They have also helped prepare fresh recruits from among Europe's frustrated, disenfranchised second-generation immigrant youths now rediscovering their religious roots.

He is one of the legions of idle, unemployed immigrant and second-generation youths who populate the poorer quarters of French cities and suburbs and, in smaller but growing numbers, French movies.

But after riots by second-generation immigrant youth last fall, Mr. Le Pen's approval rating in polls surged five percentage points, to 21 percent, according to a survey by IFOP, a French polling institute, published Friday.

Many people fear that the renewed unrest could reignite the nightly arson by the country's second-generation immigrant youths.

She accused the current government of doing "nearly nothing" to address the problems of disenfranchised second-generation immigrant youth, who were responsible for a wave of urban violence in 2005.

The survey also sought to establish the proportion of second-generation youths who dropped out of school before graduation.

The strategy appeared to backfire when second-generation immigrant youths rebelled, touching off weeks of arson and riots across the country.

The unrest highlighted the growing alienation of the country's second-generation immigrant youth from the rest of French society, and opened a national debate about the need for improved housing and education, and for affirmative action.

Writer Vijay Prashad describes the term as "ponderous and overused" and notes it as one of the mechanisms by which new immigrants attempt to make second-generation youth feel "culturally inadequate and unfinished."

Nothing represents the stratification of French society more than the country's rigid educational system, which has reinforced the segregation of disadvantaged second-generation immigrant youths by effectively locking them out of the corridors of power.