Theodore Dalrymple also has an interesting discussion of the French cit�s, although I think he's a little over the top. These places are public housing projects that encircle many French cities, particularly Paris. Dalrymple says they are inhabited by several million immigrants (mostly from North and West Africa), along with their French-born descendants "and a smattering of the least successful members of the French working class". In fact, Gao Xingjian was living in one of them when he won the Nobel Prize. Anyway, of the residents, who attack not only police but also the firemen who come to put out the fires they set and even the paramedics who come to save their friends, Dalrymple writes,

They are certainly not poor, at least by the standards of all previously existing societies: they are not hungry; they have cell phones, cars, and many other appurtenances of modernity; they are dressed fashionably�according to their own fashion�with a uniform disdain of bourgeois propriety and with gold chains round their necks. They believe they have rights, and they know they will receive medical treatment, however they behave. They enjoy a far higher standard of living (or consumption) than they would in the countries of their parents� or grandparents� origin, even if they labored there 14 hours a day to the maximum of their capacity.

But this is not a cause of gratitude�on the contrary: they feel it as an insult or a wound, even as they take it for granted as their due. But like all human beings, they want the respect and approval of others, even�or rather especially�of the people who carelessly toss them the crumbs of Western prosperity. Emasculating dependence is never a happy state, and no dependence is more absolute, more total, than that of most of the inhabitants of the cit�s. They therefore come to believe in the malevolence of those who maintain them in their limbo: and they want to keep alive the belief in this perfect malevolence, for it gives meaning�the only possible meaning�to their stunted lives. It is better to be opposed by an enemy than to be adrift in meaninglessness, for the simulacrum of an enemy lends purpose to actions whose nihilism would otherwise be self-evident.