Adolf Hitler boasted that the zeal of French collaborators spared him scarce manpower. Nazi records show 2200 German Gestapo agents were sent to France. Local police helped deport 79,000 Jews.

Historians estimate there were fewer than 75,000 active Resistance members, or 0.2 percent of the adult population. French newspapers under the Vichy government called them "terrorists."

Michel Thomas, a Jewish fighter in the French Resistance who was to testify in the trial, said on Israeli radio, "Major raids were carried out by the French against Jews in Vichy France."

Until the early 1980s, after Klarsfeld led an energetic campaign, hardly any French textbook even mentioned the Vichy government's treatment of Jews or its role in the deportations.

Marcel Ophuls' biting documentary, "The Sorrow and the Pity," probed deeply into the national anguish over wartime shame, but it was kept off the state-run television networks for a decade.

Verges is attempting to show that what happened in Lyon during World War II was a national shame and that Barbie was merely one of many caught up in it.

Prosecutors, Jewish leaders, and a spectrum of Frenchmen react heatedly to that line of defense. They say Verges wants to "banalise" Nazism--reduce it to the commonplace.

For many of the French, it is that issue, not Klaus Barbie, that is on trial.