Ms. Le Pen’s campaign has been oriented around an extreme form of nationalism, and she often criticizes historians and others who bring up the uglier aspects of France’s past, as she did on Sunday. “We’ve taught our children that they have all the reasons in the world to criticize it, to only see its darkest historical aspects,” she said. “I want them to be proud of being French.”

Mainstream candidates on the right have uttered similar sentiments about respecting France’s “national narrative.”

But the Vel d’Hiv and France’s wartime treatment of its Jews have generally been off-limits to this sort of historical revisionism. As the American historian Robert Paxton has pointed out, France was unique in Western Europe in that it was the only country to use its own police force for roundups in territory not occupied by the Germans.

Ever since President Jacques Chirac declared in a speech in 1995 commemorating the Vel d’Hiv roundup that “France, on that day, committed the irreparable,” the question of French complicity and guilt has appeared largely settled, officially at least. “Going back on its word, it delivered those whom it was protecting to their executioners,” Mr. Chirac said at the time.

On Sunday night, to quiet the growing polemic, Ms. Le Pen tried to place her words in the context of others who have disassociated the Vichy government from France itself. “I consider that France and its Republic were in London during the occupation, and that the Vichy regime wasn’t France,” Ms. Le Pen said in a news release.

There again, the historians’ verdict is different. The Vichy government initially enjoyed wide support, its functionaries and officials came largely from the prewar bureaucracy, and many went on to have excellent careers in government and business after the war. Foreign countries, including the United States, maintained embassies at Vichy and had cordial relations with it.

Mr. Bousquet received a suspended sentence in 1949 and had a successful career in business afterward. His role and high connections were only belatedly re-exposed 40 years later, when he was charged with crimes against humanity. He was shot dead by a deranged person in June 1993.