Zero tolerance, the policy adopted by Sarkozy, in combination with zero interest in how the poor are coping, has proven to be explosive. What sets apart the French situation from that in the neighbouring countries is not only, however, the violence of the current explosion. Therehas been a steady tide of broadening popular protest against neoliberalism for at least a decade, from the mass striking during the winter of discontent of 1995-96 that brought down the Jupee governement, and the formation of ATTAC as a network of citizens groups in 1998, to the recent bitter struggle against the privatization of the ferry company serving Corsica, and a strike to preserve the railways as a state company.
For what is at stake in the current French disorder is, fundamentally, the difficulty of applying neoliberal 'market' disciplines to continental European societies that have historically developed under state auspices, in many respects against liberalism.
The European Union's hurry to enact ' market' reforms in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet bloc only exacerbated longstanding contradictions between liberalization and the tradition of state intervention in several European countries.
In France, the Economic and Monetary Union negociated at Maastricht was ratified only narrowly, and it worth recalling that at that time, the Green politician and author Alan Lipietz warned that in the absence of any real popular mandate, the socially destructive implications of the Maastricht agreement could ignite civil war within a few decades.