Protected by pale green bulletproof glass and flanked by two policemen, the tall, patrician old man wore expensively tailored clothes and carried a leather-bound folder. He took notes with a gold fountain pen and sometimes cupped his ear while listening to lawyers' arguments.

"The most unsettling thing was that he never once looked at us," one of the plaintiffs, Michel Slitinsky, said after the hearing.

More than half a century after he signed the warrants that sent 1,560 French Jews to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, 87-year-old Maurice Papon this week came face to face with 35 French Jews whose families he effectively condemned to death. They, along with 15 Jewish associations, are suing him for crimes against humanity.

In this dramatic confrontation of accused and accusers it seemed as if Bordeaux had fallen into a time warp. Mr Papon was again the indifferent, arrogant bureaucrat, and the elderly Jews who studied him with intense curiosity would for ever be his victims.

In his lapel, the tiny red rosette of a Commander of the Legion of Honour testified to Mr Papon's distinguished career as a government prefect, director of a large state company, member of parliament and minister of the budget. Such an important person would not deign to look at the riff-raff in the courtroom, all those Jews wearing yellow stickers emblazoned with the star of David as a reminder of the Vichy regulations.

They searched Mr Papon's face for a sign of explanation or remorse; there was neither. "I do not feel the least bit guilty," the wartime secretary general of the Gironde prefecture said before his trial opened. "Not the least bit responsible for the dreadful misfortunes which occurred."

Had it not been for 72-year-old Michel Slitinsky, the Papon trial would never have taken place. Fifty-five years ago this month, Mr Papon received a report that Slitinsky, the son of a Ukrainian immigrant tailor, had escaped over the rooftops of Bordeaux when French police came to arrest his family.

Mr Papon was too busy administering the "section for Jewish questions" to give the escape much thought. Michel Slitinsky's father Abraham left Bordeaux in one of 10 convoys organised by Mr Papon and died at Auschwitz.

It took a 20-year search through archives for Michel Slitinsky to find the deportation orders signed by Mr Papon. When he broke the story in 1981, Mr Papon, then budget minister, thought he was beyond retribution. "This whole thing moves me very little," he sniffed.

Mr Slitinsky was so satisfied when the trial opened that he said October 8th should be declared a national holiday. With his bright orange jacket and checked shirt, bushy white hair and moustache, the short, pudgy Slitinsky could not be more different from the man he may send to prison for the rest of his life.

There was a certain irony in the fact that Mr Papon was brought under police escort from Paris to Bordeaux's Gare Saint-Jean. It was from there that he sent the deportees to the gas chambers.

In an eerie, unconvincing role reversal, Mr Papon and his lawyer sought to portray him as the victim. "There are no more guarantees for the citizen nor honour for the nation," Papon said in a statement on the eve of his trial, a declaration eminently applicable to the Vichy regime he served.

"This pursuit is a masquerade unworthy of a state based on law. There is nothing I can do against the fanatical media, the persecution and hatred, so I must hope that the authentic France (la France profonde) will come to its senses . . ."

His lawyer, Jean-Marc Varaut, said that Mr Papon, who suffers from heart disease, would not be able to participate in the trial if he continued to spend his nights in prison. Blackmail, said lawyers for the civil plaintiffs.

"If he does not survive [because of prison conditions]," Mr Varaut threatened, "his family and his lawyers will pursue all those responsible." To the fury of Jewish groups, judges yesterday freed Mr Papon. After two nights in prison and one night in hospital, he has joined his lawyers in the luxury of the Saint James Hotel at Bouliac, outside Bordeaux.

The Papon trial stirs up not only the shame of the Vichy period, but the bitterness of the 1958-1962 Algerian war. As prefect of Paris from 1958 until 1966, Papon ordered the brutal repression of two protest marches by Algerians.

On the rainy night of October 17th, 1961, French police acting under Papon's instructions opened fire on demonstrators, charged them with batons and threw dozens of bodies into the Seine. More than 200 were killed.

Four months later eight more Algerians were killed when French police attacked demonstrators at the Charonne Metro station. Not only was Mr Papon not punished, he was named director of the state-owned company Sud-Aviation.

Although he is not being tried in Bordeaux for the killing of the Algerians, their relatives this week protested in front of the Bordeaux Palais de Justice.

But Mr Papon's trial is also relevant to today's France, where the extreme right-wing National Front leader Jean-Marie le Pen wants to rescind French citizenship accorded to recent immigrants, just as Vichy rescinded the nationality of French Jews.

At a dinner party in Bordeaux on the night the trial opened, I asked the other guests whether France's second World War betrayal of French Jews could happen again.

The unanimous answer of the middle-aged, middle-class group was chilling. Yes, they all said, not only could it happen, it would. "But next time," they predicted, "it will be the Arabs."