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FORTY-ONE years after the fall of France, no period in modern French history remains more painful and controversial than the Vichy regime set up by Marshal Petain in the summer of 1940; no subject is more delicate than the behavior of the French during the four years of German occupation and Vichy rule. The postwar French political leaders - of the early Fifth as well as of the Fourth Republic - had, on the whole, come out of the Resistance; they had no reason to encourage explorations of the darker side of French wartime attitudes and policies. French archives were closed to scholars. It was only after 1970 that Marcel Ophuls's searing movie ''The Sorrow and the Pity'' began to challenge heroic myths and prudent silence. Nevertheless, when Robert Paxton's ''Vichy France'' appeared in a French translation in 1973, his stark and devastating description of Vichy collaborationism (which he based on German and American archives) was rather badly received in France, where many critics accused this scrupulous and thoughtful young historian either of misinterpreting the Vichy leaders' motives or of lacking compassion.

Now, collaborating with another fine historian, the Canadian Michael Marrus, author of an earlier book on the Jews of France and the Dreyfus case, Mr. Paxton has concentrated on the most sinister aspect of Vichy: its policy toward the Jews. ''Vichy France and the Jews'' was first published in a French translation (and with a series of interesting legislative documents not reproduced in the American edition) last spring. So far, the book has been greeted with less hostility than Mr. Paxton's earlier work. The authors have carefully studied French archives -which are only now beginning to be opened, although selectively and unevenly - as well as the vast literature of memoirs, monographs and secondary works. Along with the general issue of Vichy's relations with the Nazis, the anti-Semitic legislation and persecutions carried out by French leaders under Petain constitute the most hotly debated question about France in the years of German rule. The defenders of Vichy have always argued that the measures taken against the Jews were imposed because of German pressure, and that Vichy's overall record was fine: Statistics show that only about one-fourth of all the Jews in France in 1940 lost their lives, and most of the victims were foreign Jews; the bulk of French Jewry escaped. But Mr. Paxton and Mr. Marrus provide a graphic and often heart-rending account of official cruelty, administrative callousness, public prejudices and popular indifference; the section on Vichy's concentration camps is particularly eloquent. Their exhaustive research and the sobriety of their prose make this indictment far more powerful than previous works on the subject.

The authors establish without a doubt that it was not Germans but French anti-Semites of deep conviction and long duration - many of them influenced by the grand old man of French reactionary thinking, Charles Maurras - who initiated the Vichy anti-Semitic legislation. The first Vichy Commissioner General for Jewish Affairs, Xavier Vallat, a Roman Catholic disabled hero of World War I and a rightwing parliamentarian, was as anti-German as he was anti-Semitic. German pressure came only later, and throughout the period Vichy officials insisted not only on drafting their own measures for Vichy France - that is, for the area of France that remained unoccupied until November 1942 - but also on trying to export those measures into the part of the country occupied by the Germans, who were applying their own rules. Although Vichy anti-Semitism, according to Mr. Paxton and Mr. Marrus, was purely French, it was ''neither the work of mass opinion nor of the men at the very top'' (such as Petain, Admiral Darlan and Pierre Laval). But it ''was pushed by powerful groups and fanatical individuals, given a free hand by the indifference of others ready to abandon the values of the hated ancien regime (the liberal Third Republic).''

What constituted the Vichy policy? The original legislation, the Statut des juifs of October 1940, went beyond the German regulations, which had defined Jewishness ''by religious practice''; the statute defined the Jews as a race (though Vichyites have usually claimed that racism was a Nazi monopoly). In the Xavier Vallat era (1940-42), Vichy's policy was aimed at ''the total elimination of Jewish culture from the French scene: the foreigners by emigration, the French-born by exclusion, and the half-Jewish by assimilation.'' As Racine once put it, ''Crime, like virtue, has its degrees.'' Vichy did not want a systematic extermination of the Jews, a ''final solution'' of its own; rather, it wanted to rid France of foreign Jews. ''The internment of foreign Jews in the Vichy zone ran ahead of what was done in the Occupied Zone,'' and in December 1941, Admiral Darlan ordered the internment, or the drafting into labor battalions, of all foreign Jews who had come to France since 1936. French officials wanted the Germans to take the foreign Jews of Vichy France into occupied France. French Jews were deprived of the right to be public servants, and a numerus clausus, or quota system, was imposed in higher education and in most professions; their property could be ''Aryanized'' by administrative decision of the Commissariat-General for Jewish Affairs.

Nevertheless, Vichy did not intend to follow Germany's example in segregating French Jews from the rest of the French, and, to the end, resisted the imposition of the Star of David that was required in the occupied zone: discrimination yes, separation no. And Jewish war veterans were spared many of the discriminatory measures.

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Does this mean that Vichy was actually opposed to the extermination of the Jews? There is no doubt that Vichy was not only willing but eager to help the Nazis by agreeing to their demands - which kept increasing from the spring of 1942 onward - for the deportation of France's foreign Jews. The agreement between Rene Bousquet, the Secretary General of the French police, and Nazi S.S. Gen. Carl Oberg provided that the French police would assist in ''the repression of all the enemies of the Reich.'' As is well known (and was dramatized some years ago in a somber and moving film, ''Black Thursday''), it was the French police who, at the Germans' request, rounded up 13,000 foreign Jews in Paris on July 16 and 17, 1942, and seized many thousands more in unoccupied France in late August of that year. Pierre Laval had defiantly told a group of American Quakers a few weeks earlier that ''the French government was glad that a change in German attitude toward foreign Jews gave France an opportunity to get rid of them.''

Did Vichy acquiesce to the deportation of foreign Jews in order to save French Jews? Undoubtedly the Vichy leaders (not including Vallat's contemptible successor, Darquier de Pellepoix, a racist rabble-rouser in Germany's pay before the war) would have liked to save them. But Mr. Marrus and Mr. Paxton make it clear that Vichy was inconsistent and weak. So, for example, in June 1941 a Vichy law had given to the prefects (the Government's representatives in each department) the power to intern all Jews. Then when the Germans, in retaliation against attacks on them, began to arrest French Jews in occupied France in October 1941, Darlan decided to intervene only on behalf of veterans. Laval never gave his German counterparts the impression that he would ultimately resist their attempts to seize all Jews, and never tried to get them to agree to spare the French ones. Still, one could argue that Vichy succeeded in postponing the roundup of the bulk of the French Jews and thus saved their lives.

Vichy was consistent in one respect, which turned out to be a deadly miscalculation. In its desire to restore a modicum of French control and autonomy to occupied France, Vichy tried to obtain German consent by adopting legislative measures that would rival the anti-Semitic ones of the Nazis, and by ordering French police participation in anti-Jewish activities. The Germans saw through this tactic - and exploited it without conceding anything. As one of the Nazi leaders in France said, ''We could let the abrogation of the German measures dangle before the French, in order to stimulate their initiative in settling the Jewish question.'' It was, indeed, ''a subtle form of entrapment.'' Repeatedly, the Germans stated that they could never have accomplished as much as they did without the help of the French police. Vichy pursued its policy of yielding (or imitating) today in the hope of gaining authority tomorrow, out of fear that outright resistance would incite the Germans to replace the motley crowd of conservatives and technocrats around Petain with the real fascists of Paris. This was another miscalculation, since ''throughout Europe the Germans wisely preferred conservative and nationalist leaders to fascist adventurers.''

How were Vichy's policies enforced? The authors point to the ease with which the anti-Semitic laws and decrees were put into effect because of two factors that are usually considered political blessings, yet in this case turned out to be disastrous: the efficiency of the French bureaucracy (which included a police force proud of its ability to control and to build complete card files) and the legalism of top bureaucrats and politicians. It seems that it was at least partially in order to avoid the administrative problems of having to cope with orphans, as well as to fill the quotas imposed by the Germans, that in the summer of 1942 the French arrested Jewish children along with their parents, even though the Nazis had not asked them to do so. Many French lawyers believed that the law simply had to be obeyed. Violence was unseemly and the Star was unacceptable, but legal exclusions were only a matter of technique. Thus all essential documents such as the identity and rationing cards could be stamped with the word juif.

What were the causes of Vichy anti-Semitism? Here, the authors wisely refer to earlier history. Vichy was, after all, simultaneously a break in France's liberal and democratic tradition and the climax of antidemocratic and vindictive trends in recent French history. Mr. Paxton and Mr. Marrus rightly discount the immediate relevance of anti-Semitic themes in traditional French political thought, left and right; these had left a residue which was ''partly submerged'' but no worse than similar sentiments in other countries. Jews certainly felt at home in the Third Republic, and French Jews felt intensely French. According to Mr. Paxton and Mr. Marrus, the real source of Vichy anti-Semitism is to be found in the national crisis of the 1930's, when France, still exhausted from World War I, with a stagnant population, a creeping and seemingly endless economic depression, an ineffective parliamentary system, a tumult of extremist factions on the far right, deep divisions between the moderate left and the moderate right, a rising Moscow-led Communist Party, a resurgent and dynamic Nazi neighbor and an unworkable network of foreign alliances, increasingly sought salvation in protectionism, appeasement and meanness of spirit.

Mr. Marrus and Mr. Paxton make two essential points. Anti-Semitism was inseparable from xenophobia, hence the sharp distinction between well-assimilated Jews and foreign or recently arrived or naturalized ones. Foreigners in general, Jews in particular, were the easy scapegoats. Until the late 1930's, the Third Republic's policy on immigration and refugees had remained far more liberal than, say, that of the United States. But now many French felt triply threatened; they believed foreigners were competing for jobs, swamping their culture and showing eagerness to get France involved in war. Just before the war broke out, not only did public anti-Semitism increase - especially among the enemies of Leon Blum's failed Popular Front - but even ''mainstream'' writers such as Jean Giraudoux were asking for the protection of the French ''race.'' French legislation involving foreigners became restrictive and repressive. After the influx of Republican refugees from Spain, the French Government built a number of internment camps, into which enemy aliens (mainly refugees from Germany and Austria) were also thrown. The Republic's camps became Vichy's camps. The authors show that even enemies of Vichy, even Resistance literature, carried traces of xenophobia or of the notion that Jews were a special problem.

The other, and related, point is that the Jews were the victims of France's passion for cultural assimilation. Deviant opinions are tolerated - how could they not be when political consensus is so rare? - but cultural and ethnic minorities are feared as a mortal threat to national unity. This passion transcends the divisions between left and right: the French right, especially when it was in the grip of Maurras, saw not only Jews and foreigners but Protestants and Freemasons as unassimilable ''estates''; the French left, the heirs of the Jacobins, wanted to be both the champions of public liberties and the inflexible defenders of centralization and uniformity in territorial government and in education. (The present attempt by the Mitterrand Government to reverse so profound and passionate a current is nothing short of revolutionary.)

Finally, probably the most controversial point Mr. Paxton and Mr. Marrus address is: What were the effects of Vichy's anti-Semitic policy? Two issues are involved. What were the effects on the French public? Did they support this policy?

The authors document the paucity of public protests in the first two years, as well as approval - usually tacit or oblique - by leaders of the Catholic Church, and they mention a wave of popular anti-Semitism in 1941-42, when the problem of food became an obsession and Jews were widely denounced as conspicuous consumers and black marketeers.

There is no doubt that the Vichy legislation on Jews, which seemed somewhat abstract and legalistic, was met with a mix of indifference and support. The surge of anti-Semitism is less certain; as the authors rightly indicate, there is no way of evaluating public opinion adequately, and the prefects' reports, on which they rely, are less indicative of the convictions of the mass of the public - workers or peasants -than of the beliefs of the group - local notables, businessmen, shopkeepers, heads of organized interests, etc. - in close touch with the prefects. What is, however, again certain and well documented is the revulsion of the public, and of a good part of the Catholic Church, after the deportations of the summer of 1942. Not only had there been violence, but cruelty had become concrete, visible and shocking, and Vichy appeared both subservient and disgraceful: ''A sense of national humiliation is almost as strong a current in the prefects' reports as is a sense of pity for the victims.''

As hostility to Vichy grew, as, in particular, the opposition to the drafting of young Frenchmen for work in Germany began to feed the Resistance movement, even Laval turned around. In August 1943, he refused to sign a bill prepared by the Germans that would have deprived of French nationality all Jews naturalized since 1927, and a few weeks later he instructed the French police to stop helping the Germans arrest French Jews. But Laval, here as in other policy areas, had played the role of sorcerer's apprentice; the French Milice, headed by a simple-minded fascist Darnand, pursued Jews, Communists and resisters relentlessly until the end.

Mr. Marrus and Mr. Paxton refuse to consider the relatively small proportion of Jews killed an achievement. They point out that France, the only occupied country with its own government, ought to be compared with Hungary or Rumania, not Poland or Holland. A comparison with Italy, which the authors also make, is devastating for Vichy: The Italians, when they occupied parts of southern France between November 1942 and Marshal Badoglio's capitulation 10 months later, protected Jews from Vichy, much to the indignation of French officials.

As the authors see it, the comparatively low percentage of Jewish deaths in France was the result less of Vichy's policies than of the German decision to rely ''upon indigenous French administration.'' To be sure, theoretically the Germans could have treated France like Poland, or like Hungary after October 1944, had Vichy resisted Nazi anti-Semitism. But Germany's resources were stretched thin, and it is not at all certain that the Nazis would have found, or diverted, the forces necessary to control all of France and to wipe out Jews and resisters there. Moreover, the deportations that did take place were made possible by Vichy's cooperation. Mr. Marrus and Mr. Paxton point out both that Vichy failed to perform ''a number of modest acts'' that could have helped Jews escape, such as allowing the emigration of foreign Jews, and that the number of Jews arrested declined as French police cooperation receded: ''Vichy's rival anti-Semitism offered (the Germans) more substantial help than they received anywhere else in Western Europe and more even than they received from such allies as Hungary and Rumania.''

This is a fair, if severe, verdict. It is, in turn, fair to use it to indict the whole Vichy regime, an extraordinary mess and mass of contradictions, delusions, miscalculations, unworkable good intentions, and evil designs often clumsily carried out. But it would not be fair, or justifiable, to use this admirable book to indict the French people - something the authors carefully refrain from doing. While not concealing the poisonous prejudices and vendettas that proliferated in the 30's and were enshrined in Vichy, they remind us that many Jews were saved by Frenchmen. They point out that Vichy's claim to legitimacy was damaged for the first time, and irreparably, by the anti-Jewish atrocities of 1942. To be sure, there was little collective heroism in the France of 1940-41. But those who have never suffered a national catastrophe, including partial occupation, hunger, cold, the enforced absence of more than a million countrymen as prisoners of war, the collapse of a regime and of national pride - all of which followed the miserable era of the 30's and the terribly costly and debilitating victory of 1918 - are in no position to cast stones.

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