In late 2005 the outlying estates of Paris, and twenty other towns and cities, were burning. The suburbs were rising that November and global media attention was rife. Youths rioted and set cars and property alight for many consecutive nights. Government dithered and politicians, especially on the right, ranted. Not exactly May 68 which Baudrillard, influenced at the time by Herbert Marcuse, had witnessed alongside situationist contemporaries but not insignificant as an ‘event’ either. Baudrillard had long since given up on the ‘left’ to come to the rescue in such ‘situations’ but he was acutely aware of the damage Le Pen and the far right could do as the ‘immigrant’ question was raised nightly on the news as images of riot torn France proliferated. Baudrillard's views, as an instant pundit, were as usual eagerly awaited in France and around the globe. Chris Turner's English translation of Baudrillard's short commentary on the riots of the ‘banlieues’ was published in the journal New Left Review in 2006. The extract here is the article in full. Baudrillard made reference to the Watts riots in the US in the late 1960s, immigration and asylum seeking in Europe and the ‘No’ vote in the European Union Constitutional referendum in the mid 2000s. He contemptuously denigrated contemporary sociology's ‘integrationist’ social policy recommendations for the long-term ‘solution’ to the social problem of the riots in France. Appropriately for one of his last commentaries on contemporary events as his illness grew more serious, Baudrillard was scathing about the supposed superiority of Western culture.