Jonah has already posted Theodore Dalrymple’s City Journal article from a few years back. The good Doctor revisits the issue in an article on the French riots in the new UK Spectator. Read the whole thing, dripping as it is with the ironic resignation Dalrymple specializes in, but the conclusion too delicious not to quote directly:

In defence of French social underdevelopment, however, it must be said that arson is much less likely to bother members of the French bourgeoisie than is car-theft to bother members of the British bourgeoisie. In France, your car will not be burnt out unless you are at least teetering on the edge of relative poverty. Despite the animadversions of the French press about savage liberalism, therefore, Britain is a much more egalitarian society than France, where criminality is so much better zoned.