France imposed emergency measures on Wednesday in 38 suburbs, towns and cities including Paris and police said a wave of riots was waning despite a 13th straight night of firebombs and torched cars.
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin published a decree invoking a 50-year-old law that gives regional government officials the power to impose nightly curfews against the rioters, mainly protesting against unemployment and racism.
A poll in Le Parisien newspaper showed 73 percent support for the measures, with 86 percent of those surveyed expressing outrage at violence which police said had destroyed another 617 vehicles overnight, about half the number of the night before.
"We are seeing a sharp drop in hostile acts," the national police director, Michel Gaudin, told a news briefing.
Claude Gueant, an aide to Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, said the unrest appeared to have peaked.
"We have reasons to believe that wisdom will prevail in the districts affected by the violence," he told Europe 1 radio.
Major cities covered by emergency powers include Marseille, Strasbourg, Lyon and Toulouse, as well as Paris suburbs where the unrest erupted on October 27 with the deaths of two youngsters apparently fleeing police.
The violence - by white youngsters as well as youths of African and Arab origin - swiftly turned into a broader protest at racism, police treatment and poor job prospects in tough neighbourhoods, where the curfew won mixed reviews on Wednesday.
Fears of riots erupting in other European countries have helped push down the value of the euro, and neighbouring Belgium and Germany have been hit by copycat incidents of arson although they have not faced any riots.
Economists expect consumer confidence to drop because of the rioting but say the impact on economic growth and the state budget is likely be marginal if calm returns soon. They see few signs of any long-term blow to foreign direct investment.
But Villepin and President Jacques Chirac are feeling a political impact and are under pressure to respond.
"The prime minister seems to be losing his cool," Le Monde wrote in an unusually harsh editorial, suggesting he "does not have the nerves that a statesman needs".
Villepin declined to take any questions during parliamentary question time on Wednesday. But Sarkozy told deputies some 120 foreigners convicted of participating in the disturbances would be expelled, including those with residence permits.
Authorities in Lyon, a major city in south-eastern France, said they would halt public transport at 1800 GMT following a tear gas attack in the metro on Tuesday, the torching of a bus and stoning of several others. Rioters in Arras, in the north, hitherto spared, looted and then torched two superstores.
The opposition Socialists have muted criticism of the emergency measures, passed in 1955 when Paris feared the Algerian insurgency could spread to metropolitan France. The Socialists used them in the mid-1980s to quell unrest in France's Pacific territory of New Caledonia.
The emergency powers decree allows prefects, the government's top official in each of the 96 administrative areas known as departments, to ban the movement of people and traffic at specified times.
It also allows Sarkozy to place individuals under house arrest, confiscate weapons, ban meetings, close meeting halls and order searches of residences without a judge's order.
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