President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to shed unprecedented light on France’s murky role in the Rwanda genocide by throwing open the state archives 25 years after the start of the massacre.

Mr Macron’s gesture on Friday came after quarter of a century of tense relations over France’s stance before and during the 1994 genocide, in which 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered, many hacked to death with machetes.

Rwanda has accused France of backing the ethnic Hutu forces behind most of the killing and of facilitating the escape of some of the perpetrators. Paris has long rejected such claims.

An eight-strong commission of historians and researchers "will be tasked with consulting all France's archives relating to the genocide... in order to analyse the role and engagement of France during that period," said the presidency.

The team will have access to classified documents from the foreign and defence ministries but also the DGSE, France's external intelligence service, and reportedly the archives of then president François Mitterrand.