Oxblog’s Patrick Belton has this entry from Paris which needs to be read in full. Here’s a small part:
Paris is burning. It has done so before. Those of 1848 were the street riots of modernism, heralding enlightenment and republicanism versus the restoration of the ancien regime. The soixante-huitards’s were those of postmodernity, seeking to resituate the individual and power at the centre of a discourse which modernity and liberalism’s had to their view hidden. One is tempted to see in 2005 the riots of the atavistic, but that would be overdrawing the issue – they are the riots of Newark, Watts, and Brixton come to Paris. Those residents of the banlieues who are religious, even Islamist, are not the ones who are throwing stones or assaulting the Marais’s Jews (whatever international activity some of their number may get up to to the side). Contra one recent meme of commentary, the problem of the banleieus in a sense is not that its inhabitants are Muslim, but that they are not.
Read it in its entirety.
NOTE: Our co-blogger Jack Grant who lives in France will likely have more to say in the future as well — so stay tuned.
UPDATE: France is now under a formal State of Emergency, which allows the state to clamp down quicker and harder:
President Jacques Chirac declared a state of emergency Tuesday, paving the way for curfews to be imposed on riot-hit cities and towns in an extraordinary measure to halt France’s worst civil unrest in decades after 12 nights of violence….
The state-of-emergency decree _ invoked under a 50-year-old law _ allows curfews where needed and will become effective at midnight Tuesday, with an initial 12-day limit. Police _ massively reinforced as the violence has fanned out from its initial flash point in the northeastern suburbs of Paris _ were expected to enforce the curfews. The army has not been called in.
Nationwide, vandals burned 1,173 cars, compared to 1,408 vehicles Sunday-Monday, police said. A total of 330 people were arrested, down from 395 the night before
Local officials “will be able to impose curfews on the areas where this decision applies,” Chirac said at a Cabinet meeting. “It is necessary to accelerate the return to calm.”
The recourse to a 1955 state-of-emergency law that dates back to France’s war in Algeria was a measure both of the gravity of mayhem that has spread to hundreds of French towns and cities and of the determination of Chirac’s sorely tested government to quash it.
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said curfew violators could be sentenced to up to two months imprisonment, adding that restoring order “will take time.”
The prevailing question becomes: is what’s going on something that will be limited to France or is there a larger issue at play…and does this portend problems in other European countries in the coming years?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.