Police attempting to block and contain demonstrators amid clouds of tear gas in Paris over the past month have generated daily newspaper headlines and up-to-the-minute commentary on social media. Yet this is also old news. Paris without a wannabe anarchist torching a Peugeot parked on the boulevard near a Left Bank cafe would be like Paris without existentialism.
From the City of Lights at the center, protests fan out to other towns and provinces in France. In 1981, 1983, 1990, 1991, and 1993, riots between police and most frequently ethnic minorities featured a variety of revolutionary scenes in Bordeaux, Rennes, Nantes, Marseille, and Lyon. This begins when somebody, usually an Arab teenager, gets killed or seriously injured by police during some kind of one-on-one confrontation, setting in motion an angry response in the banlieues (French suburbs). These are disadvantaged neighborhoods with large immigrant populations, mainly from North Africa.
