PHOTOGRAPH FOR TIME BY ALEXANDRA BOULAT / VII THE MEDIATOR Traore goes looking for trouble in Clichy-sous-Bois [EM] but when he finds it, he tries to calm things down

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Posted Sunday, November 13, 2005; 9.20GMT
The problem is not limited to big cities like Paris. Riots even reached places like Blois, a gorgeous medieval town in the Loire valley associated more with castles and cathedrals than with conflicts. But Blois has troubled banlieues of its own, and in two days of violence last week around 20 cars were torched and bands of youths fought running battles with riot cops. The mayor, Nicolas Perruchot, thinks the violence was inspired by television images of unrest elsewhere, but admits "the underlying ills are there" even in bucolic Blois. Youness Ouzaanik, 21, a smart, funny young man who lives in Blois' projects, couldn't agree more. "The banlieues are as much a part of Blois as the castle," he says. "I'd like to see our neighborhood included in the tourist brochures."

Perruchot won office in 2001 on promises to restore order and renovate the banlieues, which he's tried to do by more than doubling the number of municipal police, and by exploiting tax-exemption schemes to encourage businesses to relocate to designated banlieues. But reversing decades of decay doesn't happen fast. "There's nothing left in our area," laments Mourad Salah-Brahim, 21. "Virtually every business has moved out."
Back in their gilded Paris offices, the French government didn't seem to get it. Apart from a brief, uninspiring call for calm on Nov. 6 and a few comments at a press conference last Thursday, President Jacques Chirac remained largely invisible throughout the crisis. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin announced that the government would spend more on public housing, intensify its efforts to find jobs for unemployed youth, and allow local authorities to declare curfews (about 100 communities did, including Lyons). For many, though, the measures were reminiscent of the well-meaning but ineffectual initiatives announced by past governments.

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy became a cause of the crisis for some, and its solution for others. Sarkozy acknowledged that deprivation and discrimination were behind the riots, but refused to apologize for his tough talk. "It's not just unemployment, injustice and racism," he said on television. "It's fear generated by gangs that live from drugs and stolen cars." That hard line has earned Sarkozy the scorn of some youths. "I will slit his throat or shoot him," says Osman, 14, to approval from his middle-school classmates in Clichy-sous-Bois.

Sarkozy has tapped into a craving for law and order in France, where most people recoiled from the rioters' defiance. He said he would deport any foreigners convicted in connection with the violence. But he showed a softer side, too, favoring "positive-discrimination" programs, and even advocated giving foreigners the right to vote in local elections. A poll commissioned by Le Journal du Dimanche last week showed that 53% of those questioned said they had confidence in Sarkozy to solve the problems of the banlieues, with 52% for De Villepin and 29% for Chirac. "Sarkozy's language is understood perfectly well," says Nadine Morano, a member of the governing Union for a Popular Movement who grew up in the tough Cèdre Bleu housing project in Nancy. "He's the only real alternative for changing the country."

Maybe so. But before he can change the country, he'll have to change the banlieues. Over the weekend, police intercepted a flurry of e-mails, blogs and text messages calling on rioters to leave their gutted ghettos and do some damage to the Champs Elysées, the Arc de Triomphe and the Bastille. Some 3,000 extra police were deployed throughout Paris. Sarkozy makes no secret of his ambition to succeed Chirac as President, and often refers to a "rupture" with the past to describe how he would govern. But in Clichy-sous-Bois and hundreds of places like it across France, rupture has already occurred. If the rifts that have been exposed over the past two weeks are not healed, violence could flare again.

With reporting by Bruce Crumley/Blois, Julia Mason, Sayem Mehmood, Grant Rosenberg and Vivienne Walt/Paris

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