Battleground: France.

PROLONGED rioting has exposed flaws and misperceptions that have long been set in place in France. As a matter of high policy, successive regimes have sought to flatter and co-opt Arabs and Muslims in order to create a counterweight to the United States and, perhaps, recover France's lost status as a world power. Some 6 million Muslims now live in France; they make up 10 percent of the population, a minority with a mass critical enough to confront the majority. There was an unspoken bargain that, in view of French favors, Islamist terror would be for other people to suffer.

The French proved not as generous as all that, however. They housed their Muslims in suburbs in the soulless style of Le Corbusier. Unable to escape these ghettoes, poorly educated and massively unemployed, Muslim youths take to crime. The figures are extraordinary: This year alone, over 30,000 cars have been torched, and at least 70,000 acts of violence committed. So widespread is this lawlessness that the police long ago abandoned the suburbs as no-go areas. At the same time, the French state is either boasting of its liberty, fraternity, and equality, or ordering Muslims around (for instance, forbidding girls to wear the hijab in school or imams to preach in Arabic).

The Molotov cocktails thrown by hooded youths in 300 cities and towns are a claim that no-go areas have become in effect extra-territorial. The astonishment of the government at this state of affairs is perhaps the most astonishing feature of all. The gendarmerie have no knowledge of the afflicted suburbs, and lack fireproof vans and other equipment. A fortnight passed while officials thumbed through the law books. Recently in the hospital after an apparent stroke, President Chirac remained silent for a disturbingly long time, and then uttered only platitudes. His prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, advocated appeasing the rioters, while Nicholas Sarkozy, the interior minister, spoke of "scum" that had to be hosed off the streets. Both politicians were exploiting the riots to advance their ambitions to win the presidential elections due in 2007. The French state thus shows itself to be divided, torn between weakness and repression. Rioters are invited to continue because they may be able at best to precipitate a national crisis, or at worst to extract further social benefits and concessions.

Some of the rioters duly shouted Muslim slogans, and threw stones at imams and community leaders who tried to pacify them. But the thrust of the protest so far has been social rather than faith-based or Islamist. In the wings, however, Islamists are doing whatever they can to turn the anger to their advantage. Nor is polarization restricted to Muslims. Leading the National Front, a Thirties-style fascist party, Jean-Marie Le Pen claims that thousands of new recruits are rallying to him under the shock of events. Beaten by Chirac in the last presidential election ("the crook versus the fascist," as the electorate summed it up), he too hopes to have another chance in 2007. The director general of the news service LCI, Jean-Claude Dassier, has admitted that he censored coverage of the riots because he did not want to give ammunition to "fight-wing politicians."

The volatile mix of feeble or ugly politicians and lying media on the one hand, and the Islamists on the other, points inexorably to ethnic violence. France, indeed Europe, looks more like a lost cause than a recovered world power. Copycat riots have already occurred in Belgium, Denmark, and Germany. This may well be a last chance to prevent a new front in the War on Terror from opening throughout the continent of Europe, but nobody seems to have any coherent idea how to remedy the mistakes that have brought the French to so serious a confrontation with their Muslim community.