Class & race in the Paris riots

Paris is burning, but race wasn’t the real spark
by Doug Saunders
The Globe and Mail
Saturday, November 12, 2005

In a country famous for having a revolutionary explosion every generation, this one has come as a complete surprise. It is hard not to feel strong admiration for the rioters: Spilling a minimum of blood, they have managed to awaken a myopic French society to the existence of a non-working class that had no name and no identity, that was ignored in the self-obsessions of the left and the right.

Perhaps France will one day be able to realize its revolutionary principles of liberty, equality and brotherhood, under the historic symbol of the burning car.

[A thoughtful and provocative analysis of the Paris riots, and the currents of race and class that led to the creation of an un-working underclass beyond the pale of France's social safety net.--D]

PARIS — To see the future in any European city, you need to travel to the last stop on the subway, then drive a few kilometres farther. If you’re in Paris, it is in these distant outskirts that you will discover the fatal computational error in that impressive formula — capitalist wealth with generous social spending — that makes up the fiercely defended “European social model.”

This was plainly visible as I strolled through the bleak, featureless, concrete emptiness of the Cit