PARIS, Nov. 17 - In the search for explanations for the riots that have rocked France, some politicians and intellectuals are pointing to a novel one: polygamy.

In an interview with RTL radio on Wednesday, Bernard Accoyer, the parliamentary leader of President Jacques Chirac's Gaullist party, the Union for a Popular Movement, called polygamy "certainly one of the causes, though not the only one" for France's worst unrest in four decades. He blamed the former Socialist government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin for being "strangely lax" in enforcing the ban on polygamy. Pierre Cardo, a deputy in Parliament from Mr. Chirac's party, said that the most difficult juvenile delinquents were "often products of polygamous families."

HÃ©lÃ ̈ne CarrÃ ̈re d'Encausse, one of the country's most eminent historians and the permanent secretary of the AcadÃ©mie FranÃ§aise, was even more pointed. "Everyone is astonished; why are African children in the streets and not at school?" she said on Russian television in Moscow on Sunday. "Why can't their parents buy an apartment? It's clear why. Many of these Africans, I tell you, are polygamous. In an apartment, there are three or four wives and 25 children." Even the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has suggested that polygamy makes it harder for North African Arabs and sub-Saharan Africans to integrate into French life.

"There are more problems for a child of an immigrant of black Africa or of North Africa than for a son of a Swede, a Dane or a Hungarian," said Mr. Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian father, in an interview with France 2 television on Nov. 10. "Because culture, because polygamy, because social origins contribute to more hardships for him."