Free Republic

ST.-FLORENTIN, France — From most angles, this village looks like the quaint medieval parish that tourists expect to find deep in the French countryside: half-timbered houses crowd around a stone church that overlooks rolling fields and ancient Burgundian forests. But tucked between the old buildings and the bucolic landscape, there lies another world filled with spoken Arabic, steaming couscous and the simmering frustration of idle young men born to Muslim immigrants in a deeply conservative Christian land. "Racists surround us," said Brahim Bouanani, a 26-year-old St.-Florentin native, when asked what lies down the tree-lined, two-lane highways that stretch out of...