POLICE began enforcing curfews in riot-hit areas across France last night after President Chirac declared a state of emergency, applying a law last used in the 1960s in an attempt to end the orgy of arson by youths from immigrant housing estates.

The law, enacted in 1955 to suppress riots in Algeria, a French colony at the time, empowers regional authorities to declare curfews, order house searches, prohibit public assembly and put people under house arrest. Curfew breakers will be liable to up to two months’ imprisonment during the emergency, which lasts for an initial 12 days.

Opponents denounced the measures as dangerously provocative, but M Chirac told the Cabinet that it was “necessary to accelerate the return to calm”.

As the curfew came into effect, rioters returned to the streets for the 13th consecutive night, setting 190 cars ablaze. Police said the violence appeared to be more sporadic than on previous nights, but they still made 70 arrests.

Monday night’s toll across France stood at 1,173 vehicles burnt, several schools and public buildings attacked and 330 arrests. In Toulouse a rioter lost a hand trying to throw back a tear gas grenade. In the Breton port of Brest, police said that attackers fired pellets at them. In Lyons two officers were injured by steel boules.

Police leaders and mayors in towns that have been hit by the worst violence in France since 1968 generally welcomed the emergency measures. But it was opposed by teachers, sections of the Left and the media, and by groups working to calm the Muslim-dominated housing estates.

Le Monde, the leading daily newspaper in France, took strong exception. “Exhuming a 1955 law sends to the youth of the suburbs a message of astonishing brutality: that after 50 years France intends to treat them exactly as it did their grandparents,” it said.

The largest teachers’ union said that M Chirac’s decision would be seen as a “message of war” to disaffected youths who already see the riot police as an army sent to humiliate them.

The 1955 law was used by President de Gaulle in 1962 to combat violent opposition to his decision to pull out of Algeria after an eight-year war.

As local authorities prepared a list of areas for curfews, judges rushed through the trials of youths caught destroying property or fighting police. More than 260 young men have been sentenced. About half of those detained were under the age of 16.

“The kids don’t understand the gravity of their deeds,” a senior police officer said. “We call it the Game Boy effect. They go out and do over cops like they do on their video games. The leaders are 18 to 25, but they put the young ones up to throw the petrol bottles.”

Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister, also announced a multimillion-pound package of measures to ease the plight of the descendants of the immigrants from the 1950s and 1960s whose anger has exploded on to the streets.

It includes the creation of a national anti-discrimination agency and 20,000 jobs with local government bodies for estate dwellers. The Prime Minister told parliament: “We must be clear — the Republic is at a moment of truth. What is in question is the effectiveness of our model of integration.”

The riots, which began on October 27, have laid bare the failure of the republican doctrine, which supposedly promotes assimilation by guaranteeing equality while officially refusing to acknowledge the needs of ethnic or religious communities. M de Villepin said that racial discrimination was a daily fact of life, as reflected in the preference given to jobseekers with French-sounding names.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the far-Right National Front, said that the unrest was the “civil war” that he has long predicted as a result of uncontrolled immigration.

• The riots in France showed how the combination of inequality, race and powerlessness could be incendiary, Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, said. Speaking in Edinburgh at the 40th anniversary of the first anti-discrimination law introduced in Britain, Mr Phillips said that race equality legislation was not an abstract and often arose out of tragedy.

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