PARIS — With her pink-and-orange hair and pierced lower lip, Manuella Pereira considers herself a rebel standing up for fellow young people across France.
But the diminutive 17-year-old from a well-to-do suburb learned a harsh lesson about solidarity when she went to Paris last week to join a student march on the majestic esplanade of the Invalides military monument.
"A friend of mine got robbed and I got tear-gassed," said Pereira, a student at Albert Schweitzer High School in Le Raincy. In scenes recorded by television cameras, swarms of hooded, masked youths infiltrated the march Thursday in an upscale tourist district in the heart of Paris, beating and stomping the marchers, stealing their cellphones and money, and torching cars.
The mayhem recalled last year's riots in outlying, immigrant-dominated housing projects -- for good reason, police say. Many of the marauders at the Invalides and in similar incidents elsewhere were not students, but unemployed dropouts from the projects, they say.
"On one side, the cars burning, and on the other, people with their families marching peacefully," Pereira said. "The [vandals] don't care about their future. They just want to perpetrate violence no matter what."
As France braces for major nationwide strikes to protest a new labor law today, an embattled government confronts two youth crises that threaten to converge with resounding impact.
One involves the students, mostly middle-class and wealthy activists whose movement has shut down high schools and universities with the kind of rowdy, but essentially nonviolent, protests to which the French are accustomed. Joined by France's powerful labor unions, the students accuse the government of endangering their future job security with proposed labor reforms.
The second involves another world: the bleak, crime-ridden public housing projects where unemployment among young people can approach 50%. Youths there want a better future too, but they tend to express their discontent with nihilistic outbursts of arson and vandalism.
Tension between the two is evident on the streets. On Monday morning, more than a hundred vandals went on a rampage outside a high school occupied by student protesters in Saint-Denis, a tough suburb near the birthplace of the November riots, and burned cars and threw stones.
