Jérome,

You should stress that the first publication of his book was September 11 2002, before the actual invasion of Iraq, and written even earlier than that. I've always been impressed by Todd and his mix of gumption and scholarship, even when I disagree. I was still living in the US when I first read "After the Empire" in French at the end of 2002 and I remembered thinking "Wow, le Manu is pulling a bit too hard on his case, a bit over the top, isn't he?". The following 3 years proved that he was, alas, right smack on the money.

Back to his interview, thanks a lot for the translation. I really appreciate 2 of his points, that bears repeating, in particular to Americans.

• The rates of mixed marriages, very high in France, compared to other Western countries. France has a few ghettos in the US meaning. Integration does work. The real problem is that racism remains strong and given the lousy economy, the weakest always hurts the most, meaning immigrants and theirs children. So, yes, it sucks being Beur or Black in France but the real problem is that it more generally sucks being jobless. Race is somewhat peripheral.
• On how spectacular those riots are: lots of USians I know were truly panicked by what they were seeing on CNN and I had a very hard time explaining that it was related to the type of crowd control we use in France. Simply put, in France, we don't shoot people to protect things. So rioters have quite a free hand until they get arrested. I finally got my break by asking them : What would happen in the US in similar circumstances? Answer : LA riots, at least 50 dead, 2000 injured in 6 days of riots or so. France: not a single rioter killed, barely a handful of serious injuries in 2 weeks. That's when they went "ping" light bulb. Todd does very well to stress the quality of the police's work on those riots.