Worlds Apart - Paris Suburb on the Divide Between Hope and Despair

On Sunday mornings, the covered market opposite the station in the leafy suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois - barely half an hour's drive from central Paris - spills opulently on to the streets and boulevards. Stalls selling fruit and veg, vintage clothes, kitchen utensils and dodgy-looking watches line the streets beneath neatly trimmed plane trees.

Locals emerge into the autumn sunshine from pleasant, turn-of-the-century millstone houses, baskets in hand and children in tow. Some cross the street - past the poster advertising the Maurice Utrillo exhibition at the town hall - to the Parc Dumont, where this weekend's Fête de l'Arbre has crepes, woodcarving, pot plants and interactive displays on the Forests of Elsewhere.

This is one France: calm, comfortable, concerned with the good things in life. Half a mile away is another: the stained concrete slabs and high-rise blocks of the Cité des 3000 - on the fringe of Aulnay - home to people for whom, if they are lucky, the good things in life might one day include a short-term, minimum-wage job, humping bags at Charles de Gaulle airport.

Here, the trees are fewer. The council-run social club was burned to the ground on Thursday. The supermarket's doors are shattered, and rectangles of melted asphalt mark the spots where dozens of cars have gone up in flames over the past 10 nights.

On the grim roads around these estates, a police station, a primary school, a fire station, a retirement home, a carpet warehouse and a car dealership have all been torched, stoned or ransacked by youths whose sole objective, it seems, is to do as much damage as they can.

By yesterday - even on an estate where more than 40% of the population is under 25, and where social workers estimate youth unemployment to be pushing 40% - what sympathy there may once have been for the rioters was wearing thin. Police say the troublemakers number no more than 150 youths, with some as young as 13.

"It's madness - more like Baghdad than Seine-Saint-Denis," said Mourad, 39, who has lived on the 3000 since he was four. "What are they doing, torching classrooms where their cousins go to school and cars their neighbours use to go to work? Stoning buses that are the only other way off this place?"

Ratiba, who lives in a fifth-floor flat and has watched up to eight cars burn beneath her window, said she had barely slept for days. "The children wake at every noise," she said. "On Thursday I counted nine fires from the windows. It's time for it all to stop now - we're tired and frightened."

On Saturday morning, about 3,000 people walked through these streets in a silent protest march, calling for a halt to the violence. Moucrad, who runs a small second-hand car dealership that went up in flames last week, was among them, "to demand that we can work in peace". Nothing can excuse the destruction of local businesses employing local people, he said. "I opened at the beginning of October - and now I'm closed."

Half a mile away, at the Sunday morning market, in the other Aulnay - the other France - sympathy was hard to find. But there was incomprehension, and cold anger, in abundance.

"Where are their parents?" asked Marie-Claude, 67. "What are these kids doing on the streets at 2am? How dare they mock the police? What is happening in this country?"

A customer at the fresh fish stall, Pierre-Edouard, stout in a plush leather car coat, was blunter. "We should send in the fucking army," he said. "Stamp it out hard. They're only doing it for kicks - and we're agonising about it!"

Not everyone was so harsh. Round the corner from the station, Mounir, 26, was sweeping the pavement outside his kebab shop. He said he could understand, up to a point. "Burning cars and dodging cops is a lot more fun than playing video games," he said.

"[Interior minister Nicolas] Sarkozy provoked them - he insulted them. And the police, they hassle them - ID checks all the time. But when you've got no hope, you look at things differently. You don't care. Most of these kids' fathers have never had a proper job. Why should they think things will be different for them?"