Chris, to broaden on what others wrote, indeed the replies you got have several in-depth discussions on the subject behind them, a major part of which was that most of the English-speaking press (and, in turn, other press that used them as source) gave a very slanted and untrue view of the background of the actual events in France.

Some points on this:

The motivation was not religious, not a single car-burner talking on TV (and the mummed car-burners' willingness to talk to the media was another interesting angle) mentioned anything religion, in fact it was even denounced by French Muslims (as well as the majority of even the inhabitants of the cités in polls). This had more to do with the French tradition of social unrest. Or, a more focused one: culturally the car-burners had much more to do with local hip-hop culture. (You could say, what Eminem is only preaching about in as video clip, they did in practice.) Indeed our French or France-based expat readers confirmed that faces shown on TV were often white, e.g. no children of immigrants just of poor people in the cités.

A further point is that 'riot' may not be the right word for what happened. There were very few clashes with police - most of it was arson attacks, mostly against cars, you can't compare this to, say, the Rodney King riot in LA with 53 dead - or even football hooligan riots.

Furthermore, there is the issue of media attention. This was not a wave of arson attacks, but an uptick in arson attacks noticed by the media. A hundred cars were burnt every day even before it in France - and even more in Britain!

Another point our French readers stressed is in the prehistory of the conflict between the youth of the poor banlieues and the police. One of the measures of the previous leftist government to improve the situation there was to establish a 'neighbourhood police', i.e. policemen who know the communities they patrol in. But in the new right-wing government that came to power 2002, tough-guy Sarkozy dissolved these - and brought in outsiders into the cités, from a police branch known for its harshness, who then proceeded with aggressive identity checks (which were also quite racist in whom to pick), 'pre-emptive arrests' and such, all the while nothing was done to ease the job-seeking problems that are more severe for marginalised people in France than elsewhere.

A final point is that of the final reaction of the government: it wasn't just the allovance of declaring emergency situation and curfews, but the PM choose to make wide-sweeping promises on how to ease the job- , police- and education-related problems.

Last, some of the dozens of threads we had back then, and one more recent:
Paris riots
Paris 'riots': My aunt's building burned yesterday night
Unemployment rates of immigrants/non-immigrants, sensitive suburbs vs rest of France
Crisis of French society - and the left
Paris now nothing but cinders and ashes. [<-satirical entry]
Why the French Riots Were a Good Thing

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}