Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo was Wednesday due to make a much-awaited address to the West African nation on a French peace deal which has fuelled deadly ethnic clashes and widespread rioting.

Gbagbo was expected to make the speech when he has finished consultations with key players in the peace process, aimed at ending four months of civil war in the world's largest cocoa producer.

The deal has set the armed forces against the embattled head of state, as it allocates the defence and interior portfolios to rebels who launched the war.

It also curtails Gbagbo's powers by setting up a national unity government headed by a consensus prime minister.

The deal has provoked widespread anger in Ivory Coast, manifested in four days of anti-French riots in Abidjan and ethnic violence in the nearby town of Agboville, in which at least 10 people were killed.

But if Gbagbo backs out of the deal, he risks invoking the wrath of former colonial ruler France.

Gbagbo, who accepted the deal on Sunday in Paris in front of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, 10 African leaders and representatives of the European Union, sang a different tune immediately upon his return home.

"Do not worry, what was said .... were proposals," he told thousands of disgruntled youths who met him at the president's office.

Gbagbo sought to reassure the incensed youths who have staged sweeping anti-French demonstrations over the accord that his powers were undiminished.

"The day when I am in an untenable situation or forced to betray you, I will tell you that I am no longer president," Gbagbo said.

"But we are not there, so there is no cause for worry. As long as my signature is of some value, I am at the helm and you can reassure yourselves." The deal increasingly seems to be falling apart with the government and the rebels appearing equally intransigent.

Gbagbo's Interior Minister Paul Yao N'dre late Tuesday declared the pact "null and void." "These accords say that the prime minister shares power with the president. That is unacceptable ... This regime does not share power between the democratically elected president and a prime minister named overseas." Yao N'dre scoffed at the idea of rebels in the government ranks: "All you have to do is fire off a few rounds to get invited into the government and to destabilise the whole of the sub-region." The Ivorian armed forces in a memorandum submitted to Gbagbo who had demanded it of them also clearly rejected having former rebels as their bosses.

The police are under the interior ministry and the army and gendarmerie under the defence ministry.

Meanwhile, tensions subsided in Ivory Coast Wednesday after days of ethnic clashes and sweeping anti-French protests.

The town of Agboville was calm Wednesday, after security forces were deployed to quell two days of deadly ethnic clashes sparked by the deal.

A resident of Agboville said tension in the town had fallen tangibly overnight after the army had deployed to stop the fighting between ethnic Abbeys, from southern Ivory Coast, and Dioulas, from the predominantly Muslim north.

In the main Ivorian city, Abidjan, around 80 kilometres (50 miles) south of Agboville, life returned to normal after four days of anti-French protests.

On Wednesday the barricades had been dismantled in Abidjan city centre and in the upmarket Cocody residential neighbourhood.

Municipal sweepers were busy cleaning up a road in front of the US embassy in the Plateau neighbourhood, where some 8,000 protesters from a youth group had demonstrated Tuesday to seek Washington's backing against what they see as a humiliating French-brokered treaty.

But the clean-up team forgot to remove a little wooden board placed on a kerb which said: "The army should kick out the invaders from Ivory Coast" -- a reference to the rebels - Sapa/AFP.