President's history lesson skips over the less glorious chapter

THE LAST time I stood under the plane trees of the French embassy, the stench was unbearable. One at a time - sometimes in pieces - they were bringing in the corpses of the 58 French paratroopers killed in the suicide bombing of their Beirut headquarters. The doctors wore surgical masks, we held handkerchiefs to our faces. It was stiflingly hot. Yet how easily do the years - and the memorials - sanitise our memory.

For there we were yesterday, 15 years later, standing a few feet from that tree behind Jacques Chirac as the French President honoured his dead countrymen. French UN troops stood to attention as the last post was played before the memorial to 137 French soldiers who died in Lebanon during the civil war and the 17 French embassy staff murdered - or "killed by terrorists" as the plaque says - during the same period.

Politics played its usual tricks. There was the name of Christian Gouttierre, the French military attache shot dead in 1986; but no mention yesterday that his murderer, a former Lebanese army corporal called Hussein Tleiss, mysteriously escaped from a Beirut hospital - with the help of armed men - just three months ago. There, too, was the name of Michel Seurat, the brilliant French Arabist who was among the foreign hostages in Lebanon and who died alone in captivity, of cancer, in December 1985. President Chirac even mentioned his name on the lawn of the French "Residence des Pins" the previous evening - no one suggested he probably did so because Seurat's widow, Marie, still blames the French government for failing to recover his body from his kidnappers.

Mr Chirac presented us with a sanitised version of history. He reminded us of the founder of modern Lebanon, General Henri Gouraud, and of Charles de Gaulle's arrival in Beirut after the Free French victory here in 1941. There were Lebanese anciens combattants of the French army, chests jangling with medals, to prove the ties of blood.

But Mr Chirac forgot to remember the greatest French bloodbath in Lebanon, when more than 40,000 French troops loyal to Petain resisted the Allied invasion of 1941, dying in their thousands in the Chouf mountains. Given the opportunity to fight alongside the Allies or return to Vichy France, 37,000 chose to go back to Petain. They set sail, cheering their support for Nazi Germany's French ally - and were very definitely excluded from the weekend's history lessons.

But in front of that Beirut memorial, one French cameraman was deeply moved. He described to me how, in the French paratroop headquarters on the morning of 23 October 1983, he heard an explosion and saw "cracks appearing in the walls of my room" before hurling himself beneath a table where he lay, his legs trapped by concrete, for 36 hours. His name might have been alongside his old comrades on the white stone tablet in front of us. But now he was no longer a "para", just a newsman whose memory would never be sanitised.