Sometimes I see strange connections as I go from preparing for my history classes to reading the news. I've been working on my lessons on the 1850s leading up to the Civil War and reading David M. Potter's excellent book, The Impending Crisis about this period. I'm struck by the sense of inevitability to the Civil War. The South had been threatening secession since the tariff crisis of the early 1830s. The threats heated up in the 1850s and eventually they did what they ahd been talking about for so long. There is this feeling of an inexorable movement towards war. Of course, part of this is because we know how the story will turn out. That is always the problem in studying history, divorcing your knowledge of what comes next from your analysis of what was going on at any one time.

But when I turn to what is going on in France now, I have that same sense of movement towards an inevitable cataclysm. The rioting is growing rather than being tamped down. It's spreading throughout France. And there seems to be such glee on the part of those rioting. There is nothing that they want or are asking for; they just are glorying in their destructive power.

What began as pitched battles has transformed into a nightly game of cat-and-mouse with the police.

Two or three people set out armed with mobile phones, crowbars and incendiary material. A quick hit with the crowbar on the windscreen of a police van, a Molotov cocktail inside - and they're off back into the sprawling housing estates.

The rioters have also started using motorbikes and mobile phones to trace the movements of police riot squads, in tactics reminiscent of urban guerrilla movements.

'Each night we turn this place into Baghdad', says one masked youth in Sevran near Paris. As a political statement, there have been better - but these riots seem to be more aimed at the television cameras than the National Assembly.

'It would be better to go into Paris than break up everything here,' his friend says, appearing to consider that the victims of the rioting are predominantly their own neighbours and friends.

'Why did they set my car on fire, why mine?' asks one young man as he watches it go up in flames. He knows the perpetrators, he says. They're neighbours of his, but he refuses to name them.

They're totally out of control and seem to be glorying in their viciousness.

In quiet Acheres, on the edge of the St. Germain forest west of the capital, arsonists torched a nursery school, where part of the roof caved in, and about a dozen cars in four attacks over an hour that the mayor said seemed "perfectly organized."

Children's photos clung to the blackened walls, and melted plastic toys littered the floor.

Some residents, gathered at the school gate, demanded that the army be deployed and suggested that citizens band together to protect their neighbourhoods. Mayor Alain Outreman tried to cool tempers.

"We are not going to start militias," he said. "You would have to be everywhere."

In one particularly malevolent attack, youths in the eastern Paris suburb of Meaux prevented paramedics from evacuating a sick person from a housing project.

They pelted rescuers with rocks, then torched the waiting ambulance, an Interior Ministry official said.

They don't care that they're fouling their own nest. Burn a nursery school? Why not? Torch any car that happens to be on the street. Who cares if it belongs to a friend?

If you really want to be depressed, read Theodore Dalrymple's essay about The Barbarians at the Gate in Paris. He was writing in 2002, but his description of what he saw there could have been written last week. His analysis of what has been going on in France will chill you.

I first saw l’insécurité for myself about eight months ago. It was just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain, in a neighborhood where a tolerably spacious apartment would cost $1 million. Three youths—Rumanians—were attempting quite openly to break into a parking meter with large screwdrivers to steal the coins. It was four o’clock in the afternoon; the sidewalks were crowded, and the nearby cafés were full. The youths behaved as if they were simply pursuing a normal and legitimate activity, with nothing to fear.

Eventually, two women in their sixties told them to stop. The youths, laughing until then, turned murderously angry, insulted the women, and brandished their screwdrivers. The women retreated, and the youths resumed their “work.”

A man of about 70 then told them to stop. They berated him still more threateningly, one of them holding a screwdriver as if to stab him in the stomach. I moved forward to help the man, but the youths, still shouting abuse and genuinely outraged at being interrupted in the pursuit of their livelihood, decided to run off. But it all could have ended very differently.

People wants to intervene because they are afraid of what will happen to them. And they know that it is useless anyway because the police will not investigate and the authorities will not prosecute. They've just given up the most basic protections.

It is the private complaint of everyone, however, that the police have become impotent to suppress and detect crime. Horror stories abound. A Parisian acquaintance told me how one recent evening he had seen two criminals attack a car in which a woman was waiting for her husband. They smashed her side window and tried to grab her purse, but she resisted. My acquaintance went to her aid and managed to pin down one of the assailants, the other running off. Fortunately, some police passed by, but to my acquaintance’s dismay let the assailant go, giving him only a warning.

My acquaintance said to the police that he would make a complaint. The senior among them advised him against wasting his time. At that time of night, there would be no one to complain to in the local commissariat. He would have to go the following day and would have to wait on line for three hours. He would have to return several times, with a long wait each time. And in the end, nothing would be done.

As for the police, he added, they did not want to make an arrest in a case like this. There would be too much paperwork. And even if the case came to court, the judge would give no proper punishment. Moreover, such an arrest would retard their careers. The local police chiefs were paid by results—by the crime rates in their areas of jurisdiction. The last thing they wanted was for policemen to go around finding and recording crime.

The French have totally given up the idea of maintaining any semblance of a civil society in these dreadful projects. They seemed to have hoped that if they fed in enough welfare and ignored them, that they could buy peace for the rest of the country. But now that illusion has been laid bare for the delusion that it really was.

France has created problems for itself by their economic policies that increase unemployment, and then contribute to the discontent brewing in these neighborhoods where the unemployment tops 20%.

Everyone acknowledges that unemployment, particularly of the permanent kind, is deeply destructive, and that the devil really does find work for idle hands; but the higher up the social scale you ascend, the more firmly fixed is the idea that the labor-market rigidities that encourage unemployment are essential both to distinguish France from the supposed savagery of the Anglo-Saxon neo-liberal model (one soon learns from reading the French newspapers what anglo-saxon connotes in this context), and to protect the downtrodden from exploitation. But the labor-market rigidities protect those who least need protection, while condemning the most vulnerable to utter hopelessness: and if sexual hypocrisy is the vice of the Anglo-Saxons, economic hypocrisy is the vice of the French.

France won't have the toughness to confront the economic changes that they should make to change the economic trap that they've built for themselves. I'm afraid that they'll keep searching for a way to appease the rioters and just pray that if they throw more welfare into these logements, it will all end.

There has been a lot of schadenfreude here about what is going on in France. It's not hard to have a rather childish sense of satisfaction taht the French who have so longed looked down their oh so superior noses at les Americains. But, the time schadenfreude has passed. What is going on in France will probably spread to other countries in Europe. And we can't forget that some of the 9/11 hijackers came through Europe. It wouldn't be difficult for other such men to hide among those stuck in their wretched projects. What goes on there can come here and spread elsewhere. I just feel a sense of doom about this malevolence spreading throughout Europe and then to our shores.

And if it does, historians will look back at these days of rioting as one of the stepping stones towards that day. They will look back on these days as we now look back at the 1850s. They'll wonder why people didn't take some action to forestall what was heading their way. I don't know what the solution is and if any country would have the fortitude to confront these violent youths head on and change fate. I just have a very sad sense of oncoming doom when I read about Europe.

UPDATE: Let me clarify that, in my musings about America's antebellum period, I'm not seeing much of a parallel between what we went through and what France is going through. The comparison I'm feeling is in that sense of an ineluctable march towards armed conflict that would be so disastrous for so many people. We emerged with slavery ended, but I don't see any such potential victory for the French. They're not going to erradicate Muslim disdain for western ways or that feeling of alienation and desperation that permeates their ghettoes. It seems the best they can hope for is to quiet the violence somewhat in the short term.

In the comments section, Chad makes an interesting comparison to the fall of Rome. That is not a period I know much about, but the parallels are there. Hence the title for Dalrymple's essay: The Barbarians at the Gate in Paris. It is an example that must be so frightening to any thinking Frenchman. And we have to care also, because a successful intifada in the heart of Europe spells disaster for national security here and elsewhere.