How can there be any "disaffected French youth" when you have been telling us on these threads for months now that France was doing a great job of integrating Muslim immigrants into French society? And you dismissed any one who suggested that riots were coming in the near future.
Back in the 1990s, the French sneered at America for the Los Angeles riots. As the Chicago Sun-Times reported in 1992: "the consensus of French pundits is that something on the scale of the Los Angeles riots could not happen here, mainly because France is a more humane, less racist place with a much stronger commitment to social welfare programs." President Mitterrand, the Washington Post reported in 1992, blamed the riots on the "conservative society" that Presidents Reagan and Bush had created and said France is different because it "is the country where the level of social protection is the highest in the world."
"And you dismissed any one who suggested that riots were coming in the near future."
I don't remember doing that as such, but if I did, clearly I was wrong.
I may also be wrong about the outcome of these riots, and about the resolve of the government.
With a man dying and the police shot, things do not look as likely to end well today as they did yesterday.
I am particularly concerned about the prospect of Islamist radicals using heavy weapons which the police are beginning to speak about in order to radicalize the riots and provoke a harsh crackdown.
I have also noted in the past that Villepin has shown a surprising ability to learn. It could be that we are all deluded, and that this Islamist revolt that everyone on Free Republic has been screaming about for a week is actually what is happening.
If that is so, and violence accelerates, then Villepin may continue to evolve in his thinking and may order in the army. He has always dreamt he was Napoleon. If by ruthlessly suppressing disorderly Arabs by force he gains great popularity and stature, it will embolden him.