To Christiane Amanpour at CNN. Key excerpts from the interview:

I am not sure you can call them riots. It's very different from the situation you have known in 1992 in L.A. for example. You had at that time 54 people that died, and you had 2,000 people wounded. In France during the 2 weeks period of unrest, nobody died in France. So, I think you can't compare this social unrest with any kind of riots.

[ ... ]

We have to say that, and it is important to also understand the real nature of these movements, there is no ethnic or religious basis of this movement, as we can see in some other parts of the world.

[ ... ]

They don't want to be recognized as Muslims, or as blacks, or as people coming from North Africa. They want to be recognized, as French and they want to have equal opportunity during their lives.

De Villepin here shows a rare political ability to recast recent events and make them palatable for his electorate. He has redifined the recent riots, turned them into a uniquely French and social issue that can easily be solved with time-tested approaches, while pointing the finger at the US as the place where one would find real riots.

With that - and Chirac's blessing - he's now positioned himself as a solid front-runner for the French presidential elections in 2007.