As Chirac and the top ministers in his centre-right administration held their first cabinet meeting since the heatwave, which roasted France for the first two weeks of August, a survey showed that most of the public believed the government had failed to properly handle the disaster.

Fifty-one percent of respondents in the CSA poll published in the Le Parisien newspaper said the government had proved itself incompetent in dealing with the extraordinary weather, compared to 40 percent who thought the opposite.

The two ministers most on the spot, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and Health Minister Jean-Francois Mattei, have for days tried to duck responsibility even after Mattei acknowledged that it was "plausible" that 5,000 people, most of them elderly, had died.

The resignation of France's surgeon-general, Lucien Abenhaim, on Monday has not taken the heat off the government, and Abenhaim himself told several media he was simply a "scapegoat".

Doctors groups and the opposition have accused the government of not raising the alarm fast enough and being too slow to react, even after it became clear that bodies were piling up in hospitals faster than medical staff could cope.

The lead story in all French media for over a week has been about the consequences of the heatwave, and television pictures even showed grisly images of deceased senior citizens discovered in their apartments days after they had died.

Pressure mounted even further Wednesday when the main undertakers' company, the Pompes Funebres Generales, said that it estimated there had been 10,400 more deaths than normal this month. The figure was extrapolated from its 25 percent share of the burials in France.

Patrick Pelloux, the head of a hospital emergency room doctors' union who raised the alarm early during the heatwave, said that, if the PFG's count was right, "this is a humanitarian catastrophe, a major crisis for our country."

The left-wing newspaper Liberation agreed, pointing out that the number of victims was "three times that of the attack on the World Trade Center" on September 11, 2001.

Chirac, it said, now had to justify his "deafening silence" on the disaster.

"Jacques Chirac must feel the consequences. And make sure that the ministers concerned, whose credibility is now tarnished, assume their responsibilities," it said.

The French president, who refused to cut short his three-week vacation in Canada as the heatwave drama unfolded, returned to Paris Wednesday and immediately called on the ministers concerned to give him full answers as to how they had handled the situation.

After Thursday's cabinet meeting he was due to give his first public comment on the matter.

For its part, the health ministry was working on arriving at precise fatality figures, but they were not expected to be known for weeks.

In the meantime, Raffarin urged caution over the figures being thrown about, saying in a statement Wednesday: "Out of respect for the French people personally affected by this tragic crisis, a scientific study which will establish reliable figures is necessary.

"Everybody kneeds to know the truth."

TERRA.WIRE