PARIS — France’s Cabinet authorized curfews under a state-of-emergency law today in an extraordinary measure to halt the country’s worst civil unrest in decades after violence raged for a 12th night.

Local officials “will be able to impose curfews on the areas where this decision applies,” President Jacques Chirac said.

“It is necessary to accelerate the return to calm,” he said.

The decree will become effective at midnight tonight, government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope said. The list of cities and towns where curfews will be authorized were to be decided later today.

The curfews are authorized under a 50-year-old law that allows the declaring of a state of emergency in all or parts of France. The law was originally passed to curb unrest in Algeria during the war there that led to the North African nation’s independence from France.

“I have decided, applying the law of April 3, 1955, to give the forces of order supplementary measures of action to ensure the protection of our citizens and their property,” Chirac said at the Cabinet meeting. “I ask you to implement these measures as rapidly as possible, in a spirit of responsibility and respect.”

Among other powers, police will be able to conduct raids if they suspect weapons are being stockpiled, said Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

In the 12th night of unrest, rioters in the southern city of Toulouse ordered passengers off a bus and then set it on fire and pelted police with gasoline bombs and rocks overnight Monday-Tuesday. Youths also torched another bus in the northeastern Paris suburb of Stains, national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said.

Nationwide, vandals burned 1,173 cars overnight Monday-Tuesday compared with 1,408 vehicles a night earlier, police said. A total of 330 people were arrested, down from 395 the night before.

“The intensity of this violence is on the way down,” National Police Chief Michel Gaudin said. He said there were “much fewer” attacks on public buildings, and fewer direct clashes between youths and police. He said rioting was reported in 226 towns across France, compared to nearly 300 the night before.

Outside the capital in Sevran, a junior high school was set ablaze, while in another Paris suburb, Vitry-sur-Seine, youths threw gasoline bombs at a hospital, Hamon said. No one was injured.

Rioters also attacked a police station with gasoline bombs in Chenove, in Burgundy’s Cote D’Or, Hamon said. A nursery school in Lille-Fives, in northern France, was set on fire, regional officials said.

However, Hamon said there was a “considerable decrease” in the number of incidents overnight Monday-Tuesday from the night before in the Ile-de-France region, which includes Paris.

A 61-year-old man died on Monday of wounds sustained last week in an attack at his housing project in a Paris suburb, the first fatality in the violence.

Asked on TF1 television whether the army should be brought in, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said “we are not at that point.” But “at each step, we will take the necessary measures to re-establish order very quickly throughout France,” he said.

Foreign governments have warned their citizens to be careful in France. Apparent copycat attacks also spread outside the country, with five cars torched outside the main train station in Brussels, Belgium. German police were investigating the burning of five cars in Berlin.

The violence started Oct. 27 among youths in a northeastern Paris suburb angry over the accidental deaths of two teenagers, but it has grown into a nationwide insurrection by suburban youths.

The mayhem is forcing France to confront anger building for decades in neglected suburbs and among the French-born children of Arab and black African immigrants. France’s Muslim community, at some 5 million, is western Europe’s largest.

The teenagers whose deaths sparked the rioting were of Mauritanian and Tunisian descent. They were electrocuted while hiding from police in a power substation, apparently thinking they were being chased.

Chirac, in private comments more conciliatory than his warnings Sunday that rioters would be caught and punished, acknowledged in a meeting Monday with Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga that France has not integrated immigrant youths, she said.

Chirac deplored the “ghettoization of youths of African or North African origin” and recognized “the incapacity of French society to fully accept them,” said Vike-Freiberga.

France “has not done everything possible for these youths, supported them so they feel understood, heard and respected,” Vike-Freiberga quoted Chirac as saying.

In terms of material destruction, the unrest is France’s worst since World War II; never has rioting struck so many French cities simultaneously, said security expert Sebastian Roche, a director of research at the state-funded National Center for Scientific Research.

— AP writers John Leicester, Angela Doland and D’Arcy Doran contributed to this report.