PARIS, Nov. 8 -- After a police tear gas canister exploded inside the Clichy-sous-Bois mosque during Ramadan prayers in the first days of the violence here, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French interior minister, asked to visit the suburban mosque to address outraged worshipers.
"I can't let you," Abderrahmane Bouhout, a leader in the local Muslim cultural association, said he told Sarkozy, recounting the conversation. "It's too emotional here."
"I'm not afraid," Sarkozy insisted.
"You may not be afraid," Bouhout said. "But I am afraid. I don't know how to manage you coming into the mosque."
No public figure in France has more at stake in the crisis rampaging across the country -- or has become a greater lightning rod for wrath against the government -- than Sarkozy, the nation's top law enforcement officer and the leading contender in the 2007 presidential election.
Sarkozy's track record as a law-and-order politician is threatened by the government's inability to stop the unrest. At the same time, his attempts to reach out to Muslim and immigrant communities have foundered amid rage over his undiplomatic references to marauding youth as "scum."
With cars and buildings burning on the 13th night of violence, the political dilemma of Nicolas Sarkozy -- a 50-year-old man with the melancholy, hooded eyes of a bloodhound and the cockiness of a bantam rooster -- has become a reflection of the nation's confrontation with civil chaos.
"He's caught between his own contradictions," said Dominique Moisi, deputy director of the French Institute of International Relations. "A lot will depend on the way people judge the present event. Will they say, 'We need a tough guy and Sarkozy is the right man.'? Or has Sarkozy been playing with fire and he's getting what he deserved? That's the big issue in political terms: Will it serve him or will it destroy him?"
An opinion poll last weekend by the newspaper Le Figaro showed that during the first week of violence Sarkozy lost only three points from his 60 percent approval rating. Before the violence broke out, one of Sarkozy's aides described him as having the appeal of a "rock star."
For months, Sarkozy has been unabashed in his run for the presidency. He has courted the media, dominating the magazine covers, front pages and evening newscasts in an American-style campaign of self-promotion uncommon in France.
When Sarkozy made his first trip into the troubled northern Paris suburbs on the sixth day of violence, he kept a roomful of law enforcement officers and firefighters -- many of whom had had been up for much of the night dealing with the unrest -- waiting 45 minutes while he spoke with reporters outside.
He and his chief political rival, Dominique de Villepin, the erudite prime minister who is President Jacques Chirac's favored candidate to succeed him, snipe mercilessly at each other. Sarkozy heads the Union for a Popular Movement, the political party of all three men. The internal feud has been a significant factor in the paralysis of the government in dealing with the violence. Sarkozy and Villepin sit next to each other in the gilded meeting room of the Elysee Palace, but when the cameras are on, Sarkozy studiously avoids looking in Villepin's direction.
