Four of those involved were seriously injured following the blast in a building that housed a design school and the Catholic education system headquarters in Rue Saint-Jacques, in the fifth arrondissement of the French capital.
French interior minister Gérald Darmanin has referred several times to "eco-terrorism" in relation to the actions of Les Soulèvements de la Terre in recent months, saying some activists had showed "extreme violence against police forces".
Tourism minister Olivia Grégoire unveiled plan to regulate visitor flows at the most popular sites and said France, the world's biggest tourist destination, needed to better manage the peak-season influxes that threatened "the environment, the quality of life for locals, and the experiences for its visitors".
The men, now aged between 22 and 28, are accused of planning attacks on mosques, the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF) and the French headquarters of The International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (Licra) in Tours.
Video of Emmanuel Macron downing a bottle of beer in one straight go, after being egged on to do so by Toulouse players following their victory in a rugby cup final match against La Rochelle, has led to a flurry of comments on social media and in the press about his past stances against binge drinking.
Officials representing the Normandy region are locked in a legal battle with the culture ministry in Paris over which of them has the right to a letter written in 1793, four years after the French Revolution, by Charlotte Corday, 24, explaining why she was about to murder Jean-Paul Marat, 50, a radical faction leader who she stabbed to death in his bath.
An earthquake of between 5.3 and 5.8 on the Richter scale which struck western France on Friday evening, whose epicentre was close to the coastal town of La Rochelle, was followed overnight by two aftershocks on a scale of 5 and 3, worsening damage to buildings, while no fatalities were reported.
