When France finally holds its first gay wedding in just over a month's time, it will be Vincent and Bruno who will be exchanging vows in Montpellier, a southern city known to homosexuals as the "French San Francisco".

For the French couple, it will be a legal union culminating a relationship of more than five years.

Police have smashed a gang which used fake bomb vests in the kidnapping of 21 businessmen in France and Luxembourg to raise over three million euros in ransom, Spanish police, which took part in the operation, said Sunday.

Eight suspects, including the ring's suspected leader who had escaped from a French jail last year, were detained in Spain and another eight were arrested in France, Spanish police said in a statement.

Nestled inside flimsy black fishnet stockings that droop heavily from the ceiling, hundreds of breast implants made by a firm whose faulty products sparked a global health scare have been turned into an art installation in the French city of Marseille.

The aptly punned "PIP Show" by artist Camille Lorin, which opens late on Saturday, comes just days after France launched a high-profile trial against five managers from the PIP company who stand accused of using sub-standard, industrial-grade silicone implants.

French President Francois Hollande welcomed a family of seven back to France early Saturday as they flew into Paris after two months in the hands of Nigeria's Islamist militants.

The Moulin-Fournier family, which includes four boys aged between five and 12, flew in from Cameroon on a French government Falcon jet with Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius.

French parliamentarians almost came to blows Friday as they finished debating a gay marriage bill that has triggered violent protests and been linked to homophobic assaults.

A final, decisive vote on the bill -- which would also legalize adoption by gay couples -- is expected to take place on Tuesday, prompting opponents to up the ante, with protests taking place every day in Paris and other cities.

French prosecutors on Friday opened a probe into allegations the Libyan regime contributed to the 2007 campaign of Nicolas Sarkozy, who went on to become president, a judicial source said.

The probe -- the latest in a string of allegations relating to Sarkozy's years in office and electoral campaigns -- is looking into charges of "active and passive corruption", "influence peddling" and others, the source added.

A French family of seven kidnapped by Islamic extremists in Cameroon in February have been freed and are in the hands of officials in the central African state, President Paul Biya said.

Biya made the announcement in a statement read on national radio which said the hostages -- a father, mother, four children aged 5 to 12, and an uncle -- had been "handed over last night to Cameroonian authorities.”

French President Francois Hollande on Thursday hit out at "homophobic" acts by opponents of a same-sex marriage bill following violent protests that included an attack on a gay bar.

Interior Minister Manuel Valls asked protest organizers to throw out members of far-right organisations who have been involved in the violence, as opposition intensifies ahead of the bill's expected final approval.

French researchers dealt a blow to folklore that says mothers are better than fathers in recognizing their baby's cry.

The "maternal instinct" notion gained scientific backing more than three decades ago through two experiments, one of which found that women were nearly twice as accurate as men in identifying the cry of their offspring.

Hundreds of women who received faulty breast implants are gathering in the south of France for the fraud trial of five executives accused of using cheap industrial silicone to fill tens of thousands of implants around the world.

Jean-Claude Mas, who founded and ran implant-maker Poly Implant Prothese, is among those on trial beginning Wednesday in the southern city of Marseille. The now-defunct company had claimed exports to more than 60 countries and was one of the world's leading implant makers.