Paris's northeastern suburbs continue to fester with unrest as people there blame the deaths of two youths on the police.

But the problems seem to go deeper than that, according to the BBC's reportage:

Nicolas Sarkozy has talked of the need to provide young people with job opportunities.

The interior minister is also an advocate of positive discrimination for ethnic minorities, and of voting rights for foreigners.

'People remember'

But for people in Clichy, what sticks out is the evocative language he has used to back his "zero tolerance" crime policy.

He once said an estate needed a "Kaercher clean", referring to the name of an industrial cleaning manufacturer.

Another man, at the market, says: "Immigrants came here after World War II to help rebuild France but he says their children need a 'Kaercher clean'. People remember that here."

Here is another related story:

When Nadir Dendoune was growing up in the 1980s, his home town of L'Ile Saint-Denis, north of Paris, was a fairly diverse place.

"We were all poor, but there were French people, East Europeans, as well as blacks and Arabs," says Mr Dendoune, 33, an author and something of a celebrity in his estate.

Two decades on, the complexion of the place has changed.

"On my class photos more than half the kids were white," he says. "On today's pictures only one or two are."

L'Ile St-Denis is among the "suburbs" around French cities where immigrants, notably from former North African colonies, have been housed since the 1960s.

Blighted by bad schools and endemic unemployment, the suburbs are hard to escape.

Ten years ago these youths were seen as French "Arabs".

Now most are commonly referred to, and define themselves, as "Muslims".

One TIFF film I saw was Banlieue 13 (District 13), a French action flick. But the premise was the suburbs had become such dysfunctional places that the authorities walled them off to keep people in, leaving them as de facto frontiers.

The final solution for one was to have a neutron bomb detonated in it.