Deep roots of Paris riots

He sent out fictitious applications for sales jobs, allegedly coming from six different sorts of applicant, ranging from a white male to a woman of North African origins, all with the same résumé.

Applicants writing from addresses known to be in "difficult" areas received half as many invitations to an interview as those from less notorious districts. The "North African" male candidate received five times fewer invitations than his white counterpart, says Prof. Amadieu.

At the same time, complains Michèle Lereste, who runs the "Green Light" social-work agency in Villetaneuse, just North of Paris, where the projects are almost entirely inhabited by immigrant-descended families, government funding cuts have closed a number of job-training institutes, "and we are finding it harder and harder to get employers to take apprentices from our district."

"The kids learn all the French republican values such as equality in school, and then they find in practice that it's an illusion," says Ms. Bouzar, who was recently named one of Time magazine's 50 "European Heroes" as a role model for those seeking to be good Muslims and good French citizens. "There is an enormous gap between theory and practice."

Nowhere is that gap clearer, say young men in Clichy-sous-Bois and adults who work with them, than in the behavior of the police. "They check our papers everywhere, all the time, for no reason," complains one youth in Clichy who did not want to be identified. "And the checks are getting rougher and rougher."

Those sorts of experiences "delegitimize the state" in young peoples' eyes, worries Bouzar, which helps explain why authority figures such as firemen and doctors have been stoned on recent nights even as they tried - with police protection - to save lives and property.

Taïb Ben Thabet, who has been a social worker in the projects north of Paris for 35 years, fears that the kind of discrimination his young wards face undermines his patient efforts to help them find their place in society.

"I teach them that the state is for everybody, that it treats everybody the same," he says. "But what credibility do I have when everything I say is contradicted by experience? The kids say it's all lies."

He is particularly upset by the manner in which Mr. Sarkozy referred to youths in the projects recently as "scum," pledging a "war without mercy" against them.

"We are giving power to the (Islamic) radicals," he argues. "When kids hear the minister call them scum, the obscurantists are there to take advantage of the way they feel."

"This is not just a problem for the kids in the projects," warns Mr. Cheb Sun. "Society created these ghettos and now it has to deal with them."

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