America From Abroad : Worried French Government Feels the Heat From L.A. Riots : Violence in U.S. inspires programs to soothe racial tensions in a country with the Continent’s largest minority population.

The Los Angeles riots and aftermath have had a ripple effect even in distant France, inspiring government ministers to create new programs aimed at preventing similar outbreaks of urban violence here. In some cases, such as the decision to assign 4,000 military draftees to blighted urban areas to help with crime prevention and community services, the French programs exceed in scope many of the remedies under discussion in the United States.

Last month, the French Ministry for Urban Affairs unveiled a nine-point plan for soothing tensions and providing community programs in poor--mainly Arab and black African immigrant--suburban communities outside France’s major cities.

The program was announced by Urban Affairs Minister Bernard Tapie, a flashy, self-made millionaire who grew up in poverty in the same kind of suburban communities where France faces its biggest problems.

Days later, Tapie, who said he had recruited leading business leaders and financiers to help with the program, was forced to resign after he was charged in French courts with making an illegal profit on a Japanese business deal. But Prime Minister Pierre Beregovoy, stressing the urgency of confronting urban problems in the post-Los Angeles climate of social unrest, personally took charge of the Urban Affairs Ministry file and pledged to institute the programs.

Other programs in the urban plan announced by the French government included the creation of a corps of 500 paid “parent school assistants,” recruited from the ranks of long-term unemployed to work in problem schools; the creation of night-and-day “citizen centers” in public housing projects to deal with community needs, and the launching of urban renewal construction projects in ten “especially run-down” communities. The government gave no estimate of the cost of the programs. Elsewhere in Europe, discussion of the Los Angeles riots has also been widespread.

In Britain, for example, the specter of Los Angeles has caused officials to examine the potential for a new outbreak of violence in the racially troubled Brixton area of London, where serious race riots erupted in the late 1980s.

A series of violent acts by a gang of young motorcyclists in Coventry, West Midlands, concerned authorities there. The gang members have challenged police and torched several businesses in the public housing projects where unemployment is rampant.

“I don’t condone the looting or the violence,” local Labor Party leader Bob Ainsworth told reporters in a statement similar to those made by many in Los Angeles, “but what have we done to improve disadvantaged areas? The problems are not going to disappear overnight when 50% of the population is unemployed.”

But the post-Los Angeles atmosphere has most affected France, which has the Continent’s largest, potentially most volatile, minority population. Public shock over the graphic television images of the Los Angeles rioting created an immediate appeal for government action.

“I think seeing those television pictures of the riots had repercussions on French public opinion,” sociologist Gilles Kepel, an expert on Arab immigration at the Paris-based Institut des Sciences Politiques, explained in a telephone interview, “and that had the effect of accelerating the measures taken in recent days.”

Newspapers, magazines and television public affairs programs have been preoccupied with the Los Angeles events and the question: “Could the same thing happen here?”

A recent issue of the newspaper Le Monde was typical, prominently featuring four articles dealing with fallout from the Los Angeles riots.

One, contributed by France’s only black senior official, state secretary for integration Kofi Yamgnane, discussed “lessons to be learned from these events so we can properly direct our future.”

In another, Michel Noir, the young mayor of Lyon, France’s second-most-populous city, wrote that the Los Angeles riots demonstrated the need for emergency aid for French cities.

Unlike in the United States, where most of the country’s poor are concentrated in the inner cities, France’s urban troubles are found in the industrial suburbs that ring Paris, Lyon and Marseilles. Although crime and drug-related problems are nowhere near the scale of those plaguing the United States, France has experienced several outbreaks of rioting and looting in some of the larger public housing communities.

In some cases, the incidents were sparked by episodes of police violence. Last spring in the sprawling, suburban Paris low-income housing project, Mantes-La-Jolie, for example, there were two days of riots after police shot to death a young Arab Muslim, a member of the country’s largest minority group. Several businesses were burned; no one was killed.

The Mantes-La-Jolie outbreak was one of several ethnically rooted riots that erupted in France last year. In Satrouville, another Paris suburb with a large immigrant population, two days of riots--resulting in considerable damage to businesses--broke out after the shooting death of a young French Arab, D’Jamel Chettouh, 18, by an illegally armed security guard at a shopping center. Serious rioting also occurred in the Lyon suburb of Vaulx-en-Velin.

In recent years, crime has evolved as a major political issue in the industrial suburbs, building political support for the extreme right-wing National Front party led by Jean-Marie Le Pen. To ease these concerns about mounting crime, Interior Minister Paul Quiles last week announced plans to put 3,200 additional police on patrol in “sensitive, heavily populated areas.”

The debate also has a partisan political aspect, bolstering support for the social-welfare policies of the French Socialist government. President Francois Mitterrand, whose 11-year rule has been foundering, quickly used the Los Angeles riots to attack the market-economy positions of his right-wing opposition.

“It’s very nice,” said Mitterrand, “to promote capital, profits and investments in business, but these riots show that the social needs of any country must not be neglected. . . . American society is conservative and economically capitalist. Here are some of the results of that.”

Despite the fears, the consensus of French pundits is that something on the scale of the Los Angeles riots could not happen here, mainly because France is a more humane, less racist place with a much stronger commitment to social welfare programs.

Jean Daniel, editor of the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur magazine, bible of the intellectual left, wrote an essay on the Los Angeles events titled: “Is It Possible in France?” Daniel agonized at length over the issue, giving the United States credit for successfully integrating its minorities into the political system.

“The birth of a large, black middle class is an important phenomenon,” Daniel wrote, “notably illustrated by the elections of black mayors in 25 major cities where they are not necessarily part of the majority. . . . The military chief of staff, Colin Powell, is black. . . . “

But, like Mitterrand, Daniel concluded that France’s biggest advantage in avoiding racial and class tensions is its extensive social programs, which essentially guarantee free education and health care for life as well as generous allowances for the unemployed. “France can take comfort in the major, incontestable fact that its social laws are a thousand times more protective than in New York or Los Angeles,” commented Daniel.

Harlem Desir, the black leader of the national civil rights movement, S.O.S. Racisme, thinks the potential for a similar outbreak of violent rage exists in France but notes that the racial histories of the two countries are very different. White French racial animus is mainly directed against relatively recent immigrants, mostly from North Africa, and their children.

The United States is a nation of immigrants, but it also has a 200-year-old legacy of slavery that continental France does not have. France, with the world’s fourth-largest economy, is a social welfare state in the modern European tradition.

“The ferment of discontent and exclusionism exists in France as it does in the United States. We also have a constituency of misery, particularly in immigrant population areas,” Desir said in an interview, “but it is true that the social system works much better here.”

France’s Answer to Urban Trouble

Here are the nine urban programs announced by French Urban Affairs Minister Bernard Tapie:

1. Citizen Centers: 24-hour community centers to be established in “tough” public housing communities; open for meetings, events, staffed by social workers.

2. Private Sector Participation: Recruitment of private, state businesses to act as “godfathers” to community programs in troubled neighborhoods.

3. School Parent Assistants: Hiring of 500 unemployed parents of schoolchildren to work in schools and help maintain discipline.

4. Neighborhood Boards: Creation of new local political entities to help the poor get their problems heard by city councils.

5. Urban Draftees: 4,000 Frenchmen serving compulsory military service would be assigned to urban duty--1,000 as auxiliary police, 2,000 as school assistants, 1,000 as liaisons with community groups.

6. Urban Renewal Program: Demolition and reconstruction in 10 run-down areas.

7. National Demonstration: Government-called demonstration before fall to mobilize support for urban programs; described as a “giant happening.”

8. Research Center: Creation of national urban research center to collect data and compare experiences with urban programs.

9. Public Reports: Regular reports about progress in urban areas; first due in July.