While President Jacques Chirac was promising that the persons behind the Paris riots will be detained and punished, the young rebels were wounding more than 30 persons and torching over 800 vehicles.

According to Reuters, the most violent clash took place in Grigny, where security forces were lured onto housing estate grounds and then attacked with pellet guns. A police spokesperson stated that two of them sustained serious wounds to the neck and legs.

Further violence was reported in other cities, including Nantes, Rennes, Strasbourg, Lens and Toulouse.

"Nothing seems to be able to stop the civil war that spreads a bit more every day across the whole country", the police union Action Police CFTC said in a statement.
"The events we're living through now are without precedent since the end of the Second World War."

Seizing and torching a bus, torching an elementary school and a church and beating up a Belgian reporter, these are just a few of the acts of violence perpetrated by the French youths.

These riots, which reflect the high unemployment rate among young people, the poverty, but also the large number of Muslim communities that live in a country which is mostly Catholic, were triggered by the death of two youths who were hiding from the police.