Since the early 1990s, the panoply of New Year's Eve festivities have included a new essential ingredient: vehicle fires, which occur in many working-class neighborhoods of French cities.
As a note from the Jean-Jaurès Foundation reveals, the images and accounts of cars burnt the day after New Years Eve are now an integral part of decorum and it seems that this tradition has become established in many areas.
While it was non-existent until the end of the 1980s, this phenomenon has grown since the beginning of the 2000s to the point of having become "commonplace", with on average nearly a thousand vehicles destroyed. by fire every New Year's Eve in France, as shown in the graph opposite.
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Part of the fires ...
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