Steven Erlanger
The New York Times
8/8/2010
The planned neighborhood Villeneuve, in Grenoble, has slowly degraded into a poor district before it finally burst into flames three weeks ago, with a mob setting nearly 100 cars on fire.
GRENOBLE, France — A utopian dream of a new urban community, built here in the 1970s, had slowly degraded into a poor neighborhood plagued by aimless youths before it finally burst into flames three weeks ago.
After Karim Boudouda, a 27-year-old of North African descent, and some of his friends had robbed a casino, he was killed in an exchange of automatic gunfire with the police. The next night, Villeneuve, a carefully planned neighborhood of Grenoble in eastern France, exploded. A mob set nearly 100 cars on fire, wrecked a tram car and burned an annex of city hall.
The police, reinforced by the national riot police, responded in “Robocop” gear, with helicopters flying overhead and television cameras in place, and made a number of arrests in a series of raids.
President Nicolas Sarkozy, battered in the opinion polls, quickly seized on the event as a symbol for a new campaign to get tough on immigration and crime. On July 30, about 10 days after the riots, he flew to Grenoble to make a fierce speech condemning violence, blaming “insufficiently regulated immigration” that has “led to a failure of integration.”
He vowed to deny automatic citizenship at 18 to French-born children of foreigners if they are juvenile delinquents. He said he would also strip foreign-born citizens of French citizenship if they had been convicted of threatening or harming a police officer, or of crimes like polygamy and female circumcision, which are widespread in North Africa.
“French nationality is earned, and one must prove oneself worthy of it,” he said. “When you open fire on an agent of the forces of order, you’re no longer worthy of being French.”
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