When the riots erupted early November in the desolate banlieues ringing the major French cities, I wasn't shocked. While visiting Paris from Baltimore earlier in the spring, I witnessed an incident which in a small way but prescient way laid bare the long-simmering rifts that later widened into a chasm that fall.

It was at a nation-wide high school students' demonstration in early March. The students were out protesting a proposed overhaul of the school system that if passed would severely restrict access to higher education. This was the third - and as it turned out, the last - protest against the projected reforms.

On a nippy mid-March afternoon, more than ten thousand young people packed the Place de le République in a noisy, high-spirited protest, the like of which hasn't been seen in the streets here for two generations. Hip-hop boomed through loudspeakers, banners fluttered, and angry chants echoed down the streets.

Although nominally multi-racial, well-dressed, native French clearly dominated the crowd. These were the talented tenth from working and lower middle-class backgrounds; young people with a stake in future careers, rightfully attuned to any restrictions limiting entry into the notoriously competitive French higher education system.

Just a few weeks before, though, the first two protests had broken up into clashes with the police. But it wasn't the students who fought the police both times, but the casseurs- French slang for "muggers" And the casseurs - and the word conjures up images of a menacing underclass from the suburbs - not only attacked the police. Small gangs from the suburbs attacked student protesters too, bragging later to Le Monde that they had come only to “beat up whites” and rip-off cell phones and I-Pods.

By French standards, this was a first. The traditional left angrily accused the police of standing by while "hoodlums" assaulted students. Scrambling to deflect criticism. this time however, the police came ominously well prepared to “keep order,” lining the streets by the hundreds in a brute show of force. Announcing it was there to "protect the police," the Communist Party, via the CGT union, supplied security, circling the demonstration's perimeter with beefy, middle-aged factories heavies (as surprising as it might sound here, the Communist Party in France acts more as a respectable party of law and order than as a subversive menace.)

When young Arabs and Africans from the suburbs showed up in small groups, they instantly stood out, not only by dint of skin color, but more by their clothing, the sort of stylish, upscale, hip-hop dress you see profiled in glossy VIBE ads. Unlike inner city youth in Baltimore I see who so often seem shrouded in veils of protective numbness, those young people from the Paris public housing zones were lively and defiant.

But because at the last two demonstrations the alleged casseurs had used the main body of the protest as a cover for their skirmishes with the cops, this time, the marshals linked arms to keep them from entering the demonstration. Instead, security subtly but systematically forced the suburban youth into a buffer zone in the front, wedged between the marshals and rows of baton and shield-wielding cops, including the regular police, the riot squad, the National Guard and a special paramilitary unit only called out when the Republic is “in danger.”

To me, it looked and felt like a scene out of Z, a throwback to the early 70s Salazar and Franco regimes in southern Europe.

Tension crackled in the air.

Contrary to the lurid media reports of white-bashing suburban thugs, no one paid us any attention. For the next two hours, these young people played an elaborate cat-and-mouse game with the cops, what's known in the suburbs and played for higher stakes as “dancing with the wolves.” The police suddenly moved forward and then stopped, forcing the young suburbanites back. Then the young people from the banlieue would surge ahead again. At any moment, you felt it could explode into a full-fledged riot.

But for all their bravado, they were hopelessly outnumbered and out-gunned. And outmaneuvered as well; after all, this was the cop's turf, not theirs. Every so often the police moved in with surgical precision, surrounding small groups who were doing nothing, hustling them off to nearby paddy wagons waiting out of sight on the side streets. Sometimes plainclothes police darted out of the crowd and tackled someone. Eventually, it was all over.

The underlying message couldn't be more clear. Stay in the suburbs. Don't come downtown. And if you do come downtown, we'll be watching you and we'll get you out if we have to. Here were young Arabs and Africans so feared and despised that both Communist Party and the police joined in keeping them controlled and in their place. It illustrated how the French political elite has dealt with the simmering "suburban problem" for the past decade: formally proclaiming adherence to a shared French identity yet in practice effecting marginalization and segregation, a hypocritical and contradictory policy which now lies shredded in early November's smoke and debris, with the French state scrambling now to recover legitimacy with handouts and by cultivating “responsible” community leaders.