You should move to Somalia. Sounds like your kind of place...
LULZ!

1st of all:
Welly. I think that your conception of the French is a bit off. I have been there, their country shares a border with mine. I am a bit informed of our dear bretheren. The general population is piss poor. Everything there is highly centralized. If you drift away a little from Paris **** gets ugly. There are maybe a hand full of cities that come kind of close to the living standards of Paris but after that there is a huge emptyness.
I would go so far as to call the majority of the French nation as below average poor compared to countries like Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria, all the nordic nations (!!!) and even the UK (and the UK are not close in terms of common wealth to any of the aforementioned nations in the EU).
Combine with that that in Paris u have all those pretty "suburbs" which are basically ghettos where all the working people are stuck (which is ****in stupid to begin with but hey, it's the french). There is a HUGE part of the parisian population (which actually doesn't live in Paris but the annexed towns/villages which are now called suburbs and they are generally not regarded as "parisians" either by those who actually live in Paris) that is piss poor, unemployed and abused as working mules.
Combine this new outlook of the common French's wealth with the following 2 things:
1) The French Revolution HAD TO be achieved through the uprising of the "commoner" and through the use of brute force. No other measure worked. It was a huge success and had a huge impact on the life of everyone in western society. Yes I said it, without the French revolution, you Americans wouldn't have had the pleasure to fake-elect that ****in mornon.... TWICE!
Also do not forget that aside from being a HUGE deal, which I honestly believe most Americans simply cannot grasp, the French people are also being reminded CONSTANTLY what the whole world owes them for their revolution and congratulates them for showing that much courage etc. blabla (the French love to be flattered like that and never get enough of it).
So to recap: The last time you and all the other "commoners" were getting screwed just a little bit too much by the man, you assembled, you kicked ass, you beheaded and everything went uphill from there. Back then, all the "commoners" in the other nations around you were too much of pussies to do the same thing or even think about it. But lucky for them, their governments (i.e. monarchies, kings n **** y'know) were just pissing their pants too much from all those barbaric acts in France to continue the old course. They either gave their power away or steered towards a much more moderate course of screwing the "commoners".
As a result, since your Revolution, all those other "**** nations" are extremely grateful for your show of balls and have continued to remind you for centuries just how big your humongous balls are (because they know you like it, you have made sure they know

).
Now we get to the next point to consider in the equasion:
2) The recent financial crisis which has shown quite obviously how the banksters have been and thanks to our governemtns are continuously screwing us "commoners".
Now in the eyes of the French, they might just be screwing us a liiiiiittle bit too much. And what have we learned in the past? That's right, in these situations, uniting with the other commoners as a nation, kicking ass, rioting and beheading a bit should yield good results. I mean they kept telling us how big our balls were for doing it last time for centuries!
Honestly, I am surprised that not more nations are rioting considering just how we got ****ed in the ass by those mega corps (banks, insurances, rating agencies, you name it) and their lobbies ALL THE WHILE THE GOVERNMENT DID NOTHING TO PROTECT US. On the contrary, they gave them OUR MONEY to SAVE THEM because they screwed up screwing us up !!!!
And now, to top it all off, the idiotic Sarkozy tells the French population shortly after that they should work 2 more years in their life to pay for what exactly

?? °
Say about the French what you want (and I say a lot of nasty stuff about them too because they suck). But they are WAY more capable of connecting the dots in politics than just about any other nation, ESPECIALLY the Americans! ! ! ! !
The way they riot is something else, but big groups of people always result in all the people doing crazy and stupid things. Especially if it is a big group of ANGRY people. Now add the fact that those people are proud to be a raging, angry mob and **** **** up because they have been told for centuries that they are awesome for doing so in the past and the new riots are what u get.
*breathes in and does some Tai Chi*
phew, fell into some kind of rant towards the end there

°smart governments like the one from that sleezy palpatine-like German ***** will wait a while longer before they let the general population feel what they have to endure in order to pay the receipt for that gift to the finance lobby