Overflow from more than a dozen other nearby cafes makes navigating the street a perilous business in the evening, when much of the remaining free space is taken up by African immigrants drinking cans of beer and playing cards on top of trash cans.

Africans are just one of the many communities that frequent or live on the street, which is a continuation of Rue Saint-Denis, Paris’s now-fading red-light district.

These include Kurds, Poles, Serbs, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, north Africans, native French and a growing number of foreign tourists directed here by guide books that list Chez Jeannette’s as one of the coolest bars in town.

It is this eclectic mix that locals want to preserve and which they see as being slowly destroyed by the seemingly inexorable increase in the number of bars, which close at 1:00 or 2:00 am but whose customers often hang around until much later.

— Weary locals launch Facebook campaign —

A Facebook campaign has been launched to try to ensure the street does not go the way of places like Rue Oberkampf, transformed in just a few years from a backwater into a raucous thoroughfare almost entirely given over to boozing.

Fleur Lacarelle, one of the organisers of the campaign, said her children frequently can’t sleep because of the racket, and pointed to a petition by the local fishmonger — exasperated by people urinating on her shopfront at night — that has garnered dozens of signatures asking local authorities to curb drinking on the street.

“The shame is that there are laws. All they need to do is enforce them,” said Lacarelle, who said she is so sick of the noise that she too may have to move out.

City authorities use a range of measures to try to curb noise from drinkers, who took to the streets in greater numbers after smoking was banned in enclosed spaces in France in 2008.

These include a ban on local shops selling alcohol after 9:00 pm, temporary closure of bars and even sending in the police. This summer the authorities also deployed wandering troupes of mime artists to try to persuade patrons to be quiet when they go outside to smoke or enjoy a balmy evening.