Oui, cést la Zone

Para quem estiver interessado em compreender melhor o contexto político e cultural dos tumultos parisienses, aqui fica uma sugestão de leitura:

The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris (repare na data de publicação).

Este ensaio ainda está disponível na página do City Journal, onde foi inicialmente publicado, e está também incluído nesta compilação. Um excerto:

A terrible chasm has opened up in French society, dramatically exemplified by a story that an acquaintance told me. He was driving along a six-lane highway with housing projects on both sides, when a man tried to dash across the road. My acquaintance hit him at high speed and killed him instantly.

According to French law, the participants in a fatal accident must stay as near as possible to the scene, until officials have elucidated all the circumstances. The police therefore took my informant to a kind of hotel nearby, where there was no staff, and the door could be opened only by inserting a credit card into an automatic billing terminal. Reaching his room, he discovered that all the furniture was of concrete, including the bed and washbasin, and attached either to the floor or walls.

The following morning, the police came to collect him, and he asked them what kind of place this was. Why was everything made of concrete?

“But don’t you know where you are, monsieur?” they asked. “C’est la Zone, c’est la Zone.”

La Zone is a foreign country: they do things differently there.