"THE FRENCH," wrote journalist James Cameron, are "an erratic and brilliant people, who have all the gifts except of running their country." By the time French officials tease out just why gangs of disaffected "youths" have been torching cars and attacking policemen, large swathes of the Paris banlieues may recall Dresden circa 1945.

The Gallic chatterati have no shortage of explanations for the rampaging: discrimination, poverty, dismal economic prospects, bleak living conditions, insensitive French law enforcement, provocative "anti-Muslim" statutes, the de facto segregation of Muslim and North African immigrant families from native Frenchmen. No doubt some--perhaps many--of these factors have stoked the anger.

But few dare call the violence by its proper name: barbarism. Those who do talk tough--like France's interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy--find themselves scorned by the elite tolerance brigades and threatened by the goons. President Jacques Chirac implored that "the law must be applied in a spirit of dialogue and respect" since "a lack of dialogue and an escalation of disrespectful behavior will lead to a dangerous situation." Note the words "lead to." Chirac made those comments on November 2nd. The riots were already a week old.

It's long been predicted that France's simmering cauldron of lawless Muslim ghettoes would someday combust. But few anticipated the degree of coordination among the rioters, their rapid proliferation across the country, or the apparent glee they've taken in setting their neighborhoods ablaze.

Along with the chronic troubles in Iraq, the 7/7 bombings in London, and last year's murder of Theo van Gogh in Holland, the French riots pose one of the central geopolitical questions of our age: Does democracy quell ideological fanaticism?

President Bush thinks so, and he's based his long-range anti-terrorism strategy on spreading liberal institutions and decent governance in the Middle East. The intellectual linchpin of the "Bush Doctrine"--as enunciated most prominently in the 2002 National Security Strategy and Bush's second inaugural--holds that democracies don't make war on each other and dysfunctional tyrannies breed radicalism. Hence, America should make the promotion of freedom--economic, political, and religious--the lodestar of its foreign policy, especially (but not solely) in the Arab world.

The French have never had much truck with the Bush doctrine. Too risky in its military aims and too quixotic in its democratic triumphalism, has been the Chirac government's basic stance. Of course, anti-Bush doctrine attitudes among the French can partly be explained by sheer resentment of the American hyperpuissance. But as the riots indicate, they were also a function of pragmatic fears--fears that support for the U.S.-led war in Iraq would spark France's ethnic-Muslim powderkeg.

This is not to excuse French intransigence on Iraq. Chirac behaved unforgivably not by opposing the invasion, but by actively undermining America's anti-Saddam diplomacy. If anything, as Mark Steyn and others have noted, French Arabs interpreted Chirac's resistance to the war as a signal of weakness.

No doubt the French also looked askance at Bush's linkage of Arab democratization and Western security. After all, France is a democracy, and yet its own domestic Arab population becomes more radicalized by the day. Surely this offers proof that Islam and democracy don't mix?