France was tonight braced for a 12th consecutive night of the rioting that has spread to close to more than 270 towns and claimed one life.
Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec, 61, from Stains, in the Seine-Saint-Denis region outside Paris, died today from his injuries in hospital after being beaten on Friday as he put out a fire in a rubbish bin.
Police have made more than 1,200 arrests so far, 400 of them last night. The violence, though concentrated in Paris's bleak suburbs, has spread throughout France, with some town mayors now considering curfews.
The torching of cars outside Brussels' main train station and in a working class district of Berlin has been blamed on copycat rioting.
As night fell in the southern French city of Toulouse, 50 rioters set fire to a bus and pelted police with Molotov cocktails and rocks in the evening's first - but probably not last - unrest on the streets.
Last night, the 11th and worst night of violence so far, vandals set fire to more than 1,400 vehicles and 36 police were injured, the head of national policing, Michel Gaudin told a news conference today.
Attacks were reported in 274 towns and police made 395 arrests overnight, Mr Gaudin said.
"This spread, with a sort of shock wave spreading across the country, shows up in the number of towns affected," Mr Gaudin said, noting that the violence appeared to be rippling out from its flash point in the Parisian suburbs and worsening elsewhere.
There were also fears that unrest could spread to other countries after cars were torched outside Brussels's main train station and in a working class district of Berlin, although officials in Belgium and Germany sought to downplay the risk of violence on the level of what France has endured.
In the French capital, 10 riot police officers were injured by youths firing fine-grain birdshot in the southern suburb of Grigny, a national police spokesman, Patrick Hamon, said. Two of them required hospital treatment for non life-threatening wounds.
Churches were set ablaze in northern Lens and southern Sete, while arsonists burned two schools and a bus in the central city of Saint-Etienne and its suburbs, injuring two people. In Colombes, outside Paris, a 13-month-old child required hospital treatment for a head injury after youths threw stones at a bus, Mr Hamon said, while a day-care centre in Saint-Maurice, another Paris suburb, was burned.
Much of the anger from the impoverished immigrant communities where most of the unrest has occurred has focused on the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who inflamed passions by referring to troublemakers as "scum."
In Strasbourg, youths stole a car and rammed it into a housing project, setting the vehicle and the building on fire. "We'll stop when Sarkozy steps down," said the 17-year-old driver of the car, who gave his name only as Murat.
The rioting began last week when two teenagers of African origin were accidentally electrocuted while hiding from police in Clichy-sous-Bois, north of Paris. The violence is fuelled partly by resentment at France's discriminatory treatment of its north and black African communities, a far cry from the liberty, equality and fraternity of the country that likes to call itself the birthplace of human rights.
"The law must have the last word," the president, Jacques Chirac, said yesterday after a security meeting with senior ministers, making his first public address on the riots. France is determined "to be stronger than those who want to sow violence or fear, and they will be arrested, judged and punished," he added.
The prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, promised accelerated trials for rioters and extra security during France's worst civil unrest in at least a decade.
Australia became the latest country to issue a travel warning, after the British Foreign Office told people on Saturday to "exercise extreme care" in cities affected by the trouble.
The country's biggest Muslim fundamentalist organisation, the Union for Islamic Organisations of France, issued a fatwa forbidding those "who seek divine grace from taking part in any action that blindly strikes private or public property or can harm others".
Authorities said that 4,700 cars have been set alight since the rioting began and 1,200 suspects have been detained at least temporarily.
The violence has prompted soul-searching about how to ease anger and frustration among troubled youths in France's grim public housing estates, where many residents are minorities. Educators met the French prime minister to think of ways to help.
"These are young people who are generally resigned, they face discrimination everywhere, for housing and work, and their malaise gets expressed in violence," said Ahmed Touabi, principal of an elementary school in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil. The troublemakers "feel rejected by France, and they want to spit on France."