The fear in France: what rioting and the rest of it means.

FRANCE is closed down for the moment. General strike, no transport, universities and schools suspended. It's 1968 all over again, with President Jacques Chirac in much the same terminal plight as General de Gaulle was then. Dominique de Villepin and Nicolas Sarkozy, prime minister and minister of the interior respectively, can't quite make up their minds whether to tough it out or retreat as usual in such circumstances. Both hope to succeed Chirac next year, and are scraping up political capital. "Deaf to us all" and "The shipwreck of the Chirac state" are headlines gleefully splashed across the opposition press.

But this is how the French do things, isn't it? People of the same occupation defend their vested interests with whatever violence they can muster. Haulers use their trucks to block roads and customs posts; farmers burn British lorries and the live animals in them; railway personnel close the system down to protect their right to retire at 50 on practically full pay. Stone-throwing and tear gas means that once again wish-fulfillment has priority over economic reality.

This time, it's the young who believe that their vested interests are threatened. Welfare costs and regulations make hiring so expensive for employers that, for the past decade, an average of one in ten of the total workforce has been unemployed. Unemployment among the young is chronic, running at 23 percent. Villepin hopes that a First Job Contract, or CPE according to its French initials, will alleviate this blight. Tentative, not to say timid, CPE would allow employers to take on anyone under the age of 26 without any commitment to security for a period of two years. To those at the barricades, this approach to hiring and firing is outright surrender to American capitalism and therefore brutality, and they insist on privileged security--or as one critic sneered, they all want to be civil servants. The Chirac-Villepin combination, however, has railroaded the law through the National Assembly, and refused to take an opt-out when the legality of proceedings was referred to a special constitutional court. Slight as the issue may seem, much more than conditions of youth employment is at stake.

Tocqueville long ago made the profound observation that nothing so much resembled pre-1789 monarchical France as the post-revolutionary republic that succeeded it. From Napoleon Bonaparte to Marshal Petain and General de Gaulle, rulers may not have been monarchs in name, but their power owed more to their personalities and prestige than to democratic institutions. The present constitution gives the president powers in domestic and foreign policy to match those of Louis XIV and his courtiers at Versailles.

Since the 1960s, Chirac has embodied a nationalized monarch. Appointed prime minister in 1974 and again in 1986 by successive presidents, he was simultaneously mayor of Paris, before becoming president himself in 1995. No doubt he sincerely believes that France is the greatest of countries, a beacon to the rest of the world, able to boast of many post-war achievements such as an excellent transport system, a fine health service, and nuclear-powered energy. The vision is not ignoble, but it has been preserved only by locking in place the classical French model of society, centralized, statist, dirigiste, protectionist. Undoubtedly, its greatest success has been to oblige the whole continent to adopt this closed social model in the form of the European Union. In an illuminating incident, Chirac recently walked out of a meeting in Brussels, declaring himself "profoundly shocked" because a prominent French industrialist was speaking English in public.

Villepin would have been wholly recognizable at the Versailles court. A diplomat, a poet and essayist, delighting to pass in manner and tailoring as an aristocrat and dandy, he has never been elected to anything, but owes his position entirely to Chirac's whim, or as he once put it, "I direct the president's brain." Grandiloquent pronouncements come naturally to him, in this style: "Abroad France rests on a pillar of thought and culture, a major economic, military, and political power."

The facts are otherwise. The French social model has proved incapable of delivering the rewards of the free market. More disappointing still, the European Union turns out to be a gigantic mechanism for impoverishment and decline. Globalization is simply too strong for protectionist structures of this type. Growth in France has been barely more than 1 percent a year for some time, and so feeble a performance cannot sustain the welfare state. Precarite, precariousness, is the fear mobilizing the students. Virtually half the young people asked in a poll what globalization means to them gave the answer "Fear."

On the day when the French revolution broke out and the Bastille fell, Louis XVI, so soon to be guillotined, famously noted in his diary, "Nothing." The Chirac-Villepin combination reacted with similar blind indifference to events at the end of last October. Clichy-sous-Bois is nine miles northeast of Paris, a grim suburb in Stalinist concrete. After a confused encounter there with the police, a group of teenagers ran away. Two of them, one from Tunisia and the other from Mauritania, jumped over a fence into an electricity substation and were electrocuted. Violence flared up immediately, leapfrogging to some 300 cities and towns across the country. Night after night, rioters shouting "Allah akhbar" set fire to cars, hurled petrol bombs, and battled with the police and firemen. Caught by surprise, the authorities eventually imposed curfews and declared a state of emergency. At the end of this season of destruction, about 10,000 cars had been burned and 230 public buildings either damaged or burned out. Four hundred of the 5,000 arrested were sentenced to prison.

In today's politically correct climate, the rioters were categorized as immigrants, North Africans, nihilists, vandals, anything but Muslims and Arabs. Nobody knows for sure, but there are somewhere between 5 and 7 million Muslims in France, or around one in ten of the population. The flotsam of globalization, they are also victims of a welfare system that promised far more than it can deliver, and so vanishes into mirage.

The authorities fight jihadist terrorism with conviction, but seem impotent in the face of a level of disaffection among Arab and Muslim immigrants approaching permanent lawlessness. Attacks on Jews are now running at about the rate of one a day, and some of these are cause for real fear. In one of the Stalinist-style suburbs, Adel Boumedienne, of Moroccan origins, caught and beheaded his neighbor, a Jewish disc jockey, and gloated to his own mother, "I killed my Jew, I will go to paradise." Elsewhere a Muslim gang kidnapped Ilan Halimi, a Jewish salesman of cellphones. They called his family to read the Koran to them in such a way that he could be heard in the background screaming under torture. After three weeks of this, they set fire to him, and he died. Yet the Paris public prosecutor said that this murder could in no way be linked to "an anti-Semitic declaration or action."

Amid the melancholy generated by the evident failure of the French social model, a science known as "declinology" has developed. One of its most forceful exponents is Nicolas Baverez, who points out unanswerably that the current political void is creating a space for violence. For him, the enormity of the recent Arab and Muslim rioting illustrates nothing less than "national crisis and the decomposition of the social body." Commentators of the stature of Alain Duhamel, Alain Minc, and Andre Glucksmann are hardly less pessimistic. An articulate conservative parliamentarian, Pierre Lellouche, warns of "a future that is escaping us."

Nothing is to be expected from the Chirac-Villepin combination in its dying days. Both are vain and pretentious, essentially weak men pretending to be strong. Chirac recently had what doctors euphemistically describe as a vascular accident; and the moment he leaves office he will no longer be able to benefit from a judicial exemption he obtained as president in 1999, and therefore he will face corruption charges. In the last decade, no fewer than 700 French politicians have faced corruption charges, but a law forbids naming them.

For a long time, Sarkozy was the favorite at Chirac's court. But he's in a hurry, he made his ambition far too obvious, and Chirac switched to back Villepin as his dynastic heir. Sarkozy is the son of a Hungarian who made his way to France in the 1940s. In person, he is diminutive, and comes across as combative. Responsible as minister of the interior for law and order, he called the Arab and Muslim insurgents "scum." Some praised him for it, others thought him merely provocative. In a long-running farce, moreover, his wife leaves him at intervals for another man in New York, and Sarkozy used or abused his powers to stop a journalistic account of this affair--the journalist turned it into a roman a clef.

The Socialists are in even greater disarray than the Conservatives. On the whole political spectrum there seems to be nobody with the will or the ability to modernize this nationalized monarchy that really is the source of so much violence. There has to be reform, or it may be 1789 all over again.

Mr. Pryce-Jones is an NR senior editor. His new book, Betrayal: France, the Arabs, and the Jews, will be published by Encounter in the fall.