The gendarmes have weapons. The kids they face in the street have mostly stones and Molotov cocktails. It is a mismatch. But it's the cops who are the heavy underdogs--the cops and the France that the cops alone represent in those burning godforsaken ghettos where most Frenchmen dare not go.

On the one side are the protester-arsonists, many if not most of them Muslim, whom the Interior Minister called racaille (rabble)--young, restless, violent, vibrant, angry, jobless, envious and fecund. And on the other side is an aged and exhausted civilization, the hollowed-out core of European Christendom, static, aging, contented, coddled, passive and literally without faith. Who would you think will win in the end?

Anyone with a feel for the cruel cunning of history will see history's hand, and revenge, at work. France went on a colonial binge in the 19th century, striking into North Africa, implanting its language, culture--even its vineyards--in warmer climes. Now, the colonies have struck back. Those young rioters, at once so French and so alien, are today's revenge on that colonial binge.

Perhaps the act of suicide, so often resorted to by guilt-ridden individuals, is also the tool to which weak and debased cultures turn (or are divinely consigned) in lieu of taking responsibility for their actions and conducting a moral reckoning.