For the third time in five months, Paris firefighters arrived to find screaming victims and bodies falling from windows as a fierce fire gutted a rundown residential building in the historic Marais quarter in the city centre.

The semi-derelict building is owned by the city and close to the Place des Vosges, one of the grandest and most expensive addresses in Paris.

Politicians, immigrant groups and the media voiced outrage over fires that have killed 48 immigrants in five months, most of them sans papiers, or illegal immigrants.

Last Thursday night 14 children were among the dead in a city building on the Left Bank that accommodated legal immigrants from Mali who were waiting for permanent housing. In April 24 illegal immigrants, mostly from Africa, were killed in a low-price hotel in the Opéra district where they had been given temporary lodging.

M Chirac expressed horror at “another dreadful fire” and said that Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister, would announce emergency measures this week. M Chirac said: “This situation is totally unworthy of the welcome that we should give to those who have come to our country, whatever their origins or nationality.”

Bertrand Delanoë, the Socialist Mayor of Paris, appealed for state aid to tackle what he called an extremely serious problem of decrepit housing in the city. He said that the city council was working to renovate 1,000 buildings that his administration listed as insalubrious when he took office in 2001. The latest building to burn down was bought by the council last year as part of that scheme. All the victims were illegal immigrants from the Ivory Coast who had occupied it for the past six years.

Thousands of immigrants and poor families live in rundown hotels and crumbling apartment buildings because of a housing shortage. More than 100,000 people are seeking council housing but the city provides only 12,000 homes a year.

Immigrants say that they are given low priority, and illegal immigrants cannot apply. The housing shortage is compounded by an explosion in property and rental prices over the past five years. Conservative politicians insisted that the problem lay with illegal immigration.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister and chief political rival to M Chirac, said: “We have dramas like this because we accept people to whom we cannot offer work or housing. We have to close all these buildings, and I have given orders to the police to that effect.”

The authorities had no clue to the origin of the Marais fire in the narrow Rue du Roi Doré. Survivors described the medieval conditions in which they lived, with water drawn from a street fountain and one lavatory for 40 residents. “It was hell,” said Fofana, one of the residents of the five-floor building. “The ceilings were falling in, electric wires were dangling, there were rats, and cockroaches were in the food.”

A candle started the Opéra fire in April, and police believe that the fire last Thursday was also accidental. Yacinthe Kouassi, the Ivory Coast Ambassador to Paris, appealed to the authorities to help illegal immigrants who had fled civil war in his country. He said: “We Africans gave a lot to the former colonial power. These are human beings who have been grilled like toast.”

Successive French governments have wrestled with the problem of the sans papiers, the tens of thousands of would-be immigrants who live in a legal limbo in France’s cities. For political, humanitarian and practical reasons, they cannot be expelled, yet they have no legal existence in France and are entitled to minimal assistance from the State and charities.

The Chirac Government has refused calls for mass legalisation of sans papiers, as carried out recently in Italy, Spain and in France under the previous Socialist Government.

Times Recommends

• British ‘tortured and jailed Obama’s grandfather’
• BA in merger talks with Qantas
• Mumbai police were ill equipped for attacks