A struggling actor has forced President Chirac’s Government to enact radical measures to house the homeless, achieving in a three-week campaign what established charities had failed to do in years.

With total victory in France, the campaign is moving on to other European countries.

Augustin Legrand, 31, set up a website and issued tents to 300 homeless people, forming an encampment in a fashionable suburb of Paris and inviting residents to join them for a night. His protest tactics quickly spread around other French cities, putting huge pressure on Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister.

With a presidential election in April, Mr de Villepin promised to enact immediately a law making housing an enforceable right. Yesterday the Government announced an emergency programme to open 27,000 new places in shelters for those most in need.

The measures were demanded by the Children of Don Quixote, as Mr Legrand’s campaign is called, and last night he ordered the tents to be struck after his demands had been met by the Government and favourably received by the main candidates, Ségolène Royal, of the Socialists, and Nicolas Sarkozy, of the centre-right UMP party.

“A radical change in policy towards the homeless and the certainty of an enforceable right to housing . . . has put an immediate end to the crisis,” Mr Legrand said.

The bearded actor, who is 6ft 7in (2.01m), became a media star after December 16, when, along with his brothers and friends, he installed about 300 homeless people in red tents along both sides of the St Martin Canal, in the heart of gentrified eastern Paris.

They invited the city’s well-housed residents to join them and more than 100 a night did so, including celebrities such as the actors Jean Rochefort and Beatrice Dalle.

Thanks to Mr Legrand’s charisma, astute media management and the pressures of the election campaign, the quirky Don Quixote campaign, named after Cervantes’s impractical idealist who sets out to fight injustice, caught the imagination at a time when France has become alarmed over a housing shortage and lack of facilities for the Sans Domicile Fixe (SDF), as the homeless are known.

A dozen Quixote camps opened in other cities, from Lille in the north to Nice on the Mediterranean. Members of the group are to set up tents in Barcelona this week as the campaign spreads across Europe. Scotland is the only other EU nation with such legislation.

Joseph Legrand, 21, said last night that his brother’s campaign had changed the emergency housing system in France completely. Jean-Baptiste, 30, the middle brother, was now heading for Barcelona. The French campaigners would be delighted to brief any British organisation on their tactics, Joseph told The Times.

The success of the Quixote campaign generated hostility from some groups who accused Mr Legrand of a publicity stunt. Emmaus, the oldest homeless charity, questioned the sincerity of the Quixote team, which includes the four Legrand brothers and their mother and father. France Soir voiced a suspicion that, with his emaciated, monkish look, Mr Legrand had styled himself on L’Abbé Pierre, the revered priest who founded Emmaus in 1954.

Charentes-Libre newspaper said that Mr Legrand’s operation was “a detestable form of new age charity”. Others praised the campaign. Bernard Kouchner, founder of Médecins du Monde and a former minister, said that Mr Legrand had understood the tactic of “making a big noise”. Like the best campaigners, they were outsiders, he added.

()Mr Legrand, who had no previous experience in activism, devised the operation after living rough with two friends in order to make a documentary film about the homeless. “We started out with €20, three guys and a camera and the idea just came to us. We knew it would work,” he said.

“I am nobody special,” Mr Legrand told Libération yesterday. “With a little courage and determination, a huge number of French could have done it.”

There are 86,500 homeless people in France, according to official estimates.

No place to call their own

Procedures for measuring homelessness vary widely between countries:

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