FRANCE has never reconciled itself to its wartime record. The uncomfortable truths of collaboration, anti-semitism and a divided country with a shameful regime are not the subject of popular embrace even today. It was only in the 80s that French schoolbooks even mentioned collaboration with the Nazi conquerors and few would easily discuss the part Frenchmen played in the deportation of 75,000 of their Jewish countrymen to Adolf Hitler's death camps. So perhaps we should be surprised and even grateful that a court in Versailles this week finally sentenced the first Frenchman to be convicted of crimes against humanity to life imprisonment. That Paul Touvier is 79 and has lived the last 50 years since his awful deeds as a relatively free man (albeit evading capture by the authorities for some of that period) indicates that even at this late hour some in France are beginning to examine its chequered past. The former militia chief was sentenced for his part in the execution of seven Jewish prisoners near Lyons in the south of France on June 29, 1944. In his final plea to the court Jacques Tremolet de Villers, his defence lawyer, had questioned the relevance of the trial asking members of the jury: ''Do you think that the victims, 50 years on, need the conviction of Paul Touvier?'' President Francois Mitterrand may well have thought not. He commented, a few days ago as the trial entered its second week, that to try old men for crimes to which there were few witnesses still alive ''has hardly any meaning any more''. He is not alone, Georges Pompidou and Charles de Gaulle argued that France's wartime past should be buried. France has had an ostrich-like ability to ignore its past when it wanted to. About 10,000 French citizens were executed or assassinated after the Liberation for helping the Germans but it was only 30 years later that it became general knowledge that the Vichy Government had helped to round up 75,000 French and foreign Jews for the gas chambers. In the 1980s charges of crimes against humanity were brought against four ageing Frenchmen but the authorities were reluctant to bring them to trial. Two have since died - one being shot by a gunman last June. The other two are Touvier and Maurice Papon. Touvier was long-considered the least important of the four. He was arrested in 1989 after nearly 45 years hiding in convents and monasteries. This again raises questions over the role of the church. It knew exactly the nature of the man it sheltered. TOUVIER'S indictable crime came when the Nazis demanded reprisals for the assassination by the Resistance of the Vichy information minister Philippe Henriot. Touvier carried out the executions. The fact that he spared the life of an eighth prisoner on the grounds that he was not Jewish was also incriminating. Now the pressure is on for the trial of Papon, a more senior figure in the regime who it is claimed was responsible for the deportation to their deaths of around 1,700 Jews. There are many who accuse President Mitterrand of effectively sheltering Papon. He was a civil servant rather than thug and a trial would risk the dangers of exposing the extent to which the elite was involved - just the fears exposed by the Lyons trial of the German police officer Klaus Barbie on the same charge in 1987. Papon went on to an outstanding post-war career as the chief of police in Paris and became budget minister under Giscard d'Estaing. One French newspaper described his escape so far as ''judicial burial''. But there seems little chance he will be brought to trial. He has been indicted twice in 1983 and 1984 but was never brought anywhere near to justice. French Jewish groups are calling for justice but it seems the establishment has little stomach for it. The sentencing of Touvier merited just 400 words in the leftish newspaper Liberation the morning after it was read out this week. Even Le Figaro, which gave it a full page, pulled back from an editorial opinion, concentrating instead on a crisis in French sports. Not that France is alone in its reluctance. Britain has abandoned any attempts to bring charges against east European death camp guards who fled to Britain after the war rather than face the Soviets. And who really expects those responsible for 250,000 deaths in Bosnia over the past two years to ever face justice?
