Epidemiological modeling of the 2005 French riots: a spreading wave and the role of contagion Laurent Bonnasse-Gahot1, Henri Berestycki1 , Marie-Aude Depuiset2,3,4, Mirta B. Gordon4, Sebastian Roch´e2, Nancy Rodriguez5, Jean-Pierre Nadal1,6,* 1Ecole´ des Hautes Etudes´ en Sciences Sociales, PSL Research University, CNRS, Centre d'Analyse et de Math´ematique Sociales, Paris, France 2Univ. Grenoble Alpes, Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Grenoble, CNRS, PACTE, Grenoble, France 3Universit´ede Lille, CNRS, UMR 8019 - CLERSE´ - Centre Lillois d'Etudes´ et de Recherches sociologiques et Economiques,´ Lille, France 4Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, LIG, Grenoble France 5The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Mathematics, Chapel Hill, USA 6Laboratoire de Physique Statistique, Ecole´ Normale Sup´erieure,PSL Research University; Universit´eParis Diderot, Sorbonne Paris-Cit´e; Sorbonne Universit´es,UPMC { Univ. Paris 06; CNRS; Paris, France. *corresponding author. Email:
[email protected] Dated: December 15th, 2017 This is an author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Scientific Reports (http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-18093-4) Abstract As a large-scale instance of dramatic collective behavior, the 2005 French riots started in a poor suburb of Paris, then spread in all of France, lasting about three weeks. Remarkably, although there were no displacements of rioters, the riot activity did travel. Access to daily national police data has allowed us to explore the dynamics of riot propagation. Here we show that an epidemic-like model, with just a few parameters and a single sociological variable characterizing neighborhood deprivation, accounts quantitatively for the full spatio-temporal dynamics of the riots.