I haven't been following the riots in France with any particular interest, but a blog post by a journalist in France caught my attention.   A little snippet, if I may:

The rebellion is spreading spontaneously -- driven especially by racist police conduct that is the daily lot of these youths. It's incredible the level of police racism -- these young are arrested or controlled by the police, shaken down, pushed around, and have their papers checked simply because they have dark sins, and the police are verbally brutal, calling them 'bougnoules' [a racist insult, something like the American "towel-heads", only worse], 'dirty Arabs' and more. The police bark, 'Lower your eyes! Lower your eyes!' as if they had no right even to look a policeman in the face. It's utterly dehumanizing. No wonder these kids feel so divorced from authority.

Wow.  Certainly, there are better ways to voice your dissatisfaction with goverment policy, but I can't blame the youth if the picture is really as dark as the blog paints it to be.

For me, I think the most distrubing thing is that I don't see how an resolution can be reached easily as the core issues are not ones that can be changed overnight or through words alone.  I simply cannot answer what the proper course of action is on behalf of the goverment as there is no central figure with whom to negotiate terms of peace.  Further martial action will surely only be met by more resistence and increased unrest amoung the youth.

Could we be seeing the early stages of a modern day revolution?

Perhaps what's most frightening is that, for the most part, none of the current activity has been organized on any large scale.  I think everyone would fear the invovlment of an organized Islamic uprising which may draw upon the vast network of European Islamic extremists.  Aye, this is a Jihadist's dream in the making.