PARIS — The wave of firebombings, looting and fierce street fights between vandals and police appeared to subside Wednesday, amid cold, rainy weather and "state of emergency" measures that the embattled government ordered on Tuesday.
In a statement likely to stir controversy among immigrant groups, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy called for the expulsion of foreigners convicted of taking part in the extraordinary surge of violence that has stunned Europe, and that has put the spotlight on France's integration policies.
Almost all participants in the riots are Muslims of Arab or African origin, authorities have said. Some have adopted the language of militant Islam, but police say the rebellion in hundreds of towns and cities has been fomented mostly by street thugs, criminal gangs and jobless young men, not by organized radical Muslim groups. Politicians and news media, however, suggest that radical Islamic activists are quietly egging on the rioters.
Although the civil mayhem that some have called the "French intifadah" continued to flare across the country, incidents of arson and the destruction of shops and government facilities dropped dramatically, for the first time since the uprising started two weeks ago, authorities said.
From sunset Tuesday to dawn Wednesday, firebombers destroyed 617 vehicles in 116 towns. That was down sharply from previous nights, when more than 1,300 vehicles were torched.
The emergency decree, issued under a 50-year-old law created to suppress disorder during France's colonial war in Algeria, allowed police broader powers of arrest and gave authorities the power to impose curfews in some areas, and shut down public places where youths gathered.
The state of emergency applied to Paris; its hot-spot suburbs; and 30 other cities and towns from the English Channel to the Mediterranean Sea.
Paris chose not to invoke the curfew, however, and the city's street life and tourist attractions were largely undisturbed, with visitors seeming oblivious to the troubles. The United States and other countries have issued advisories that urged caution in areas of high danger, but have stopped short of warning people not to travel to France. "We watch it on CNN at the hotel, but it doesn't seem real," Michael Goldstein of Scarsdale, N.Y., said Wednesday as he snapped photographs of his wife feeding pigeons outside Notre Dame Cathedral. "Except, coming in from the airport, we could see the smoke and all the police vehicles."
The Mediterranean resort city of Nice, on the French Riviera, imposed a curfew on minors and authorized massive police raids Wednesday to disrupt gangs.
A poll published Wednesday by Le Parisien newspaper suggested that 73 percent of French approve of the government's crackdown. But other newspapers criticized Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin for invoking an emergency law associated with the country's colonial era.
"The prime minister seems to be losing his cool," the Paris daily Le Monde declared in an unusually harsh editorial, asserting that the leader "does not have the nerves that a statesman needs."
Despite the decline in incidents, unrest persisted. Arsonists destroyed an electronics superstore in the northern town of Arras, torched a newspaper warehouse in the Riviera perfume center of Grasse, and detonated an incendiary device on an empty subway train in Lyon, forcing the city to temporarily shut down its transit system, according to wire service reports that quoted police officials. No one was injured.
The violence erupted on Oct. 27 after two youths in Clichy-sous-Bois, a community of bleak public housing tracts and high unemployment north of Paris, were electrocuted while hiding from police in a power substation.
The lawlessness soon spread to hundreds of "banlieues" - a word for "suburbs" that often is used to connote the impoverished immigrant settlements that ring many French cities - in almost every region of the country.
Authorities said they had arrested more than 1,830 suspects in the past 13 days, although many of youths seized were released for lack of evidence.
"The arrests are bearing fruit; there's been a significant drop," an Interior Ministry spokesman, Franck Louvrier, told reporters. "But we must persevere."
Sarkozy, the interior minister, who some blame for inflaming the crisis by referring to rioters in its early days as "scum," said Wednesday that the government should deport any foreigners involved in the disturbances, even those who are legal residents of France.
"I have asked regional prefects to expel foreigners who [are] convicted - whether they have proper residency papers or not - without delay," he said at a session of the National Assembly, the lower house of the national parliament.