French police arrested 12 people in the fifth night of unrest in the troubled north Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois.
The trouble was sparked by the deaths of two youths on Thursday whom locals say were fleeing police.
Police fired tear gas to disperse around 100 youths involved in a stand-off with some 50 officers near a mosque. Petrol bombs were thrown at police.
Tensions had escalated on Sunday after a tear gas cannister was thrown into the mosque during evening prayers.
The dead boys, aged 15 and 19, were electrocuted after they scaled the wall of an electrical relay station and touched a transformer.
The local public prosecutor said the boys thought they were being chased by police, but authorities denied that was the case.
French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy defended his tough anti-crime policies yesterday but vowed to investigate the tear gas incident and repeated his "zero tolerance" policy toward violence.
Sarkozy, who also promised the parents of two teenagers whose deaths sparked the violence that they would learn the "full truth" about how their sons died, said that the situation in some deprived neighbourhoods had been deteriorating "for 30 years" and had to be tackled firmly.
But Equal Opportunities Minister Azouz Begag said a stronger police presence was not the way to tackle the violence.
"It is by fighting the discriminations of which young people are victims that we will re-establish order, the order of equality. Not by bringing out more CRS (riot police)," Mr Begag told the newspaper Liberation.