And why should they? The France visited by tourists remains largely untouched by the stone throwing, the arson attacks, the running battles between immigrant youth and French police. The violence, in any case, is abating -- largely due to the curfews imposed on affected neighborhoods across the country. On Thursday night, the number of cars torched -- a statistic which has become the grisly litmus test by which the intensity of violence is measured -- across France dropped to 463 as compared with 483 the night before, 482 on Tuesday night and over a thousand per night early in the week. In Seine-Saint-Denis on the Paris outskirts, only 15 were torched on Wednesday night -- not much more than the nightly average for the neighborhood even in quieter times, according to local officials.


The heart of Paris, though -- even at the height of the unrest -- remained more Kir Royal than Molotov cocktail. Nevertheless, the riots are hardly shocking, says John. "The government’s immigration policy is to provide free welfare to all people coming to France," he says. "But you can’t welcome immigrants when there are no jobs for them. So I’m not surprised by the riots."

His wife Maria is also less than impressed by the French government. "This has been going on for two weeks now," she said. "I’m amazed the government has waited so long to impose a curfew. Other countries have cracked down on immigration. France should do it too."

Five minutes later, the family is standing atop the Eiffel Tower, looking down at gray Paris.

La Goutte d’Or

Landmarks are not difficult to come by in Paris. One could, if wearing a decent pair of shoes, head northeast from the Eiffel Tower and stumble across a bunch of them. Over the winding Seine, across the glitzy Champs Elysees, past the staid Opera Garnier and, eventually, up to the gleaming white Basilique du Sacre Coeur at the top of Montmartre.

The sweeping stairs leading up to the basilica are, during the summer, a favorite meeting spot for young travelers. Guitar music and singing last well into the night following the fantastic sunsets that many come here to watch. Yet for all the frivolity on top of the hill, most don't realize that the bottom is a different story -- and the site of one of the city's invisible rifts. On the one side of Barbes Boulevard, which runs along the eastern flank of Montmartre, are tourist hotspots and upper-middle class plushness. On the other is one of the poorest neighborhoods of Paris.

The area is known as La Goutte d’Or and in addition to being poor, it is also incredibly diverse. Immigrants from the African colonies were the first to arrive -- the initial wave hitting immediately following World War II. They have since been joined by Indians, Pakistanis, Haitians and Chinese.

Those living on the rich side of the boulevard rarely venture into the narrow, dirty streets of La Goutte d'Or. Many of the buildings here are shabby and rundown, plaster cracked and crumbling. During the day, black market vendors sell watches and mobile phones on the streets. At night, they make way for the drug pushers and crack addicts.

Kimara, a 75-year-old from Mauritania, is standing outside the Assalam Mosque. He moved to Paris after retiring from the French army. "I feel at home in France," he says, when asked about the riots in the immigrant neighborhoods further out. "But as a Muslim, I think the main issue is that people forget that Islam is the second religion in the country."

Indeed, the Assalam Mosque itself is a symbol of that sentiment and an emblem of France’s troubled relationship with its Muslim population. It is so small that, during the month-long Ramadan celebrations -- a period of fasting which sees more Muslims attending religious services -- the crowd of faithful often spills out onto the sidewalk for prayer. The Muslims in the quarter have repeatedly asked the city authorities for help in building a new, larger mosque. But a 1905 law strictly forbids public funding of religious institutions. For Muslims, though, it seems as though France doesn't care.

Despite the frustration and feelings of isolation in La Goutte d’Or, the district has remained riot free during the last two weeks. Kimara himself, though he refused to give his last name out of fear for his safety, realizes it could be worse. "Life is much more difficult across the Périphérique," he says. The Périphérique is the highway circling the heart of the French capital. It's a strip of concrete that serves as a boundary between the City of Lights and its dark suburbs.

La Courneuve

In the 1980s, the French government began an ambitious urban renewal program. The idea was to get rid of the largest and most visually offensive concrete housing projects on the outskirts of the nation's capital in favor of smaller, cosier structures. The city of La Courneuve, crammed between the noisy, polluted Périphérique and a large industrial zone, was taken as the project's starting point. Specifically, an area called "La Cité des 4,000."

Once a visually offensive mass of concrete, "Les 4,000," was supposed to become the symbol of a new start. Instead, it has become a symbol of failed hopes and a failed immigration policy. Now, some 15,000 people live in the neighborhood -- most of them in gray tenements hastily built in the early 1960s to house Northern African immigrants. The area’s unemployment rate has risen to 24 percent -- and it's even higher among the La Courneuve youth. Frustration and anger are not in short supply.

 Nadia, a 53-year-old Algerian, is nervously standing in front of the police precinct with a group of friends and relatives. Her 16-year-old daughter has just been arrested and is being held for assaulting a woman on the street. "Witnesses told the cops she didn’t do anything," Nadia claims. "But they just said they couldn’t trust people like us. Cops enforce their own law here."

It's an attitude shared by many in the neighborhood. Police, they complain, have made harassment a daily occurrence.  Younger residents are routinely stopped and asked for their identification without even the slightest pretence. Some will even say that the deaths of the two Northern African teenagers in Clichy-sous-Bois two weeks ago -- which sparked the current rioting -- was the result of just such harassment. The two teenagers, according to one explanation,  were simply tired of being stopped, ran from the police and attempted to hide in an electrical substation where they were electrocuted.

"Don’t worry," a passer-by tells Nadia with a smile when he overhears her comments.  "I’ll burn 200 more cars for you tonight." The group bursts out laughing. The riot policemen standing 15 meters away do not seem to notice.

Much of the anger centers on French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. He infamously referred to the rioters as scum and riffraff, a comment he reiterated on Thursday. After the death of an 11-year-old boy last June after he was hit by a stray bullet, Sarkozy announced he would "clean up Les 4,000 with a pressure washer." These words, says Nadia's 40-year-old cousin, Said, fueled the inhabitants’ anger and were directly responsible for the riots.

“We’re not all delinquents," he says. "We want security and we need cops. But when you go out on the street, they ask for your ID. When you come back from work in the evening, they ask again. What do they need my ID for? They’ve been working here long enough to know who I am and where I live!"

Said came to France from Algeria at the age of two but, he says, he has never thought of himself as an Algerian. "I go to Algeria on vacation in the summer but I will never be able to live there. People like me are 100 percent French," he says. "But our skin color is still a problem -- except for (professional soccer star) Zinedine Zidane. If that means you need to be a soccer star to be considered as French, it’s pretty sad."

La Courneuve has been the scene of some of the most violent clashes between rioters and police. Dozens of cars have been torched and early in the rioting, police battling rioters there were met by shot gun fire. On Thursday, eight police officers were suspended for beating a La Courneuve resident.

But even before the rioting, the quarter had a reputation. Mounir, 23, waits patiently for Said to finish before launching into his own story. "I quit school when I was 16 and, like everybody else my age here, I just stayed home and slept all day" he says. "When I searched for jobs and told employers I lived at La Courneuve, they said they’d call me back. Of course, they never did."

Not everybody in La Courneuve is a failure, of course. Nineteen-year-old Zakaria, likewise from Algeria, prefers a suit to a hooded sweatshirt; he speaks in carefully formulated sentences instead of slum slang. "Algerian family values are very strict," he explains. "Girls stay at home, boys go to work. But my parents quickly understood that education was the key to integration. And, unlike my sisters, I was born in France and I’ve always been immersed in the French culture."

As Zakaria finishes his story, dusk is rapidly descending on La Courneuve. It isn't the carefree, musical dusk of Montmartre. It is a tense, ominous dusk -- and seems to arrive more quickly as the sun is obscured behind the high-rise hulks of concrete. The neighborhood prepares for another night of unrest.