People left homeless or in a precarious state after the heavy winds and rain late Tuesday and Wednesday would have access to a loan fund of 650,000 euros (730,000 dollars), and that his ministry would pick up the tab for clean-up costs, he said during a trip to the southwestern town of Biscarosse, near Bordeaux.

Local authorities and insurance companies should also expedite claims resulting from the storms, which ripped through the Landes, Maine-et-Loire, Gironde, Charente-Maritime and Vienne regions.

Wooded camp sites had borne the brunt of the ugly weather, with three of those killed -- a 39-year-old Dutchman, a 10-year-old Dutch girl, and a two-year-old French boy -- being hit by uprooted trees in separate locations.

The other two deaths Tuesday resulted from a 17-year-old boy losing control of his moped during a ferocious hail storm and hitting an oncoming vehicle, and a man who died of a heart attack.

A Frenchman who had disappeared while playing on a lake south of Bordeaux was listed as missing.

Around 70 people were injured in the storms, 10 of them seriously, according to the emergency services.

Several French newspapers gave the storms front-page treatment.

One of them, France-Soir, noted that France's national weather service Meteo France had issued several storm warnings but that campers had apparently ignored the danger.

The newspaper confirmed that a bulletin had gone out Tuesday morning, but it quoted an unnamed official in the Maine-et-Loire region as saying: "But we have storm alerts every two days!"

Meteo France told the paper it has taken extra efforts to inform authorities of dangerous weather since December 1999, when storms of extraordinary force ripped across France, killing 92 people.

Forecasts were now for sunny weather across virtually all of France to Saturday, with a heat wave that was broken by the storms gradually returning.

TERRA.WIRE