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French Brace for Further Violence

More than a year after mostly Muslim immigrant youth (or the children of immigrants) spent weeks torching vehicles throughout France, the violence has return amidst memorials for the last year?s troubles. In the run-up to this week?s torching of buses, police responding to call in suburbs of Paris have been attacked by mobs of people. Some have called the incidents a precursor to a low-level civil war pitting ?ethnics? against ?true French? in the country which prides itself on its supposed ?Liberty, Equality and Fraternity?.

France is no stranger to outbreaks of politically-motivated violence, every July, the French mark Bastille Day, the day in 1789 when mobs broke into the largely empty Bastille prison in Paris at the beginning of the French Revolution. Throughout the country?s history afterward, France gravitated between democracy and restored monarchies before, finally, in the twentieth century falling under German occupation in the Second World War. Following the Allied victory in 1945, in 1968 massive student protests broke out and many, as in our own time, worried about the possibility of another revolution.

The violence nowadays is being carried out mostly by radicalized Muslim youth, whose parents hail from former French colonies in the Arab world, such as Algeria. While France claims to be a state blind to differences of skin color, many Arabs and Muslims report that it is difficult to get jobs with obviously Arab or Muslim names. Last year?s violence prompted Nicholas Sarkozy, a front-runner in next year?s presidential race, to denounce as ?thugs? those setting cars aflame.