The Car-B-Q count in France seems to be returning to its usual levels of a few dozen a night so it is perhaps worth looking at the political reactions and the public's reactions to the reactions.
Starting from the top: l'Escroc has been very quiet. Even the foreign press has noticed this, although many of them do repeat without sniggering his hypocritical duck-billed platitudes about the primacy of the rule of law:
"Everyone must know that the law cannot be broken with impunity. In the republic, no one can break the law without being arrested, prosecuted and sanctioned."
Said hypocrisy, along with his complete lack of anything original in the way of remedies - throw some money at the suburbs - is not, so far as I can tell, endearing him with the general public who think that he ought to do more.
Vile Pin looks to be in equally bad shape. I haven't seen (yet) a comparison with Marie Antoinette but he also seems to subscribe to the "let them eat cake" school of remedy. Although he has been slightly more visible that his boss, Vile Pin is also not precisely wowing the crowds with his dynamsms and evidence of being on top of the situation. However, along with Thierry Breton, the finance minister, he has apparently come up with the wheeze of removing some of the regulations from the troubled areas. As I noted a few days ago I doubt this will do much good because the problem is a general lack of economic growth and health.
The EU managed to get a few headlines by "coming to the aid of the French". This probably helped them avoid publicity for being criticised for not knowing where their money gets spent (for the 11th year in a row) and got them some headlines without the need to actually do anything. For the EU it was a win-win situation. Either France says "oui" in which case they get to slather EU flags over all the nasty suburbs or France, in a fit of nationalistic pride, say "non" in which case they get to say "well we offered what we could" without having to actually do anything. One suspects from the way the "offer" was pitched that they were hoping for the latter response. Given that the EU response basically fell in the "throw money at it" category of remedies I don't think it got much interest within France though so this was a piece of grandstanding that cost very little and produced very little.
Le Pen and his fascist buddies managed to do OK. Despite being almost as quiet as l'Escroc for the first week or so, Le Pen has now managed to come up with his usual "too many foreigners" rhetoric and claims that his National Front has been inundated with requests to join. Of course the censorship issue probably helps too. I have no doubt that Le Pen is saving up all the juicy quotes from TF1 etc about how they reduced coverage to stop a right wing backlash to play in the next presidential election campaign.
However as that last but one link hints, the real winner in all of this is Sarko:
Criticized even by fellow cabinet members for the harsh language he used against residents of the troubled suburbs, Sarkozy - in charge of the police force and immigration issues - has made law and order his personal crusade as he eyes the presidency.
He drew fresh attention to himself last week by taking a page out of Le Pen's playbook, ordering the expulsion from France of any noncitizen found guilty of breaking the law during the violence.
His hard-line stance and his indefatigable style - visiting police officers and firemen in the suburbs almost every night since the trouble began - have earned him plaudits from the public.
An opinion poll published Sunday showed that he was the politician most trusted to resolve the problems in the suburbs, with 53 percent support, just ahead of Mr. de Villepin with 52 percent.
"Politically, I do not feel weakened," Sarkozy told the daily "Le Monde" newspaper on Monday.
The recent disorder, Duhamel suggests, "allows Le Pen to hold on to his electorate, but Sarkozy stops him winning more. Sarkozy has given a very energetic response."
I suspect that initially people were annoyed at the way that Sarko had apparently provoked the riots but it is becoming increasingly clear that his provocation was more on the lines of trying to get laws enforced universally than any thing else and that is something that people find hard to criticise. The BBC, which as I have noted before, is doing good work covering the riots, makes this point crystal clear in a piece entitled "Sarkozy shines amid controversy". Likewise Al Zarqawi Press points out that the Sarko vision is not limited to crime:
The biggest champion of affirmative action is Sarkozy, who has become the main magnet of immigrant anger after calling suburban delinquents "scum."
While Sarkozy does not support quotas, which by law are generally not allowed in the United States, he has favored active recruitment in underprivileged immigrant areas and scholarships for the brightest minority youths.
Sarkozy also supports programs to educate imams. Some see this as a way to reach out to Muslims; some also view it as a way to keep tabs on Islamic communities.
(Note the utterly bizarre mention of how quotas are not permitted in the US)
I don't think Sarko intended to cause riots per se, but I do think he did intend to highlight the problems in the underclass and highlight how the approaches of the last few decades of French government by both the left and the right have completely failed to fix them. I don't think he is necessarily correct in his solutions but he is at least willing to admit that the current solutions have failed and to try something different.