"La Zone" is the (pejorative) term used for the ghettos in France. It's a little strange that while North American "ghettos" are usually near the city centre (hence the term "inner city"), it is the suburbs in France that are known for poverty and crime. Indeed, there's usually a negative connotation for the French word for "suburb" ("banlieue").

Let's make this clear: "La Zone" ain't a tourist destination. There are no hotels in "La Zone". In Strasbourg, "La Zone" is composed of cold, brutal 1960's residential complexes. And, like many poorer communities in the Western world, these suburbs do display abnormal levels of crime, violence, and burning cars. And, indeed, there was an underlying racial undertone, often displayed when listening to the suburbs' youth.

These days, one article being quoted by the blogs is a piece by Theodore Darlymple written three years ago. Mr. Darlymple discusses many of the endemic problems with the class divisions in French society, particularly in "La Zone". This is an exceptional article, and is a definite must-read. Pretty creepy foreshadowing:

The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris -- Surrounding the City of Light are Threatening Cities of Darkness

...

...Where does the increase in crime come from? The geographical answer: from the public housing projects that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size, Paris especially. In these housing projects lives an immigrant population numbering several million, from North and West Africa mostly, along with their French-born descendants and a smattering of the least successful members of the French working class. From these projects, the excellence of the French public transport system ensures that the most fashionable arrondissements are within easy reach of the most inveterate thief and vandal...

...There are burned-out and eviscerated carcasses of cars everywhere. Fire is now fashionable in the cités: in Les Tarterets, residents had torched and looted every store—with the exceptions of one government-subsidized supermarket and a pharmacy. The underground parking lot, charred and blackened by smoke like a vault in an urban hell, is permanently closed.

...like all human beings, they want the respect and approval of others, even—or rather especially—of the people who carelessly toss them the crumbs of Western prosperity. Emasculating dependence is never a happy state, and no dependence is more absolute, more total, than that of most of the inhabitants of the cités. They therefore come to believe in the malevolence of those who maintain them in their limbo: and they want to keep alive the belief in this perfect malevolence, for it gives meaning—the only possible meaning—to their stunted lives. It is better to be opposed by an enemy than to be adrift in meaninglessness, for the simulacrum of an enemy lends purpose to actions whose nihilism would otherwise be self-evident.

...Though most people in France have never visited a cité, they dimly know that long-term unemployment among the young is so rife there that it is the normal state of being. Indeed, French youth unemployment is among the highest in Europe—and higher the further you descend the social scale...

...It requires little imagination to see how, in the circumstances, the burden of unemployment should fall disproportionately on immigrants and their children: and why, already culturally distinct from the bulk of the population, they should feel themselves vilely discriminated against. Having been enclosed in a physical ghetto, they respond by building a cultural and psychological ghetto for themselves. They are of France, but not French.

...A profoundly alienated population is thus armed with serious firepower; and in conditions of violent social upheaval, such as France is in the habit of experiencing every few decades, it could prove difficult to control. The French state is caught in a dilemma between honoring its commitments to the more privileged section of the population, many of whom earn their livelihoods from administering the dirigiste economy, and freeing the labor market sufficiently to give the hope of a normal life to the inhabitants of the cités.... If that fails, as in the long run it will, harsh repression will follow.

Don't get me wrong. For the most part, I felt safe in Strasbourg. Likewise, I generally feel safe whenever I visit Paris. But the fundamental seeds of the current French violence have existed for a very long time. It's important that we recognize this reality.