As fierce clashes burst out last week in France’s worst riots in nearly two decades, protesters set buses on fire and charred the facade of a swimming pool being built for the 2024 Olympics in Aubervilliers, a working-class suburb north of Paris near where Emmanuel Macron first declared he was running for president.

There was a reason why Macron had picked the area to announce his candidacy in 2016. His speech, sprinkled with pledges “to act and protect the weakest” with jobs, was yet another attempt by a French presidential hopeful to address one of the country’s most intractable problems: the seemingly unbridgeable social and economic chasm separating the residents of impoverished suburbs from the rest of France.