LE BLANC MESNIL, France – "It's the start of war, cried one teenager. "We hate the police," yelled another.

Shouting over each other to be heard, the young toughs vented about their lives in Paris' tough suburban projects and the rioting that has set them ablaze and grown into a nationwide insurrection of disgruntled suburban youth.

All French-born children of Arab and black African immigrants, this group of a dozen or so teens at Les Tilleuls housing project north of Paris complain of being marginalized by French society.

None said they participated in arson attacks, but their sympathies are clearly with the rioters who have shaken France to its core, prompting the government to say Monday that it will impose curfews under a state-of-emergency law.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin also said France would call up 1,500 police reservists to reinforce the 8,000 police and gendarmes already on guard against the rioting that has spread from places like Les Tilleuls to nearly 300 cities and towns across the country.

Asked on TF1 television whether the army should be brought in, 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. "That is our prime duty: ensuring everyone's protection."

France's worst civil unrest in decades entered a 12th night Monday, as rioters in the southern city of Toulouse set fire to a bus after sundown and pelted police with gasoline bombs and rocks.

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, police said. No one was injured.

Earlier, a 61-year-old man died of wounds he received last week in an attack, the first fatality in the violence.

Apparent copycat attacks also spread outside France, with 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. The mayhem is forcing France to confront anger building for decades in neglected suburbs and among the children of immigrants. 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.

President Jacques 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," Vike-Freiberga said.

The Les Tilleuls youths noted that France had welcomed their parents as labor years ago, often to do menial jobs most French did not want. Now, there are no jobs – or no one willing to give them one, they said.

"This isn't good for anything," says Farid, 20, angrily shaking his French identity card. He and the others refused to give their surnames, saying they fear repercussions from police or in the community.

"The 'elders' of the projects have tried to calm us down, but we don't care," said 20-year-old Karim, gesticulating wildly with his arms and then concentrating on rolling a hashish joint.

Vandals burned more than 1,400 vehicles overnight into Monday, as well as churches, schools and businesses, and injured 36 police officers in clashes around the country, setting a new high for arson and violence, said France's national police chief, Michel Gaudin. Attacks were reported in 274 towns, and police made 395 arrests.

"This spread, with a sort of shock wave spreading across the country, shows up in the number of towns affected," Gaudin said.

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

Villepin said curfews will be imposed under a 1955 law that allows the declaring of a state of emergency in parts or all of France. The law was passed to curb unrest in Algeria during the war that led to its independence.

He said 1,500 reservists were being called up to reinforce the 8,000 police and gendarmes already deployed. The Cabinet will meet Tuesday to authorize curfews "wherever it is necessary," he said.

"The multiplying acts of destruction, the destruction of schools and sports centers, thousands of cars set on fire, all of this is unacceptable and inexcusable," he said. "To all in France who are watching me, who are disturbed by this, who are shocked, who want to see a return to normalcy, a return to security, the state's response – I say it tonight forcefully – will be firm and just."

Villepin said "organized criminal networks" are backing the violence and youths taking part are treating it as a "game," trying to outdo each other. He did rule out the possibility that radical Islamists are involved, saying: "That element must not be neglected." France's community of Muslims, at some 5 million, is western Europe's largest.

Local government officials will be able to impose curfews "if they think it will be useful to permit a return to calm and ensure the protection of residents. That is our No. 1 responsibility," the prime minister said.

Nearly 600 people were in custody Monday night, and fast-track trials were being used to punish rioters.

France's biggest Muslim fundamentalist organization, the Union for Islamic Organizations of France, issued a religious decree against the violence. It prohibited all those "who seek divine grace from taking part in any action that blindly strikes private or public property or can harm others."

The first fatality was identified as 61-year-old Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec. He was trying to extinguish a trash can fire Friday at his housing project in the northeastern Paris suburb of Stains when an attacker caught him by surprise and beat him into a coma, police said.

"They have to stop this stupidity," his widow, Nicole, told Associated Press Television News of the rioting. "It's going nowhere."

Associated Press Writers Jocelyn Gecker, John Leicester, Angela Doland and D'Arcy Doran in Paris contributed to this report.