The Guardian’s upright Sunday appendage, The Observer reports on growing tensions in France – anger, resentment and frustration that could spill out into open generational warfare any day now:

They call them the ‘baby losers’, the lost generation, ’sacrificed’ for the pleasure and leisure of their parents. And now, led by an unlikely alliance of economists, sociologists, angry 30-something commentators and a few self-hating turncoats from the ranks of the ‘baby boomers’ themselves, they are striking back.
They claim to be aiming to halt a widening gap between generations in France. Their enemies say they are trying to rob those who have worked hard all their lives of the fruits of their labours. ‘Our children will hate us,’ admits Denis Jeambar, 58, one of France’s most senior journalists and one of the few ‘baby-boomers’ to break rank with his peers. ‘And they will be right because we will have left them an exhausted, used-up, slack society.’

Hey, at least they got the “self-hating” right. Back off, vicious back-striker!

Meanwhile, out there in the suburbs, another generation – the ‘youths’, who also have not worked all their lives and are keen for a little robbing of their own are striking forward (Yahoo, AP):

EPINAY-SUR-SEINE, France – On a routine call, three unwitting police officers fell into a trap. A car darted out to block their path, and dozens of hooded youths surged out of the darkness to attack them with stones, bats and tear gas before fleeing. One officer was hospitalized.

[..]On Sunday, a band of about 30 youths, some wearing masks, forced passengers out of a bus in a southern Paris suburb in broad daylight Sunday, set it on fire, then stoned firefighters who came to the rescue, police said. No one was injured. Two people were arrested, one of them a 13-year-old, according to LCI television.

Anyhow, back to the important stuff. The Observer explains why those aggressive 30-something granny-haters are seething and poised to strike back:

The problem is simple. While those in their sixties, such as President Jacques Chirac or actress Catherine Deneuve, enjoy a quality of life that is the envy of much of Europe, the generations born after them can expect no such privileges. According to Louis Chauvel, sociologist at the National Foundations for Political Science, for the first time in recent history French citizens between the age of 20 and 40 can expect a lower standard of living than the one before, largely because the previous generation have decided not to share. ‘Some talk of a war between the generations but we are not there yet,’ said Chauvel. ‘But the reality has been a massive pillaging of the resources of one generation by another.’

See, simple. Catherine Deneuve is not sharing. Phew, at least for all this talk of “war between generations”, we are not there yet.

Now this “massive pillaging of the resources of one generation by another”, that’s something that other unsettled generation, the “youths”, can certainly share in (London Times):

An average of 112 cars a day have been torched across France so far this year and there have been 15 attacks a day on police and emergency services. Nearly 3,000 police officers have been injured in clashes this year. Officers have been badly injured in four ambushes in the Paris outskirts since September. Some police talk of open war with youths who are bent on more than vandalism.

“The thing that has changed over the past month is that they now want to kill us,” said Bruno Beschizza, the leader of Synergie, a union to which 40 per cent of officers belong. Action Police, a hardline union, said: “We are in a civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists.”

War? Didn’t these guys read the Observer? We are not there yet.

Not to worry, the Observer has more details about that more pressing problem of those incorrigible 30-somethings. What radical Islamists?

The problem is most acute among the French middle-classes. Chauvel, born in 1967, quotes rafts of statistics: in 1973, only six per cent of recent university leavers were unemployed, now the rate is 25 to 30 per cent; salaries have stagnated for 20 years while property prices have doubled or trebled; though the overall proportion of French citizens suffering in poverty has not changed, where in the 1960s the poor were predominantly the old, now they are the young; in 1970, salaries for 50 year olds were only 15 per cent higher than those for workers aged 30, the gap now is 40 per cent.
A raft of recent books, talks, magazine articles and meetings may change that. An article last week in Telerama on the ‘war between generations’ provoked a huge response. The author, Weronika Zarachowicz, 38, was flooded with calls and emails thanking her for raising the issue. However Zarachowicz also received angry calls from ‘baby boomers’. ‘One even compared me to the radio stations in Rwanda that incited massacres,’ she told The Observer. ‘Apparently I was calling for anyone over 50 to be killed!’

Not anyone, just the police and firefighters. And gynecologists. Anyway, that explains officer Beschizza’s comment above. The ‘youths’ have been incited to kill by whining sociologists (Mullouis in French). Here’s one who must have read Zarachowicz’s article for sure:

FLAMES lick around a burning car on a tiny telephone screen. Omar, 17, a veteran of France’s suburban riots, replayed the sequence with pride. “It was great. We did lots of them and then we went out and torched more the next day.”

Omar, whose parents immigrated from Mali, was savouring memories of the revolt that erupted 12 months ago from his home, the Chêne Pointu estate in Clichy-sous-Bois, in the eastern outskirts of Paris. “We’re ready for it again. In fact it hasn’t stopped,” he added.

Not afraid to get their hands dirty the brave Observer reporters got out there amongst the volatile “lost generation” to find out whats really making them so mad that they are even prepared to whinge to jounalists about it:

In one bistro in Paris’s seventh arrondissement last week the issue raised tempers. Michele Fayard, a 31-year-old teacher, agreed fervently. ‘I rent an apartment, I haven’t got a car and I’m not sure what will happen if I have kids. It makes me angry when I see how some of the older bureaucrats live. They only care about themselves.’

You haven’t got a car? I wouldn’t worry about that too much, it would probably just end up as fuel for a carBQ anyway. And to think, people older than you are wealthier and are just going around hoarding the world’s opportunities for themselves. The outrage! Why, you should burn their cars too, of course. The ‘youth’ tried that, and look what they’re getting:

President Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, his Prime Minister, are waging their own, softer, campaign to undermine the colleague whom they do not want to be president. M de Villepin called in community leaders this week and promised to accelerate hundreds of millions of pounds of measures that were promised last autumn to relieve the plight of the immigrant-dominated suburbs.

Never ones to suffer from false modesty, the intrepid Observer pundits next give us THE TRUTH:

The truth is that the generation that profited from the rapid economic growth and the expansion of the state and public industries in the decades between 1960 and 1990 – and from the new levels of meritocracy and social mobility won by the student revolts of 1968 – is now ageing.

The truth a la Observer: The students revolts of 1968 are to thank for the opulent, ’socially mobile’ ways of some of them older fatcat beaurocrats. Well, if that’s the case these current youngsters are just going to be swimming in wealth, ‘cause baby, the students revolts of 1968 are going to look like a UN resolution of condemnation compared to what you’ve got coming this time round:

Car-burning has become so routine on the estates that it has been eclipsed in news coverage by the violence against police. Sebastian Roche, a sociologist who has published a book on the riots, said that torching a vehicle had become a standard amusement. “There is an apprenticeship of destruction. Kids learn where the petrol tank is, how to make a petrol bomb,” he told The Times.

The Observer then back up their “truth” with the trusted opinion of an expert:

‘The problem is that the older generation has not passed on the relay to the younger generation,’ said Nicholas Charbonneau, author of Generation 69, a book on the phenomenon. ‘There is no place for the young in this country. All our politicians are older than those overseas, there is not a senior editor of a newspaper or magazine who is under 55. France is becoming a museum… a very beautiful museum, but a museum all the same.’

I think he must mean the Baghdad museum.

Michel Thooris, head of the small Action Police union, claims that the new violence is taking on an Islamic fundamentalist tinge.

“Many youths, many arsonists, many vandals behind the violence do it to cries of ‘Allah Akbar’ (God is Great) when our police cars are stoned, ” he said in an interview.

[..] “First, it was a rock here or there. Then it was rocks by the dozen. Now, they’re leading operations of an almost military sort to trap us,” said Loic Lecouplier, a police union official in the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of Paris. “These are acts of war.”

H/t: LGF 1, and 2, Gates of Vienna