LONDON, Nov 10 (AFP) - Blazing cars, street battles and a powderkeg mix of racism and chronic immigrant unemployment: the image of France as shown around the world by two weeks of riots has hardly been the stuff of tourist dreams.

Beamed live from Hong Kong to Washington via London, the unrest has put an unforgiving spotlight on a side of society rarely seen outside a nation that, like any other, seeks to cast a cultural, social and political aura.

In the United States, comparisons have been drawn between the unrest in the poor, high-immigrant neighbourhoods with race riots of the 1960s and 1980s.

Other commentators have spoken of scenes akin to Chechnya, still others of the possibility of Islamic extremists stoking the fires.

It has not chimed with the reality on the ground, but still, nightly scenes of violence played on television have shocked and surprised.

"It's quite scary, quite frightening to think that that's happening on our doorstep," said Jo Lawrence, an accountant in London.

She said it reminded her of the troubles in Northern Ireland. "Perhaps I'm ignorant, but I had no idea that was going on," she told AFP.

In Paris, some expatriates have reported getting calls from their relatives back home asking if they were safe.

But for many analysts, the violence has above all exposed an underclass of angry, immigrant youths with little hope and even fewer job prospects, locked in a vaunted system of social integration that has failed them.

"France is sending a lot of negative signals right at this moment," Aurore Wanlin, at the Centre for European Reform in London, told AFP.

The riots showed "the French model doesn't protect those who aren't already part of the system."

In USA Today, an opinion piece said the "civil disobedience should serve as lessons to neighboring countries on how not to treat a minority population."

The violence, the worst France has seen since the 1968 student revolt, has seen more than 6,600 vehicles torched and dozens of buses, schools, gymnasiums, nurseries, libraries, shops and businesses destroyed in arson attacks.

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