Health minister Olivier Véran also added three more départements, including the area around Lyon, to 16 already placed under tougher mobility restrictions.
There has been widespread condemnation by the French government, medical professionals and local politicians after more than 6,000 mostly young people, many unmasked, flouted lockdown measures in Marseille to join an illegal carnival through the streets of the southern port city.
French Prime Minister Jean Castex on Thursday evening annnounced an initial one-month lockdown on public movement in Paris and 15 other regions as of midnight Friday to stem a resurgence of the Covid-19 epidemic that is already challenging hospital capacity.
Amid calls by several particpants for France's locked-down cinemas and theatres to reopen, French actress Corinne Masiero stripped naked on stage at France's yearly César film awards ceremony with a message of protest for French PM Jean Casteix on her bared back which read 'Give us back art, Jean', phonetically also meaning 'Give us our money back'.
A longterm health study of more than 200,000 people in France has found the presence of antibodies to the coronavirus behind Covid-19 in blood samples dating from early November 2019.
France will from Friday no longer require people travelling to or from Australia, Britain, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea to justify 'compelling' reasons for their journey, although other restrictions will remain in place, such as the requirement to show a negative Covid-19 test taken less than 72 hours before travel.
In a charity-run scheme, language students from around the world who are unable to study in France because of the coronavirus pandemic link up via the internet to have video chats with elderly French people who, because of the virus threat, are confined to their homes in lonely conditions.
The city authorities in Paris, led by mayor Anne Hidalgo, have suggested that the French capital and surrounding region be put under a new lockdown to tackle the worsening Covid-19 virus situation there. This has piled pressure on President Emmanuel Macron who has been described by some as the country's “epidemiologist-in-chief” and who has so far resisted growing calls for a lockdown not just in the capital but across France. As Ellen Salvi reports, the Paris authorities are effectively asking a question that the head of state's supporters are refusing to countenance: what if the French president has got it wrong?
PM Jean Castex said a new nationwide lockdown was not on the agenda, but said French citizens needed to be in a state of heightened alert to make sure they contain the spread of the virus while vaccines are rolled out.
In face of a surge in cases of coronavirus infections in south-east France, which are well above the national average, parts of the French Riviera, including the city of Nice and the town of Cannes, are to be subject to weekend lockdowns at least over the next fortnight,
