French presidential candidates marked a one day truce Saturday on the eve of voting in a first-round poll to whittle the 10-strong field down to two frontrunners.

French election rules outlaw both campaigning and opinion polling on the last day of the race, but Socialist challenger Francois Hollande went into the weekend favorite to oust right-wing incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy.

French Ambassador to Lebanon Denis Pietton said Saturday that Lebanon would have been placed in a very dangerous situation if Lebanese Forces chief Samir Geagea was killed.

In an interview published in An Nahar daily, Pietton expressed concern at the situation in Lebanon after Geagea escaped an assassination attempt as he was walking in the garden of his fortified residence in Maarab.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe declared on Friday that the U.N. observer mission in Syria needs to be able to guarantee Syrians the freedom to protest against Bashar Assad's regime.

"We need observers on the ground, but properly equipped observers with helicopters that can ensure the right to protest. It's extremely important. The day this freedom is guaranteed, the regime will not stand," he said.

French Ambassador to Lebanon Denis Pietton denied on Friday that his country is considering to deploy troops along the northern Lebanese border.

“These reports aren’t based on facts and there’s no will to deploy French troops along the Lebanese northern border with Syria,” Pietton told reporters during a tour to the South.

A coalition of Western and Middle East powers warned on Thursday that they would seek tougher international action if Bashar al-Assad's Syrian regime continues to flout a shaky U.N. peace plan.

Senior officials, including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, accused Assad of breaking the ceasefire and said a U.N. observer mission would have to be dramatically reinforced.

Western and Arab foreign ministers were to meet in Paris on Thursday for talks on the Syria crisis, with France warning Russia that its refusal to attend was plunging it deeper into isolation.

"I regret that Russia continues to lock itself into a vision that isolates it more and more, not just from the Arab world but also from the international community," Foreign Minister Alain Juppe told journalists.

Russia said on Thursday it was skipping a meeting of foreign ministers on Syria in Paris as they were only aimed at isolating the regime and would hurt the chances of direct peace talks.

"It seems that this meeting is not aimed at finding the grounds for dialogue within Syria, but quite the opposite," the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday accused Syria's Bashar Assad of seeking to "wipe Homs from the map", comparing his campaign to the Libyan regime's attacks on the city of Benghazi.

"Bashar Assad is lying in a shameful way, he wants to wipe Homs from the map like (former Libyan strongman Moammsr) Gadhafi wanted to wipe Benghazi from the map," Sarkozy told Europe 1 radio.

France said Wednesday that 14 foreign ministers would attend a meeting on Syria in Paris on Thursday to send a "strong" message to Bashar al-Assad's regime to implement a peace plan.

"The obstacles to the U.N. observers' mission that Damascus is putting in place and the Syrian regime's continued repression, contrary to its commitments, calls for a strong reaction from the international community," French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said in a statement.

Thousands have backed a video appeal to Syria's first lady to speak out against violence, made by the wives of the British and German ambassadors to the United Nations.

In the video, Sheila Lyall Grant and Huberta von Voss-Wittig implore Asma al-Assad "to stand up for peace" and speak out against the deadly crackdown instigated by her husband President Bashar al-Assad.