Reporter's Notebook From Paris

CBS News correspondent Elaine Cobbe is based in Paris.

That's the question on everyone's lips here. Some ask out of fear because they are living in the affected areas, others out of a need to gauge the political and security response and others, not directly affected, out of sheer bewilderment that this phenomenon has spread so far so fast, engulfing not just the Paris suburbs but poor areas around many of France's wealthy cities and towns.

The rioters don't have a neat list of demands. They're not part of an organized group. But they share a common background in that they're all from the high-rise housing projects on the outskirts of the cities. These bleak towers were built in the 1960s and the 1970s to house the waves of immigrant workers from north and west Africa. These workers were welcomed with open arms as they took the jobs the French didn't want and, in those heady days of economic success, didn't have to do themselves.

But the golden years are over. France has the highest unemployment rate in western Europe and young people from all levels of society face the problem of finding a decent job with a decent salary. For young people in these projects, it's at least twice as hard – the average unemployment rate in the poorer suburbs is more than twice the national average, at 20.7 per cent. And in some of the hardest-hit areas, fifty percent of young men are jobless, and likely to remain so.

Most of the rioters are angry young men. They're French-born, French-educated, French. But they still live in the ghettos these projects have become. Educated alongside Jean-Charles and Sandrine, who've gone on to good jobs, it's no wonder Mohamed and Mustapha feel the French slogan of "liberté, égalité, fraternité" is color-coded.

Nasser Ramdane is with the anti-racism group SOS Racisme. He was a child in the 1980s when he and others like him were known as Beurs, a slang inversion of Arab, a name they chose themselves and liked to use. After the 1998 World Cup victory with its multi-racial team, they were French. After 9/11, they were Islamists, victim of the generalized idea that all Muslims are Islamists – another source of discontent among these people.

There are others behind some of the violence, though. Some of these projects are "no-go" zones, where drug dealers and criminal gangs rule. They have no interest in law and order being restored to the police and local authorities so they fuel the violence in their neighborhoods. Many of them have weapons, including automatic pistols and sub-machine guns. The police fear a serious escalation of violence in these areas if the Interior Minister's promise to take back control is acted on.

People here aren't surprised that the riots happened. There have been riots in these suburbs since the 1980s, usually on occasions when the police were linked to deaths of local youths.

What no-one had predicted – at least, not for this time – was that the riots would spread from Clichy-sous-Bois, where two teenage boys were electrocuted after they fled a police id check. Within days, the violence had engulfed the poorer northern and northeastern suburbs around Paris. And then they jumped south to Nice, east to Strasbourg, west to Nantes so that now there are new flashpoints every night.

The score sheet is disturbing. Some 5,000 cars torched; dozens of public buildings, schools and community centers burnt out; one man dead at the hands of the rioters; dozens of people injured including two police officers fired on with birdshot in an ambush and almost a thousand people arrested – half of them under 18, some as young as 11. And we're still counting as the violence continues…

Some fear the counting is exacerbating the situation. Now France 3 state television says it will stop giving the numbers – for fear it prompts the youths to go for a new high score.

The media have other problems with this story. It's just not safe in these areas when the riots are underway. As is happening in so many other places, journalists are increasingly being seen not as impartial witnesses but as, at best, tools to be used or, at worst, the enemy, to be attacked. France 2 state television decided to stop sending its cameras into these suburbs after a crew was attacked and their car overturned and torched. They ran, fearing for their own safety.

Others are afraid too – neighboring countries like Belgium, Switzerland, Germany. Already, there have been car-burning incidents in Berlin and Bremen in Germany and in the Belgian capital, Brussels. Most western European nations have immigrant populations, often housed in similar conditions and subject to the same racial discrimination. If the tinderbox flamed in France, it could, they reason, happen to them too.