Will this be remembered as Emmanuel Macron’s Marie-Antoinette moment? On Wednesday night, as violent clashes erupted from Paris to Marseille, the French president boogied with his wife Brigitte at an Elton John concert. 

The happy couple then posed for photos backstage with Mr. John, now 76, and his husband, David Furnish, as civil unrest exploded over the shooting death of a teenager by a police officer. 

The reaction was instantaneous and furious, with one member of parliament with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party stating: “While France was on fire, Macron clapped for Elton John.”

It appears that Mr. Macron’s list of tone-deaf moments is in no danger of getting any shorter. Those long and fruitless conversations with Vladimir Putin early on following the Russian invasion of Ukraine come to mind. But this time the French leader looks almost pathetically rudderless. 

Across France, from Paris to Marseille, roads are blocked, hundreds of arrests have been made, and several cities are under curfew orders. In a bleak throwback to the riots of 2005, when 8,000 cars were torched, vehicles are now being burned in multiple French cities, many of which resemble war zones. 

Mr. Macron’s solution? Other than shimmying to Elton John, it is basically, as Le Figaro reported Friday, the creation of a new government crisis unit over which he will naturally preside. Yet it won’t be enough. 

To understand why, it helps to consider some basic Parisian geography, thrown into sharp relief by two disparate events. The first was the incident that touched off the present chaos. 

On Tuesday morning at Nanterre, a French police officer shot a 17-year-old teenager identified only as “Nahel M” at point-blank range at a traffic check. France 24 reported that an authenticated video of the incident recorded a voice telling the youth, “You are going to get a bullet in the head.” 

Nahel was subsequently fatally shot in the chest. Violent clashes with police broke out the same day. Nanterre is a suburb just west of Paris. Most French suburbs are the flip side of the postcard — the French refer to them pejoratively as la banlieue, and they are by and large poverty traps marred by sprawling housing projects. They surround virtually every major French city. 

At Paris the separation is particularly stark because of the presence of the Boulevard Périphérique, the ring road that encircles the French capital. The Elton John concert Mr. Macron attended — the second event in question — took place at the Accor Arena, by the Seine in the Bercy section of Paris. On the other side of the “Périph” is where rough suburbs like Montreuil and Bagnolet start. 

East of those is Clichy-sous-Bois, the suburb where three weeks of nationwide riots began in 2005. The disconnect between the Paris bubble and the troubled suburbs is if anything more pronounced now than it was nearly two decades ago.

Police shootings have been on the rise in France. According to French police — some 40,000 of whom have been deployed to try to quell the latest round of  violence clashes — 13 people were killed in police shootings in 2022 after failing to comply with orders during traffic stops. Nahel is the third person this year to have died in similar situations — to wit, not stopping when the authorities have ordered them to do so. 

The problem could have as much to do with recent legislation as with law enforcement. Following a wave of extremist attacks in 2017, France passed a law that permits police officers to shoot at a vehicle if a driver fails to comply with orders or “whose occupants are likely to perpetrate, in their flight, attacks on their life or physical integrity or that of others.” 

According to a report in French magazine L’Obs (formerly Le Nouvel Observateur), since the passage of that law there have been “on average 25 percent more shootings, and five times more lethal shootings” as well as “a clear shift in police practices towards an increase in police shootings.”

The elasticity of the language of the new law notwithstanding, the officer who allegedly shot Nahel has been placed in detention and handed a preliminary charge of voluntary homicide. His attorney said his client did not shoot with the intent to kill. The officer, possibly in a bid to dial down public anger, has asked the teenager’s family for forgiveness. 

None of that has assuaged the rage of the French public, particularly among disaffected youths. Three days of urban rioting were, on Friday, spiraling into a fourth. 

Overnight Thursday a tour bus near Versailles was set ablaze — fortunately, no passengers were aboard at the time. But photos showed a burned out husk that will do nothing to encourage summer tourism to the vaunted palace. 

Urban violence rocked cities from north to south, with widespread looting and fires, some reportedly caused by the lighting of firecrackers but most set deliberately by protesters. The interior ministry reported that 249 police officers had been wounded in clashes and at least 667 fresh arrests were made. Public transportation in the capital region was shut down after sunset. 

As Monsieur Macron posed with his wife (who is also the president’s former school teacher) for Instagram along with Elton John, a tweak to one of the illustrious rocker’s iconic songs seemed an apt précis of the 45-year-old leader’s current predicament: “I Guess That’s Why They Call It Les Blues.”