October 27, 2005, when two Muslim teens fled a police identity check in a banlieue—a run-down Paris suburb called Clichy-sous-Bois. They scaled the wall of an electrical relay station and touched a transformer, which electrocuted them on the spot. Youths, mostly unemployed Muslims, heard the news and—as everyone now knows—rampaged. They burned cars, vandalized buildings, and pelted police with stones and bottles.