Jonathan Freedland: “Yes, these riots are rooted in economic deprivation and urban decay. But they also have an ethnic, racial dimension. And France’s key problem is that it cannot face that fact… France’s refusal to see the ethnicity of some of its people as relevant translates into de facto racism. If human beings were free of prejudice, the French republican ideal would work beautifully. Because we are not, it allows racism a free hand.”

In contrast to Freedland’s convincing piece, there has been a lot of poor commentary written about the French riots in the past few days. Craig Smith, in The New York Times, wrote a naive analysis for Sunday’s paper, which largely rejected claims that France has an underclass. His conclusion: “Because France’s difficulties are relatively recent, it may have a chance to escape the depth of the American problems.” Subsequent pieces in the Times, including by Smith, have been hurriedly rowing away from that view.

Of course, the articles and blogs that have called the riots a French intifada are equally misguided. The problems are social and economic, not religious. The problems are particularly graphic in France, but policymakers in Brussels, Rotterdam and Berlin should be working overtime to make sure similar events don’t happen in their cities.

Dominique Reynié, a professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris, has a very pertinent observation in today’s Financial Times: “I do not think this is a crisis of the Fifth Republic, which is in the end only a form of government, so much as a crisis of the political class, which responds to these problems in an archaic way. They are responding as if there is a social group who want something and with whom they can open a dialogue. But this is not the case. It is not a pertinent response.”

There’s no hint that Reynié suggested to the FT what a pertinent response would be. I suspect it’s not what interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy apparently told the police yesterday, according to a report I heard this morning on NPR. He advised that they take care to address the rioters with the respectful “vous”, rather than the informal, disrespectful “tu”. That should solve it.