TOULOUSE, France -- Workers under police escort laid cinder blocks Thursday to seal the charred entrance of a burned-out kindergarten in Reynerie, the most restive neighborhood in Toulouse during France's two-week wave of rioting.
A few miles away, Toulouse Mayor Jean-Luc Moudenc toured a new cultural and social center in Fontaine Lestang, a district of Toulouse untouched by the violence. The pristine building, with wall-size sound systems and special music rooms, was meant, in his words, "to bring city hall closer to the people."
A reporter asked him whether he planned to visit Reynerie in the course of the day, in view of the school firebombing Wednesday night. "No, I visited out there yesterday," the mayor replied.
Actually, he hadn't gone to Reynerie but to Bellefontaine, a nearby gentrifying neighborhood. His assistant mayor for the area, Jean-Pierre Lloret, explained: "We are not going to enter the debate at present. We will not talk under pressure. We must wait until there is total serenity. In any case, the troublemakers are young, very young people with whom it would be difficult to talk."
Close up, Toulouse offers a flavor of the misunderstandings and disagreements that separate French authorities and the rioters, many of them young men of African heritage, who have burned cars and buildings night after night in minority enclaves across the country.
Toulouse is a prosperous city in southwestern France that is the headquarters of Airbus, the European plane manufacturer. For all its high-tech sheen and the charm of its city center, Toulouse also has, like so many other French cities, bleak underclass suburbs that erupted in anger during the past two weeks.
To travel from central Toulouse, with its elegant buildings of pinkish brick, to Reynerie, with its gray slabs of apartment blocks, is to traverse two mutually exclusive worlds. And since the rioting, the city and suburbs have drifted further apart.
Residents of Reynerie, part of the sprawling Mirail district southeast of downtown, say discrimination is the problem. They say city leaders ignored them even before the rioting, and the young arsonists have taken it upon themselves to expel symbols of authority from the neighborhood. "The government doesn't want us, we don't want it," said Abou, a young, unemployed aeronautical engineer in Reynerie who declined to provide his last name.
People at city hall reject discrimination as a cause of the problems, instead blaming recently arrived immigrants. "They come here, know nothing of Toulouse, make demands and create problems," Lloret said. Such contrasting attitudes throw into question the budding notion in France that the riots will change the country.
The riots have also caused debate over whether France's official view of itself as a nation without racial prejudice or discrimination is obsolete. Some commentators speculate that France will soon move toward the approach of the United States and Britain, which recognize distinct ethnic minorities and their cultural differences and generally acknowledge racial discrimination. In France, affirmative action programs do not exist, on the grounds that they are not needed.
Lloret said the recent events were only a fever that would pass. "This is not the first time there," he said, referring to a week of riots in 1998 in Mirail after police killed a 17-year-old suspected of car theft.
"If there is another pretext, some mistake, it will happen all over again," Lloret said. The past two weeks of turbulence erupted after two teenagers were electrocuted at a power substation in suburban Paris while avoiding a police checkpoint.
