The violence that has wracked France's city suburbs for two weeks showed clear signs of being on the wane yesterday, as police reported another decrease in the number of overnight incidents.

According to national police chief Michel Gaudin, there were 482 cars burned across the country and 203 people arrested, compared to 617 cars torched and 330 arrests the night before. This was a "significant decline," he said.

The fall was especially marked in the Paris region, where the riots began on October 27 but which saw only 95 cars burned overnight. The figures confirmed a pattern established since the weekend, which has seen the provinces overtake the capital as the prime focus of the unrest.

At the peak of the trouble on Sunday night some 1,400 vehicles were burned 395 people arrested across the country.

The easing-off of the unrest came after the government decreed a state of emergency in much of the country on Tuesday -- triggering overnight curfews Wednesday night in some 30 towns and cities.

Meanwhile controversy surrounded a call by the tough-talking Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy for foreigners convicted of acts of violence during the troubles to be deported -- a measure denounced by left-wing parties and campaigning groups as a breach of human rights.

In the worst outbreak of urban

violence since May 1968, France has been struggling to contain a surge of car-burnings, arson attacks and rioting carried out in the main by young Arab and black residents of the country's poor out-of-town estates.

Thousands of vehicles have been destroyed, schools and other public buildings wrecked, dozens of police officers injured, one civilian killed and more than 2,000 people arrested.

In addition, immense damage has been done to France's international image, as the failures of its vaunted model of integration -- based on the unfulfilled theory of colour-blind equality -- have been cruelly exposed.

On Tuesday the government of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin outlined a twin-track initiative to defuse the unrest -- invoking a 50

year-old law that authorises curfews and house-to-house searches and at the same unveiling a classic package of social assistance to help the stricken areas.

Most regional governors -- or prefects -- chose not to use their new emergency powers to order curfews overnight Wednesday, sensing that the violence was already on the decline and that the new measure could be interpreted as a provocation.

However in several towns on the Riviera such as Nice, Cannes and Antibes, as well as at Orleans in the centre and Rouen, Le Havre and Amiens in the north, unaccompanied children under the age of 16 were ordered to stay at home.