Last Saturday evening, my wife and I had dinner in a restaurant overlooking the St. Martin Canal, just a short walk from the Parisian neighborhood where we have lived for the past 15 years. As we left, we were greeted by the acrid smell of burning rubber from cars that had been set alight near the Place de la Republique nearby. We were not surprised. Everyone in Paris knew that the riots would not remain confined to the city’s impoverished suburbs for long. The center of Paris was too tempting a target for the gangs of youths now rampaging in dozens of French cities. Bringing the riots to the center of French government power was the next logical step.

As I write, early on Tuesday morning, the riots have continued for 12 straight nights, despite increasing law and order talk from the conservative French government and the mobilization of nearly 10,000 local and national police. The current situation is the logical and predictable result of neglecting the plight of the the ghettoized communities that ring Paris, especially to the north and east. Here, in bleak, often run down housing projects, immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa—some newcomers, many here for several generations—suffer from 30-40% employment rates, inferior schools, and minimal social services. They also suffer from the ingrained racism of a French society that has always regarded them as outsiders and perhaps always will.

To understand what is going on in France requires keeping two or more contradictory thoughts in one’s head at the same time. The rioters are not freedom fighters, revolutionaries, or community activists. The chief instigators are the hoodlum elements that have long plagued these poor suburbs, making the lives of their own neighbors insecure and miserable. On the weekends, they plague public transportation, sometimes attacking passengers and otherwise making a nuisance of themselves. On the other hand, there are no hoodlum gangs in the wealthy districts of western Paris. When a young man has no job and no money, being a hoodlum and/or a drug dealer is pretty much all that is left as a vocation. So while the torching of cars, schools, and businesses is unacceptable and inexcusable, it is easily understandable. And from an entirely symbolic point of view, these actions have a certain resonance: In France as in America, the automobile, the rioters’ chief target, is a symbol of freedom, mobility, and independence—something that these young people have never had and may never have. More than 5,000 autos have now been torched, a symbolic statement indeed.

It also has to be said that the suburban youth have been provoked. By now many Americans will have heard of French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who earlier this year made a number of highly mediatized excursions into the suburbs promising to “clean up” problem neighborhoods, and who has characterized violent youth as “scum.” Also predictably, this has made him one of France’s most popular politicians. The riots are the riposte of the scum to the government elite and the society that has neglected them and accepted their suffering as the natural state of things. And most tellingly, the government has not had to appoint commissions to study the situation for several years to understand the roots of the problem. Ministers have long talked about “sensitive suburbs” and “difficult neighborhoods”—all the while doing nothing about them. Despite tough but mostly empty talk from Sarkozy, prime minister Dominique de Villepin, and president Jacques Chirac that restoring order is the number one priority, government ministers are already rushing to throw money and programs at the problems of youth unemployment and hopelessness.

And let’s have no illusions that this is just a problem for the French political right, even if it is currently in power. Left-leaning governments have not acted much differently, although in recent years the right has severely cut back on services and social supports in poorer neighborhoods. French society is no more or less racist than that of most other western countries, yet everyone in France knows that that conditions in these suburbs are intolerable, and everyone knows that most of the victims of these conditions are Africans. Can we not just come right out and say that for many white French men and women, this makes it somehow okay? If that is too strong, then let’s at least ask why it takes riots and burning cars for the government and society at large to act when everyone knows exactly why this is happening. Has it become trite to say that human beings will accept only so many assaults on their dignity before they react in protest, sometimes violently? Perhaps no more trite than to say that a nation that neglects a large portion of its youth should not be too surprised when they turn bad.