressed bookshelves in shantytowns from Monterrey to Manila...

...That statement and the scene at the Paris demonstration in March perfectly represent the musty dream castle of the unreconstructed European left...

...to "Capital" and "Democracy...

...It gives us a chance to prove ourselves...

...They came here about five years ago...

...Animating the French rioters last fall was not Islamism or jihad but what the French call nationalisme de quartier, a kind of neighborhood pride...

...France is the country where, more than anywhere else, the historical class struggles were each time fought out to a finish, and where, consequently, the changing political forms within which they move and in which their results are summarized have been stamped in the sharpest outlines...

...The marchers gave no evidence in their myriad posters and flags or in the uniform color of their faces that Muslims make up 10 percent of France's population, or that France sports a gamut of Muslim organizations...

...Not the expected trouble—not the sibilant Salafists, not the jihadists cowering under the watchful, capable eye of French intelligence—but the fire next time...

...They'd preach for two hours nonstop telling us to pray, to be pious, not to drink, not to hang out...

...Outcasts abroad, down and out at home, these adolescents and their younger brothers and sisters can lay claim to no defining national identity...

...But that's fine with me...

...The Montaigne Institute confirms Rachid's point...

...After traveling to Shanghai to establish contacts with suppliers, Rachid went to French banks for funds...

...Lycée students in Ché Guevara T-shirts ambled alongside grey-bearded Sorbonne professors chanting slogans from the Spanish Civil War...

...It's hot...

...It was an absence Professor Axel Honneth—the new guru of the Frankfurt school, inheriting the mantle of Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas—seemed unaware of...

...I stood in the Paris rain and watched the ghosts march...

...Unwilling to compete with young compatriots of immigrant background, the French insider cannot escape competition from China, India, Vietnam, and Eastern Europe, where workers labor twice as long for a fraction of the wages...

...In most French cities the slums are a world apart...

...In a celebratory interview in Le Monde, Honneth intoned: "The revolt of the banlieues has played a decisive role in the current protest movement against the [labor reform] in the sense that it permitted the students to realize that they too could change things...

...Exiting at Gare de Lyon, where a similar squad was waiting, together they broke into the open field, disappearing toward the procession wending its way to the Place de la République...

...Their absence from both the riots and the recent demonstrations ought to calm the nerves of those who fear an Islamist takeover in France...

...Only the Paris branch of Crédit du Maroc, where his father knew the manager, would...

...We said: We can top that," one young resident told me...

...there's no air conditioning...

...So some crashed the party, turning up at the protests in March like the uninvited thirteenth fairy...

...So wrote Friedrich Engels introducing Marx's first account of 19th-century class war...

...Adorned with hammer and sickle, red flags stood out against black anarchist banners vowing "Death...

...Class struggle (la lutte des classes) got major poster board...

...And their means of coordination was not some secret organization, as Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy suggested, but television...

...In reality, the rioters from the banlieues—most of them born in France, though of African descent—loathe the marchers who gathered to protest a mild labor reform designed to offer the slum-dwellers a shot at decent jobs...

...The dreams of the marchers notwithstanding, France, for all its beauty and savoir vivre, is not exempt from the laws of economics...

...Soon cars were burning in Seine-Saint-Denis: "They're burning cars in Aulnay-sous-Bois...

...Nobody reads them...

...For similar reasons the jihadists among the Islamists stayed quiet during the riots last fall...

...The walking museum exhibited every brand of revolutionary familiar in another life: Trotskyites distributed leaflets announcing "world revolution...

...Blimps hoisted by labor unions dawdled above plump public employees...

...France, as the good professor reminded Le Monde, is still where revolution really happens, as opposed to Germany, where it only gets thought about...

...Let's go for a bus...