COLUMN ONE : A Shadow on the Soul of France : The shame of the wartime Vichy regime endures. A decision not to try a Nazi collaborator angers political leaders and, for the first time, the religious elite.

They are the dark years of recent French history. They are the years--1940 to 1944--of France’s humiliating defeat and occupation by Germany and, worst of all, the widespread collaboration with the Nazis during the Vichy government of Marshal Philippe Petain.

They are the years many people in France wanted to forget, to purge from their nation’s collective memory. But like a wound that will not heal, the stigma of those times, documented in films such as the 1971 classic “The Sorrow and the Pity” by director Marcel Ophuls, does not go away.

Most recently, the internal debate here over the Vichy years was revived when an appeals court, reflecting a forgive-and-forget strain still present in some spheres of French society, ruled that Paul Touvier--a 78-year-old collaborationist militia leader--should not stand trial on the charge of “crimes against humanity” for his pro-Nazi activities during the war.

Widely viewed as an exoneration of the Vichy government (which took its name from the small south-central French resort town and spa that was its capital), the court decision on Touvier released an unprecedented torrent of outrage from France’s political leadership, and, for the first time ever, its religious elite.

Upon learning of the April 14 court decision, French Parliament members walked out en masse from the National Assembly. They headed to a nearby memorial to the French Jews and Resistance leaders who were deported, often with the help of French militiamen like Touvier, to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps.

In a break with traditional ecclesiastical silence on the Vichy period, Cardinal Albert Decourtray, the leader of the French Roman Catholic Church and archbishop of Lyons, openly expressed his desire to see Touvier put on trial to aid in the “purification of France’s memory.”

Earlier, Decourtray authorized an exhaustive study of the church’s own role in hiding and protecting Touvier for more than 40 years before his capture in a Catholic fundamentalist monastery near Nice in 1989.

Many interpreted the new position of the church as an important sign that after five decades, France was finally learning to face up to the demons of its past. But in truth, France’s rueful reconciliation with its past has been going on for years and forms a consistent backdrop to everyday French life.

Only 20% of France’s 56 million people were alive at the time of the Vichy government. But the intensity of the debate on Touvier, featured on numerous television talk shows and magazine covers, shows the importance the war years still play in contemporary France.

More than is true of any other period, what France did and didn’t do during the war dictates the way it acts, thinks and presents itself on the world stage today. Much of the late Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s strutting and posturing in the postwar years, for example, can be attributed to his effort to rebuild French pride after the humiliation and shame of World War II.

For French political leader Simone Veil, the damage to France might have been less had it suffered the same fate as Denmark, the Netherlands and even tiny Luxembourg--and had been overrun and completely occupied by the Germans.

Instead, with the armistice of 1940 signed by Petain, France made a separate peace with the Germans. The pact allowed the country to continue the administration of the southern half of its territory known as Vichy France or, incongruously, as “free France.”

As a result, Veil lamented during a recent television discussion of the Touvier case, “France still suffers from a deep and painful division that doesn’t exist in other countries. It remains an indelible stain. We collaborated.”

The words of Veil, 64, a member of the European Parliament and a former government minister, carry special weight. As a teen-ager in a middle-class French Jewish family, she was deported to the Nazi extermination camp in Auschwitz in 1944 but saved from almost certain death by the Allied victory a year later.

But as minister of health in 1979, even Veil became entangled in France’s agonizing struggle with its own memory of what it did during the war. When Ophuls’ classic documentary on wartime collaboration and resistance in the central French city of Clermont-Ferrand was proposed for airing on French television, Veil opposed it.

Ophuls’ film, she said, was too harsh. “To depict all Frenchmen as bastards is a form of masochism.”

To say that France has ignored its Vichy past is neither fair nor true, especially in light of the almost constant brooding self-examination on the subject that has marked the past 20 years. Since 1970, the period of occupation and Vichy has been the subject of dozens of histories, novels, plays and films by the French themselves.

The Vichy regime and the deportation of French Jews have been featured in dozens of French films, beginning with the 1956 classic documentary “Night and Fog” by Alain Resnais and continuing with the recent Claude Berri-directed movie “Uranus,” which deals with the explosive issue of the postwar purge.

What is true, most historians agree, is that in the immediate postwar years of reconstruction, De Gaulle attempted to heal his country’s wounds by intentionally exaggerating the role of the Resistance against German rule. In truth, the French Resistance was never as large nor as active as the romantic image presented by Gaullists and, indeed, by Hollywood.

In the Gaullist version of events, Petain, a World War I hero, was a misguided old man surrounded by a small number of evil-minded, home-grown French fascists. Supposedly, the majority of the French, both in the occupied northern half of the country and in the Vichy “free French” zone to the south, opposed the Germans.

But that myth was largely exploded in the 1971 Ophuls film, which depicted the French Resistance as a minuscule minority of mainly Communist activists, and by the 1972 book “Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order 1940-44” by American scholar Robert Paxton. Using mainly German records, Paxton for the first time documented the extent of voluntary cooperation between the Vichy government and the Germans.

Until then, many in France had taken comfort in the idea that Petain and members of his government had played a kind of “double game” with the Germans to protect French citizens, including the country’s Jews.

But Paxton demonstrated that the Vichy government not only cooperated with the Germans in the deportation and genocide of the Jews but in some cases even exceeded the German demands.

Anti-Semitism, Paxton showed, was an integral part of Vichy policy. French defenders of Petain argued that not one anti-Semitic remark could be found in any of the marshal’s speeches. However, records showed a series of anti-Jewish legislative actions and edicts beginning with the infamous 1940 statute that excluded Jews from the government, education, radio and the military.

Between Aug. 29, 1940, when the practice of medicine was banned for Jews in the Vichy zone, and Aug. 26, 1941, when 7,000 Jews were arrested and deported to concentration camps, at least 12 anti-Jewish laws were promulgated by the Vichy regime.

Paxton’s book provoked a period of French self-analysis and scholarship that continues to this day. Viewed by an outsider, this brooding self-examination by the French presents a picture of a nation stunned into a state of amnesia by the horror of what it had done and seen, now cautiously pricking its memory lobes to reconstruct the truth.

A few years ago, for example, French school textbooks painted De Gaulle and Petain with the same brush--”two patriots who had a different idea of honor.” But in one of the high school textbooks in use today, the authors note that the Vichy regime “directed an anti-Semitic policy well before the Nazis even asked for it.”

In the wake of the Touvier court decision, French Education and Cultural Minister Jack Lang required that the film “Night and Fog”--the 1956 classic by Resnais about the deportation of Jews to Nazi extermination camps--be shown in all lycees.

Because of the extensive scholarship, most historians now agree on general facts about what happened during and immediately following the war in France.

According to Henry Rousso, author of a recent book on the traumatic French struggle with the nation’s past, “The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944,” the Vichy regime abetted the deportation of 76,000 French and foreign Jews, only 3% of whom survived.

Postwar purges, Rousso noted, also caused thousands of deaths. About 10,000 people were executed without trial. Military and civilian courts reviewed 160,287 cases of collaboration. Of 7,037 people sentenced to death by these courts, 1,500 were executed.

The period of purge resulted in the arrest and punishment of most of the active collaborators and senior officials of Vichy, as well as Germans accused of crimes in France.

Among the few who escaped were Klaus Barbie, the German Gestapo chief in Lyons, and Touvier, chief of intelligence for the Vichy regime militia. Barbie, extradited to France from Bolivia in 1983, was put on trial for “crimes against humanity” and sentenced to life in prison, where he died last year.

Jacques Verges, Barbie’s French attorney, used the trial as an occasion to put France itself on trial for its activities during the war. During the trial, the country was forced to confront the role that French citizens played in the crimes of the Holocaust.

By convicting the “butcher of Lyons,” the French proved they could face up to the crimes that Germans committed on their soil.

But the country’s stomach for confronting the crimes of the French had still not been demonstrated. Confronted with fresh revelations about the wartime activities of two prominent French citizens--Rene Bousquet, a leading businessman and banker, and Maurice Papon, a former Paris police chief--the French criminal justice system has delayed and dawdled for years, as though it were uncertain what should be done.

The arrest of Touvier at a Nice monastery in 1989, however, offered the best chance yet for the French judiciary to put a Frenchman, indeed Barbie’s equivalent in the Vichy government, on trial. That Touvier is a war criminal is beyond question. After escaping from custody in 1944, Touvier was twice put on trial in absentia and sentenced to death.

Using a network of sympathetic French priests who offered him protection--the clerics included a small, extreme right-wing element of the French church known as the Knights of Notre Dame--Touvier was able to avoid arrest until 1967, when the statute of limitations expired on his death sentences.

In 1971, President Georges Pompidou, announcing that the time had come to “draw a veil” over the crimes of the Vichy past, offered Touvier amnesty on the remaining sanctions against him, including a prohibition on owning property in France. But Pompidou’s amnesty created an instant storm of protest, mainly from former Resistance fighters. Touvier was forced to flee once again.

Finally in 1989, he was arrested in the Nice monastery of an excommunicated fundamentalist order of the church. He was promptly indicted on the basis of the same “crimes against humanity” charges that were used to convict Barbie.

But on April 14, a three-judge panel meeting in Paris ordered the charges dropped. In reviewing the charges in a 213-page decision, the judges issued a very narrow interpretation of the “crimes against humanity” statute, which requires that the alleged crimes have been committed “in the name of a totalitarian state.”

The judges determined that there was enough evidence, based largely on Touvier’s own admissions in interviews, that he committed at least one of the crimes charged, the execution of seven Jewish men at Rillieux-la-Pape in 1944 in reprisal for the Resistance assassination of a Vichy minister.

But in the most controversial element of their decision, they ruled that the Vichy government was not a “totalitarian state”--that it had not officially collaborated with Nazi Germany.

This apparent disregard for history, even the textbooks in their own children’s classrooms, caused the outraged wave of protest from historians of the Vichy period. How could the regime that practiced genocide alongside its German ally be judged differently than the Germans, notably Barbie?

“The decision gives the impression that the French are ready to judge and convict Germans but not do the same thing for (France’s) own citizens,” commented historian Rene Remond, leader of a commission of scholars who investigated the Touvier case at the behest of the French church.

A few days later a headline appeared over a story about the Touvier case in the Frankfurt daily newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau, raising exactly this point: “Are There Different Rules for the Butcher and His Helper?”