Paris is Burning.(youth crime in France)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)

The curfew begins each night at 11, but the streets of Colombes are unquiet. Police cars prowl through the sulfurous halos of the street lights and black shadows cast by soulless concrete housing projects. Here and there, the screens of mobile phones flash as hoodlums track the cops, watching where they aren't. "This part of the city has been lost," says Deputy Mayor Olivier Camps-Voqeur, as he wheels his Renault back toward the "safe" part of town and drops a visitor at the commuter train that will take him to Paris, only 10 miles away.

The world of France's banlieues and cites--the grim ghettos on the fringes of the country's major towns--has never been more menacing to the society that for so long has ignored them. Outside Marseilles and Paris, gang wars rage and riot police are drawn into running battles. In Strasbourg, angry youths used to burn one or two cars a week. Now it's several a night. Beleaguered bus drivers are regularly assaulted. In the southeastern town of La Seyne last week, one was hospitalized after a young passenger smashed a bottle of beer over her head. Two weeks ago in the Parisian suburb of Evry, a bus full of Red Cross volunteers returning from a vacation in the Alps was attacked by teenagers wielding knives and metal bars. During the July 14 Bastille Day celebrations, 130 cars were torched in the city of Aulnay. When firefighters arrived on the scene, their truck was rammed by a bulldozer commandeered by a group of thugs, who then destroyed the fire hoses.

Such violent blowouts have spread the sense among many French that youth-related crime is out of control, and a country known for its genteel, civilized culture is falling prey to homegrown Bloods and Crips. Politicians gearing up for presidential elections next year have been quick to seize on the issue, heightening the sense of insecurity. But neither President Jacques Chirac, a conservative Gaullist, nor his main opponent, Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, has ready solutions.

What's clear from government statistics is that crime has risen by nearly 10 percent across France since January. Fearing a long, troubled summer, more than 20 cities imposed nighttime curfews for their youngest citizens. As 70 million tourists swarm into France for vacation season, visitors are being warned to stay away from "problem areas." Security details have been deployed on the glittering beaches of Cannes and Nice, where incidents of armed robbery have doubled this year.

Desperate not to appear lax, some French authorities, including Chirac, are pushing to adopt a policy of "zero tolerance" toward youthful offenders--as Mayor Rudolph Giuliani did in New York. For Europeans used to hearing about mayhem in America, both the crimes and the proposed solution seem like twisted U.S. imports. But some fear these social tremors are a sign of greater eruptions to come, as alienated and disenfranchised young people lash out at French society, at symbols of authority and at each other.

Trapped in monolithic low-rent wastelands, many of these kids are the children of immigrants, never quite welcomed into European society. Others come from old industrial working classes, displaced in the new Europe. A strong sense of ...