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This paper deals with an urban riot at Montbeliard on the 12th of July, 2000. The authors attempt to demonstrate, based on long-term fieldwork in the industrial area of Sochaux, the scientific interest and the importance of studying the phenomenon of urban riots in a historical context. This case study invites us to move beyond local factors and the broader morphological transformations of the French “banlieue” housing projects as approaches to understanding the generalization of urban riots in the 1990s, by making a detour through the study of (1) the transformation of work relations in the factory, and (2) the relations between generations, the processes of constitution of social personality among the children of immigrants, the kind of aggressivity of the most deprived part of this heterogeneous social group.