Le Pen, 79, was not in court for the hearing, which relates to remarks made in an interview with a far-right magazine in 2005.

The veteran National Front (FN) chief told Rivarol magazine that "in France at least the German occupation was not especially inhumane, even if there were a number of excesses -- inevitable in a country of 550,000 square kilometres.

"If the Germans had carried out mass executions across the country as the received wisdom would have it, then there wouldn’t have been any need for concentration camps for political deportees."

He also partially exonerated the German army over a 1944 massacre in the town of Villeneve d’Ascq, saying it was the work of a lieutenant "mad with rage" over the death of comrades in a resistance attack, and that it was the Gestapo who intervened to stop the killings.

This version was disputed in court by the mayor of Villeneuve d’Ascq and by prosecutor Anne de Fontette, who said it was like calling the Gestapo "the blue berets of the 1940s."

She asked the court to give Le Pen a five month suspended prison term and a 10,000 euros (14,500 dollar) fine.

Rivarol’s editor Marie-Luce Wacquez, who was also prosecuted, told the court that she had not been shocked by Le Pen’s comments over the occupation.

"If you exclude the deportations, the occupation was pretty moderate compared to what happened in the Netherlands and Belgium," she said.

With the help of the collaborationist Vichy government, the German
authorities deported more than 70,000 French Jews to death camps, and thousands of French civilians died in reprisals by the German army -- especially towards the end of the war.

However historical debate has raged over the degree of French acceptance of the 1940-1944 occupation, which for most of the time was relatively peaceful compared to the experiences of countries in eastern Europe.

Le Pen, who founded the Front National in 1972, has been convicted of racism or anti-Semitism on previous occasions.

In 1987 he described the Nazi gas chambers as a "detail of history".

The trial comes at a bad time for the FN, which faces millions of euros of debts after losing state subsidies thanks to its unexpectedly poor showing in this year’s parliamentary elections.

Most of its candidates failed to reach the five percent threshold required for claiming back expenses from the state.

Aides to Le Pen confirmed this week that he was considering selling the party’s headquarters in the affluent Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud.