The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris, by Theodore Dalrymple, describes modern France’s criminal-infested housing projects (cités), and the parallels to American housing projects are uncanny:
A kind of anti-society has grown up in them — a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, “official,” society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrust — greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years — is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements.
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Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete with graffiti — BAISE LA POLICE, fuck the police, being the favorite theme.
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[Pit bulls were] the only breed of dog I saw in the cités, paraded with menacing swagger by their owners.
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Antagonism toward the police might appear understandable, but the conduct of the young inhabitants of the cités toward the firemen who come to rescue them from the fires that they have themselves started gives a dismaying glimpse into the depth of their hatred for mainstream society. They greet the admirable firemen (whose motto is Sauver ou périr, save or perish) with Molotov cocktails and hails of stones when they arrive on their mission of mercy, so that armored vehicles frequently have to protect the fire engines.
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The absence of a real economy and of law means, in practice, an economy and an informal legal system based on theft and drug-trafficking. In Les Tarterets, for example, I observed two dealers openly distributing drugs and collecting money while driving around in their highly conspicuous BMW convertible, clearly the monarchs of all they surveyed. Both of northwest African descent, one wore a scarlet baseball cap backward, while the other had dyed blond hair, contrasting dramatically with his complexion. Their faces were as immobile as those of potentates receiving tribute from conquered tribes. They drove everywhere at maximum speed in low gear and high noise: they could hardly have drawn more attention to themselves if they tried. They didn’t fear the law: rather, the law feared them.