Government offers no solution for a growing surge of insecurity

It was a Saturday afternoon when I heard the thud on the balcony and stuck my head around the doorway to find myself face to face with a burglar. He was a scruffy European in his 30s, wearing a leather jacket, jeans and running shoes. His right hand was flat against the window, which was closed. For a fraction of a second, I feared losing my voice. Then I let out a scream that must have woken them up in the cimetiΦre Montparnasse.

My unwelcome visitor stared at me, then like Saint Nicholas in The Night Before Christmas, raised a finger to his lips to bid silence. In seconds, he vaulted back onto the rooftop.

Forty-five minutes later, two policemen arrived. They'd had a second sighting four buildings away. But they didn't waste time on the grimy hand print he'd left on the window. "The burglars hit the top floors in the day time," one of the cops shrugged.

"They go for the ground floors and first floors at night. What do you expect? This is a bourgeois quartier."

The forces of law and order nonetheless urged me to go to the commissariat in the rue Jean Bart. I dropped by the following day, and was shown 93 photos of criminals fitting the burglar's description.

An officer printed up five copies of my account -- three for the police judiciaire, two for the Department of Justice. "The French administration loves paper," he told me.

When I asked whether it was really worth filing a complaint, the officer scolded me for having "un esprit Anglo-Saxon".

So when my bicycle was stolen from the courtyard of the building one recent night - notwithstanding the electronic code on the front door and the best German lock available - I didn't bother returning to the commissariat.

For days, I glanced forlornly at the bicycle rack each time I passed by, half expecting my bike to come home on its own. A shopkeeper commiserated; "they" stole his baby's pram from a storage cupboard.

The ministry of the interior announced this month that crime in France increased 9.58 per cent during the first half of this year - and that follows a 5.72 per cent increase in 2000. Theft accounts for two thirds of the increase.

The C⌠te d'Azur, where three cities have imposed curfews for children under 13 this summer, is most affected. Crime in Nice has risen 18 per cent in a year, with thefts from cars up 300 per cent.

Pillion passengers on motorcycles often grab handbags from cars stuck in traffic.

Opinion polls invariably show that crime is the first concern of the French, and it will be one of the principal themes in upcoming presidential and legislative elections.

President Chirac devoted much of his Bastille Day television appearance to the problem. "We have got to a point that is absolutely unbearable, and we've got to put a stop to ... this growing insecurity, this sort of sweeping surge," he said.

Mr Chirac claims the Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin has "let the institutions adrift" and "abandoned the authority of the State".

The root causes of France's crime wave are elsewhere - disaffected youth, the exclusion of millions of immigrants from former French colonies. It is a worsening problem for which no French government has found a solution.

Although homicide is declining, assault has quadrupled in three decades. Every dinner conversation in France these days seems to include first-hand testimony from a crime victim. The most chilling I've heard was from CΘcile Blin (29), the CEO of a yacht charter agency. On the last Sunday in May, Ms Blin was on the way to Roissy airport when someone rear-ended the Audi S4 she was travelling in. Her driver, a friend, stopped to check the damage. Three teenagers - all Europeans - emerged from the other car wearing black gloves and began to beat up her companion, who was partially blinded in one eye. Ms Blin fainted; when she regained consciousness, she was lying in the ditch next to her friend, who was covered in blood. The car and more than £8,000 in computers and belongings were gone.

Ms Blin was not able to speak for eight days after she was thrown in the ditch by the motorway, but two months later, she is philosophical. "I don't blame the young men who robbed us," she says. "These people are angry at the system they live in. They express themselves the only way they know how."