President Jacques Chirac yesterday signed a decree establishing a 12-day state of emergency in France, writes Lara Marlowe in Paris. If the rioting that has wracked France since October 27th continues, prime minister Dominique de Villepin will submit a draft law to the National Assembly to prolong the decree.
Last night the head of the national police reported that the level of violence was "decreasing". However, a police spokesman described the atmosphere across the country as similar to the previous night, when 1,173 cars and 12 schools were burned in 226 towns and cities and 330 people were detained.
Yesterday President Chirac's government invoked the April 1955 Law Establishing a State of Emergency. "Choosing a law from 50 years ago, during the Algerian war, doesn't seem the best of symbols to me," commented Lionel Jospin, the former prime minister. Many of the rioters are of Algerian origin.
The decree empowers prefects to declare curfews, place suspected troublemakers under house arrest, confiscate weapons and stage day or night-time searches.
The prefecture of the Somme was the first to announce a curfew last night, for the city of Amiens and its suburbs. No child under the age of 16 will be allowed outside between 11pm and 6am.
It is forbidden to sell petrol in jerricans to minors. Half of the 1,500 people detained since the riots started are minors.
Michel Gaudin, the director general of the French national police, said: "The intensity of the violence is decreasing. There were fewer attacks on private buildings and less direct confrontation with the forces of order." Some 10,200 police and gendarmes have been deployed.
In Nice yesterday a man of Tunisian origin was hospitalised in a critical condition after being hit on the head with a brick thrown from a 15-storey apartment building.
A police spokesman said 76 vehicles had been set ablaze and 57 people detained in violent incidents across France by 9.30pm last night, but there had been no major clashes.
A special "car cemetery" has been set up in the Essonne department south of Paris to store some of the country's 5,800 charred remains.
The cars were all destroyed in the same manner: rioters, usually teenage boys, break a window, then throw a Molotov cocktail inside. -(additional reporting by Reuters)