The Fire This Time; Years of racism and neglect explode in a week of riots across France's mostly Muslim immigrant ghettos.

Byline: Christopher Dickey (With Tracy McNicoll in Clichy-sous-Bois and Eric Pape in Sevran)

Word of the deaths spread quickly through Clichy-sous-Bois, a grim collection of housing projects an hour by train and bus from the center of Paris. Two teenage boys had been electrocuted while trying to hide near a transformer. Rumor said they were running from police. Soon, dozens of angry young men came from the soulless high-rises looking for cops to fight and cars to burn on streets named, as it happens, for heroes of French culture: Boulevard Emile Zola, Allee Albert Camus, Rue Picasso. Dead white men. "It's Baghdad here," the rioters shouted. By the end of that first night, Oct. 27, police would count 15 cars torched and six arrests. No firefighters or cops were injured and authorities claimed the situation was stabilized. But they were very wrong.

Night after night last week rage spread through the ghettos that ring Paris, then beyond--to the slums of Dijon in Burgundy, Rouen in Normandy, Toulouse, Rennes, Marseilles. When, on the fourth night, a tear-gas canister exploded near the entrance to a warehouselike mosque in Clichy-sous-Bois, forcing hundreds of worshipers to flee barefoot and gagging into Place Anatole France, a new cry went up from the vandals. "Now this is war," said one. Others cried "jihad."

It was neither, in fact, and the Paris known to tourists was not burning. It was far from the city center that cars and dumpsters were incinerated, buses attacked with Molotov cocktails and hundreds of arrests made. Police said gangs were increasingly organized, using the Internet and cell-phone text messages to coordinate. Dozens of people were injured and shots were fired at police; on Friday night alone nearly 900 cars were torched nationwide. But at the weekend, no one had been killed. The Los Angeles riots of 1992, by contrast, claimed the lives of more than 50 people.

What has shaken the French government, and badly, is its continued inability to contain the metastasizing anger spreading through the country's many predominantly Muslim ghettos. Like a Middle Eastern intifada, the violence is stripping away whatever comfortable assumptions existed about the authorities' ability to cope. Decades of French policies intended to force the integration of immigrants and their children into French society are seen to have failed, and in the age of terror, the fear is that rage like this will swell the ranks of radical Islamists in the heart of Europe. For years, itinerant preachers have moved through these same communities recruiting for holy wars in Bosnia, Chechnya and now Iraq, where a few young French Muslims have gone to die as suicide bombers. Madrid and London have shown what happens when that sort of fury is turned inward.

For now, the most dramatic casualty may be French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. He's been angling for the presidency in 2007, posturing as France's most confident can-do politician. But even before the riots started, suspicions had grown that "Super Sarko" couldn't actually get much done. During the first weekend of violence, he denounced the gangs burning cars as "scum" and vowed he'd impose order. He didn't, and far from containing the fury, he inflamed it. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who is Sarkozy's main rival, publicly reined him in. The government should be careful not to "stigmatize" whole neighborhoods, he said. Prodded by President Jacques Chirac, the two of them eventually, awkwardly, tried to show a united front behind the slogan "firmness and justice." That didn't work either.

The greatest challenge in the days to come is to keep the violent fringe from winning even wider sympathy. There are more than 12 million people of Muslim origin in Western Europe, roughly half of them in France. Many have adapted easily and well to European life, while Europe has also been forced, however reluctantly, to adapt to them. They've enriched the business, professional and artistic scenes in Britain. They have changed, quite literally, the complexion of Dutch schools. (Within another generation, some projections show, most babies born in the Netherlands will be ...