Timothy Garton Ash of the Guardian spends a little time chatting up the banlieusards.*

DESPAIR TURNS TO FURY,
BUT IT'S NOT TOO LATE
TO END FRANCE'S WAR WITH ITSELF
People In The Explosive Estates
Around Paris Know What They Want:
Respect, Recognition And Representation

PARIS June 7, 2006 (Guardian) - Last Sunday I watched France playing football. This was a match more important than the World Cup for the future of France. It took place at a tatty stadium in Clichy-sous-Bois, the small town in the north-eastern outskirts of Paris where last autumn's nationwide explosion of anger began after two teenagers, Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna, were electrocuted when they hid from the police in an electricity substation. Now I leaned against the railings with Bouna's elder brother, who, like so many others, wore a T-shirt saying "Bouna and Zyed ... dead for nothing". As we watched two teams from communities of immigrant origin play a rather desultory game on a bumpy pitch, he told me a story I would hear again and again over three days spent visiting the now notorious high-rise housing estates of Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil.

Nothing had changed, he said, in the more than six months since that nationwide bonfire of the motorcars - a conflagration that the distant inhabitants of the smart quarters of inner Paris call les émeutes (the riots), but the spokespeople of the outskirts call les événements, recalling "the events" of May 1968, or simply la révolte. Last week, when protest flared up again in Montfermeil, the police were back in force, circulating overhead in helicopters and lurking in their Black Marias. But otherwise they leave the people of the outskirts to stew: packed into overcrowded, decaying high-rise blocks covered in graffiti; up to half of them unemployed and living on state handouts; nothing to do all day except watch television, or kick a football around in the yard, or do drugs; cut off by poor public transport and poverty. ...

All they ask of the French republic is that it should practise what it preaches: the equality of all French citizens, blind to race and religion. In the wake of les événements, a group of local activists in Clichy-sous-Bois set up an association with the acronym ACLEFEU [Association Collectif Liberté Egalité Fraternité Egalité ensemble unis], which, pronounced in French, sounds like "enough of fire". The LEF stands for liberté, égalité, fraternité. But the reality is that, even if someone from these communities can get a reasonable education - and here the French state is visibly trying to do something; the schools in Clichy-sous-Bois are well funded and apparently not so bad - their job application is likely to be turned down simply on the basis of their address and "foreign" name. If by some miracle they get to an interview, the job opening mysteriously disappears as soon as the interviewer sees the colour of their skin. I heard this story so many times and from so many different sources, including independent analysts, that there is clearly truth in it. If what has happened over the last 20 years in the French labour market is not racism, I don't know what is. The lofty ideals of republican egalitarianism that they imbibe at school only add insult to injury. "It's a country of hypocrisy," said Oussine, who trained as a book-keeper but could not find a position.

Meanwhile, they are almost entirely unrepresented in French public life. The appointment of a black man as a prime-time TV anchor was recently hailed as a breakthrough, but over several days of relentless channel-flicking here I have seen nothing but white faces presenting to camera. In politics the faces are almost all white too. Only on the football pitch is the real France of multiple ethnicities, cultures and colours represented - even over-represented. ...

"It's too late," several people told me in the battered housing estates. A generation has been lost. Despair has turned to fury. Every little spark will produce another explosion. A community activist who has worked on one of the worst estates for 14 years told me that, if something radical is not done to improve the life-chances of the young, "C'est la guerre ... c'est la guerre avec madame la France."

To my own surprise, I came away thinking that it's not too late. The people I met had not abandoned hope and were clear and articulate in explaining what is needed. Of course they are, so to speak, the elite of the ghettoes: I did not meet the despairing homebound, the criminal elements, the drug dealers or the extremist Islamists. But these were people born and living there, and they were quite different from anything you would expect from television and newspaper reports. Some of their demands will be hard to meet: the over-rigid French economy is unlikely to create that many new jobs any time soon; nor is the French state likely to be able to redirect the large resources needed to turn their stinking high-rise blocks (Le Corbusier's dream become a nightmare) into decent, human-scale housing. But some can be realised. ...

It is always the transient reporter who, having surveyed the piteous hellholes of France, comes away optimistic. Probably because coming away is there at the end of his workday. For the banlieusards coming away is not an option -- and a workday, ah, mes amis, that is the stuff of Cloudcuckooland France.

Worth the full read. Reader comments are appended.

* Absolutely no Muslims sighted during the writing of this report.

PFFT (What is this?): Liberté 2 | Fraternité 0 | Egalité 0 | Rayonnement français 0

Perhaps Monsieur Bennett ought to look in his own "backyard", where Hell is already on the loose and leave more dead people per capita than any French "hot" banlieue on a bad day.

By the way, how ironic that our obsessive/compulsive and apparently clueless friend should read The Guardian , who not only has an obvious "anti-American" slant, but also a bizzare fixation in reporting freak events - anything from murder, racism or obesity - in their daily "US News" column.

England's version of PAVE can be read in The Guardian's "International Talk" blog, a well-balanced mix of international finger-pointing and infinitely more entertaining (and more visited, needless to say).