France today declared a state of emergency to allow the introduction of localised curfews in an attempt to end the wave of riots which has flared across the country for 12 nights.

President Jacques Chirac announced the extreme measure - which bans the movement of people and vehicles after dark and allows police to set up roadblocks - after a crisis meeting of his Cabinet this morning.

In their now routine assessment of the previous night's carnage, police reported 330 arrests, 12 officers hurt and 1,173 vehicles burned in about 300 towns last night. This compares to 1,408 cars burnt on the previous night.

The focus of the trouble has shifted from Paris to other major cities, with the worst violence reported in Toulouse and Lille, where a crèche was torched in a previously tranquil working class neighbourhood.

In Seine-Saint-Denis, the suburb of Paris where the trouble began, authorities said the situation was calmer than on previous nights, with three times fewer calls made to the emergency services.

Today's ruling, which invokes a 50-year-old law drawn up during the 1954-1962 war in colonial Algeria, will empower authorities to impose curfews on suburbs which are enduring the worst civil unrest since student revolts of 1968. So far, more than 5,000 vehicles have been set alight, 1,500 people arrested and 600 suspects detained in custody.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister, said after today's Cabinet meeting: "We will now be able to act in a preventative manner to avoid these incidents. We will monitor, bit by bit, the evolution of events."

There were no immediate details on where or how curfews might be imposed or how long they might last. M Sarkozy said police would be granted powers to search properties suspected of being used to make and stockpile petrol bombs.

The mayor of the north-eastern Paris suburb of Raincy, near to the epicentre of the riots, jumped the gun by attempting to impose a curfew last night. It was not enforced by police.

Suburban youths quoted by Le Parisien newspaper said the emergency measures "won’t change anything". "This isn’t going to solve things," one said. "More repression means more destruction... more cops is just provocation."

The Government has ruled out an army intervention to stop the violence but has said that 1,500 police and gendarme reservists would be deployed as reinforcements for 8,000 officers already on the ground.

One man died yesterday, the first fatal victim of the rioters. Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec, 61, died in hospital after being beaten into a coma last week in the northern Paris suburb of Stains.

The effective state of emergency to be decreed can last for 12 days, beyond which it can only continue after a parliamentary vote. The last time it was used was in 1984, to put down violence in France’s Pacific Ocean territory of New Caledonia.

Although politicians generally welcomed the Government's tougher stance against the rioters, French newspapers were sceptical that curfews would stop the unrest.

The financial daily La Tribune said the measures were necessary but "they are not - by a long shot - sufficient." The left wing daily Liberation said resorting to a law created in 1955 to cope with a war was a "tragic farce".

Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister, gave a televised address last night in which he softened the pledge of firmness with the announcement of measures aimed at easing the plight of the ethnic Arab and African minorities on the housing estates where young men have been running riot since October 28.

Without giving any figures, he said that a programme to build better council blocks would be accelerated, scholarships for bright children would be tripled and all school dropouts would be offered training and apprenticeships from 14.

Measures to stamp out discrimination over housing and jobs would also be intensified. M de Villepin said the Government was aware that French citizens from the ethnic minorities suffered because they were made to feel different. "We have to respond to this," he said.

M Sarkozy insisted that nothing would halt his Government’s drive to restore order. "We will crack down and we will prevail. The Republic cannot retreat. Either we have Republican order or the rule of gangs," he said.

To show the State’s determination, judges were sent to special court sessions at Bobigny, north of Paris, where 45 rioters were being tried last night. Michel Gaudin, chief of the National Police, said: "We are witnessing a sort of shockwave that is spreading across the country."

Authorities in Brussels and Berlin attributed arson attacks on cars in those cities over the past two days to copycat actions. Governments around the world, including Britain’s, urged citizens visiting France to avoid the troublespots.

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