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GLOBE EDITORIAL # The fires in France November 5, 2005 COMMENTING ON the 1973 Arab oil embargo, former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing once observed that the West was paying the price for the 19th century, by which he meant the legacy of European colonialism. It is very difficult today for the French political class to acknowledge that France is paying the price for its treatment of people from its own colonial territories, but that is the veiled meaning of the violence perpetrated night after night by rampaging youths from the segregated slums ringing Paris and other French cities. There are close to 2 million people, mostly immigrants and the children and grandchildren of immigrants, living in 300 agglomerations of high-rise housing projects. Wittingly or not, the French urban planners and politicians who created these overcrowded, stultifying ghettos were preparing the way for the criminal gangs, the Islamist radicalism, and the de facto apartheid that characterize these crucibles of anger and alienation. The vapid posturing of leading French politicians such as Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy -- two conservative contenders to replace President Jacques Chirac if he declines to run for a third term -- illustrates how hard it is for the French political elite to confront a crisis that has been festering for decades. Sarkozy started out by talking tough and alleging, without evidence, that the riots had been organized; he didn't say by whom. De Villepin left local officials in riot-torn communities nonplussed when he declared that by the end of this month he would announce a plan for the ghetto dwellers of the ''banlieux" -- the overwhelmingly North African and black African slums on the outskirts of French urban areas. Local officials say they need effective action from the government, not the umpteenth plan from high functionaries who would use the present crisis to advance their presidential ambitions. To quell the immediate crisis, French police unions have requested curfews and asked for troops from the military to provide reinforcements. These police proposals reflect the gravity of the disorder, underlining how unprepared the French establishment has been to cope with riots that are taking on the qualities of a rebellion that could foreshadow a more political revolt of France's unassimilated, unaccepted minorities. To cope with its postcolonial crisis, France will have to change its ways profoundly. It must not only open up to economic reforms that Chirac has denounced as the ultraliberal Anglo-Saxon model but will also have to recognize that populations confined in ghettos and victimized by discrimination cannot be expected to assimilate. France's republican values have been wanting not only in the rioters setting fires to cars, buses, and warehouses these nights.

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