Not at all to my surprise, the Car-B-Q party was observed to be going on in Grasse last night in an estate next to my favourite hypermarché. I did not personally witness it but a former work colleague who lives across the valley had what he described as a perfect view of the helicopters, search lights etc. Said ex-colleague is sitting in my home office as I write this because the ever efficient France Telecom have managed to completely bugger up the phones in his part of the world since Saturday so that all calls to houses in the quartier are being directed to the house of a (rather irritated) Australian couple and vital things for work like DSL are, of course, completely hosed.
I think it would be quite possible to draw a sensible moral from this tale of France Telecom's inaction since it isn't just FT that is inefficent in France, other national utilities can also be pretty useless, and many of the local government provided services are, to put it bluntly, crap. Now I know English people winge about serivce levels in the UK but the totally uncharming customer service attitude displayed by the state or municipal owned utilities, not to mention that of the oh-so-unhelpful incivil nonservants in France takes customer service to a new low - the petite Anglaise had a representative story of France Telecom service a few months ago. Service is in fact sufficiently low that we residents are pleasantly surprised when things are fixed on time with no fuss. The inhabitants of the banlieues have described frequently how they feel abandoned and ignored by the state, the problem is that the rest of us are equally abandonded but we have alternate resources so that our abandonment doesn't cause us more than occasional annoyance or inconvenience.
In August I described Grasse as the "hairy armpit of the Côte d'Azur" and the town council charges more and provides less than almost other municipality in the region. I live in a neighbouring commune where the mayor is highly efficient and this means that we frequently receive amazed looks when we explain at parties that water leaks, holes in the roads etc. are fixed within hours of being reported. Grasse is the opposite and moreover, as I noted in August, it seems to have a skewed sense of priorities perfering to tart up roundabouts (the Mas I mentioned in that post has morphed into a complete mock water mill with working wheel) to actually fixing things that people care about. If I were a rioter I'd steel a car, drive it into that fake mill - which is only a mile or so from last night's fun and games and torch it. The result would be far more representative of Grasse than what is currently on offer.
If these riots result in goverment bodies actually delivering services then they may actually be a good thing, although one suspects that this will not be the result. Mayors are already complaining that they will have financial problems what with all the overtime they have to pay and things like that. One interesting thing is that the riots have meant that last month's announcement that the government planned to sell off some of EDF has rather fallen by the wayside - although the Wapping Liar had an excellent piece on it on Sunday. Assuming that the current unrest dies down and that we return to politics as normal, EDF workers will be busy protesting the privatization over the next few weeks. If EDF "workers" do decide to go on strike I imagine they won't be protesting in a way that draws the attention of the riot police (CRS) because the CRS will be only too glad to hit someone other than an Arab teenager at that point.