French upper house to vote to extend state of emergency Hugh Schofield (AFP) Paris, November 16, 2005
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A French government bill extending until February a state of emergency is presented to the upper house Senate on Wednesday, a day after deputies approved the measure despite the country's gradual return to normalcy after nearly three weeks of suburban unrest.

The vote in the National Assembly late on Tuesday was 346 in favour to 148 against, with four abstentions.

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy told the lawmakers before the vote that the extension was necessary because "even though there appears to be a progressive return to calm, nothing has been definitively achieved."

Introduced last week under a little-used 1955 law, the state of emergency allows authorities to impose curfews, order house arrests and searches, and ban public gatherings. After the initial 12 days it had to be renewed by an act of parliament.

However, the political left expressed opposition to extending the special powers, saying it was no longer needed since calm had largely returned to the country's high-immigration suburbs.

The violence erupted after the accidental deaths of two teenagers in an electricity sub-station where they hid from police in a northern Paris suburb. After several days of rioting in the Paris region, it spread to most major towns and cities.

Several curfews for unaccompanied children under 16, which were imposed under the state of emergency, were lifted on Tuesday. However, curfews remain in force in 25 localities, mostly in the cities of Lyon and Nice.

Police said early on Wednesday that 159 vehicles had been set ablaze across France by 4:00 am (0300 GMT) and 44 people detained for questioning, compared to 162 and 42 respectively the previous night.

For the first time since the unrest erupted 19 days ago no cars were torched in two regions on the outskirts of Paris, in the western Hauts-de-Seine and the southeastern Val-de-Marne departments.

In all, more than 8,000 cars have been burned, businesses and public buildings wrecked and dozens of policemen injured in rioting carried out mainly by black and Arab youths. Nearly 2,900 people have been arrested.

Sarkozy -- who has become the rioters' number one hate figure -- used Tuesday's parliamentary debate to deliver a stinging indictment of the state of the French nation.

"The sickness of the suburbs is only the reflection of a broader and deeper malaise -- which is the malaise of France. The neighbourhoods in difficulty are just the heightened expression of a country that doubts, that fears relegation, that despairs for the future," he said.

"These neighbourhoods are not another France, they are not a separate France -- they are France as it is, as we have built and managed it for 30 years."

Sarkozy, who has ambitions to be the next French president after elections in 2007, said that between 75 and 80 per cent of those arrested in the violence had police records. "Already they were delinquents," he said.

In a symbolic effort to emphasis a return to normalcy, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin made a televised visit to Aulnay-sous-Bois -- one of the worst-hit areas on Paris's northern outskirts -- to convey a government message of "firmness and responsibility."

France's employment minister Gerard Larcher meanwhile blamed polygamy as one possible reason for the rioting.

Large, polygamous families sometimes led to anti-social behaviour by youths who did not have a father figure in the home, which made employers more cautious of hiring staff from ethnic minorities, Larcher said according to the Financial Times online site.

"Since part of society displays this anti-social behaviour, it is not surprising that some of them have difficulties finding work...," the minister was quoted as telling foreign journalists.

"Efforts must be made by both sides. If people are not employable, they will not be employed."

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