The young men in hooded sweatshirts go by rapper tags-Spion, El Pach, Benou and K-Soc-and like thousands of others from the grimy, soulless apartment blocks that ring France's big cities, they were out cruising the mean streets of Paris' banliieues, or suburbs, last week. Near the city hall of Bobigny, a rough town on the northeastern outskirts of Paris, a circle of fire marked where a trash container had been set alight to provoke a police patrol. "People mix it up with the police every day around here," says Spion, 19, who is of Moroccan origin. But this is different, says his friend Benou, whose parents came from Algeria. "This is May 1968-but in the banlieues."
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