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The ire of young immigrants who set fires in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities has smoldered for 30 years, but it now blazes in any living room with a TV set. The stories about why France is on fire are many, and they all tell how hard it is to reach the ideal of liberté, egalité, and fraternité.

One of these stories will sound familiar to people of all Western nations: An urbane society needs a cheap labor force for menial jobs. Somebody needs to force-feed geese to make fois gras.

Others tell the story of a well-meaning government with a generous welfare system that backfired. "The right wing in charge with Chirac has done a dreadful job," says Philippe Malidor, a French journalist of religion and society. "They demolished a few good things done by the Left, especially the so-called proximity police [which provided a way for local police to engage the youth in volatile areas]. They privileged repression over social action with the youth." France's 10 percent unemployment disproportionately affects immigrant guest workers and their naturalized children, who, depending on the suburb, face up to 60 percent unemployment.

Another story tells of France's changing numbers: as birthrates among the indigenous French decline (a trend that's echoed in all industrialized nations), the birth rates among poor immigrants are rising. More numbers: Educated, middle-class women get up to €1,000 a month—almost the minimum wage—to stop working for a year and have a third child.

And there's another story—or myth, if you will—about France's society. In France, say the French, there are no "minority" citizens. There are only the French. The society refuses to ask its citizens about their ethnicity in census forms. But everyone knows where the brown-faced African immigrants live: in concrete high rise towers, the architectural eyesores, many with 100 flats and up to 3,000 families.

Another story is about exasperated young people desperate to get a hearing to talk about some of these stories. And about choosing wrong means to do so.

The religion angle
Where the stories all tie together is what the French detest to talk about in polite company or in government meetings: religion. It so happens that the young and the restless are followers of Islam, up to five million of France's 60 million population.

But the French arsonists are a religious story only by default. The Qur'an doesn't ordain setting property, or its owners, on fire. Sébastien Fath, who researches evangelicalism at the National Center for Scientific Research at the Sorbonne, is adamant that "radical Islam communities have done their best to stop the violence. Far from nurturing the riots, these Muslims are trying to calm down the youth. … Most of the few ones who shouted Allahu Akbar [God is Great] during the riots are not devout Muslims."

Even if the arsonists aren't devout practitioners of Islam, the raging violence is still a story about religion. The rioters are believers who are children of believers. The religion of their parents is incompatible with laïcité, the French society's well-oiled order according to which church and state stay out of each other's way. Such a system is compatible with, and even protective of, Christianity, because the teachings of Christ can work well within a democracy. But Islam just isn't this adaptable.

One example: Last year, presidents of French universities released a declaration to bar religious activity at universities. "One reason for that—and it's awfully controversial to say so—is that Islamic activists have been active in the university," says David Brown, the head of University Bible Groups (the French equivalent of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship). "They demanded that they should be able to lay out their prayer mats during examinations, for example. Or they refused to take an oral exam with a female professor."

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November (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49