Schroedinger said:
A` Paris, goddamn it!
To swing wildly back on topic, it seems that this is just the latest in periodic tensions between the police and those who live in the Suburbs. Also, to get more into the 'why', in the French papers everyone's writing that it's been, fundamentally, a gross mismanagement by the government of immigration and settling people, in this case, of Algerians and other Maghreb/North-African people, as it's that social group who this is all affecting.
ihavenothing mentions the standards of living and employment being crap - it's just that. The people living in the suburbs are the marginalised (which, it seems, is pretty much the truth) from the rest of French society...
All this, combined with general (youth) delinquancy a` la Macquarie Fields etc, has just finally erupted into these riots.
Bit of discussion from French forum, and a bit of a dark background to the riots is this:
[quote="Papy Mouseaux", translation]Unemployment affects about 10% of the active population [in France] and it keeps getting worse. How, in these conditions, can we give everyone work, particularly those without professional qualifications? [Education, even vocational, or lack thereof also being a big problem of the suburbs]
France is growing poorer each day that passes, and obviously the most humble sections of of the population [that is, those in the Suburbs] are the most affected, that is, immigrants and their children
This in turn generates enormous tensions, causes everyone to get fed up with it all, and then creates conditions of a social explosion.
http://community.boredofstudies.org/showpost.php?p=2011427&postcount=973[/quote]