A sixth man was acquitted, and his lawyer said he would try to win reparations from the U.S. government for his time at the prison in Cuba.
The ruling in France capped proceedings that seemed at times like a trial of the U.S. prison camp itself, with the prosecutor lashing out at the ''Guantánamo system'' and saying the prison violates international law.
Seven French citizens were captured in or near Afghanistan by U.S. forces in late 2001, held at Guantánamo and then handed over to French authorities in 2004 and 2005. One was freed immediately and found to have no ties to terrorism.
The others spent up to 17 months in prison in France. All were free by the time the verdict was announced Wednesday.
The five men were convicted of ''criminal association with a terrorist enterprise,'' a broad charge frequently used in France. The court gave them one-year prison sentences, but they will remain free. Time that the men served in provisional sentences upon their return home to France counts toward their new sentences.
The court followed the recommendations of Prosecutor Sonya Djemni-Wagner, who said on Dec. 11 that she could not condone what she called the men's ''abnormal detention'' at Guantánamo.
''None of them should have been held on that base, in defiance of international law, and have had to go through what they went through,'' she said.
She said they should, however, be convicted because they used phony identity papers and visas to knowingly ''integrate into terrorist structures'' in Afghanistan.
Five of the men -- Brahim Yadel, 36; Khaled ben Mustafa, 35; Nizar Sassi, 28; Mourad Benchellali, 26; and Ridouane Khalid, 40 -- said during the trial that they had spent time in military training camps in Afghanistan but said they had never put their combat skills to use.
The sixth man, Imad Kanouni, 30, said he went to Afghanistan for spiritual reasons. He was acquitted, as the prosecutor had recommended. Lawyer Felix de Belloy said he would try to seek reparations on behalf of Kanouni, though he did not elaborate on how he planned to do so.
All the men insisted during the trial that they were innocent of the charges. Their lawyers asked for all to be acquitted.
The formal sentence for Sassi, Benchellali, Khalid and ben Mustafa was four years in prison, with three of those years suspended. Yadel was sentenced to five years in prison, with four of those years suspended.
Lawyers for four of the men said they would appeal, while Khalid's plans were not clear -- his lawyer was not in court.
The verdict was originally expected in September 2006 but was postponed. At the time, the court said it needed to seek more information about secret interrogations of the suspects by French intelligence officers at the American base.
Arguing for their acquittal, the suspects' lawyers had complained that the men were questioned by agents of the DST counterintelligence service outside the framework of international law. They argued that the interrogators unjustly gathered information to bolster the case against the men.
But the court dismissed that argument, saying the DST agents were merely doing intelligence work that had no impact on the court case.
