André Bettencourt

André Bettencourt, who died on November 19 aged 88, served as a cabinet minister in French governments of the 1960s and 1970s and won medals for bravery for his service in the Resistance; in the 1990s, however, it emerged that his wartime record was not all it seemed.

In his youth Bettencourt had been a member of La Cagoule, a violent Fascist group bankrolled by Eugène Schueller, founder of the cosmetics giant L'Oréal.

Even before the German invasion members of the group, which was committed to the overthrow of France's elected government and was violently anti-Semitic, were involved in criminal activities ranging from gun-running to the firebombing of synagogues. After the German invasion, they swore allegiance to Hitler, sent men to support the German forces fighting in Russia and collaborated in the persecution of French Jews.

After the war L'Oréal is alleged to have provided a hiding place for former members of the group anxious to rewrite their pasts, becoming, as the Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld put it, "a factory designed to recycle the extreme Right" into post-war respectability.

Bettencourt went on to marry Schueller's daughter and heir, Liliane, and rose to become deputy chairman of L'Oréal and one of the richest men in France. His murky past began to catch up with him, however, in 1991 when Jean Frydman, a shareholder and board member of L'Oréal's film and television subsidiary Paravision, alleged that he had been sacked in 1989 because the L'Oréal senior management wanted to avoid an Arab boycott of firms with Jewish links. Frydman had joint French and Israeli nationality.

In 1994 Frydman, who had exposed the Nazi associations of other L'Oréal executives, went on to reveal that, during the occupation of France, Bettencourt had written more than 60 articles for La Terre Française, a virulently anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda sheet financed by the German occupiers.

Frydman and his brother had discovered the articles after some difficulty in the French Bibliothèque Nationale; when they had applied at other French libraries they had been told that the articles were either "missing" or "unavailable".

The evidence was damning in the extreme. In the Easter edition of 1941, for example, Bettencourt had described Jews as "hypocritical Pharisees" whose "race has been forever sullied by the blood of the righteous". In another article he wrote: "The Jews: their race is tainted with Jesus's blood for all eternity."

In the furore that greeted these revelations, Bettencourt stood down as deputy chairman of L'Oréal, ostensibly on the ground of age, transferring his shares in the business to his wife as he did so; French newspapers speculated that the real reason was the publicity about his past.

He admitted authorship of the articles but dismissed them as "errors of youth", claiming that he had been poisoned by Vichy propaganda. "I have repeatedly expressed my regrets concerning them in public and will always beg the Jewish community to forgive me for them," he said. In any case, he argued, they were mistakes that he had tried to rectify by joining the French Resistance.

Bettencourt claimed to have joined the organisation in early 1943 and to have served as a member of the cell run by François Mitterrand, who became a lifelong friend. He claimed to have helped Mitterrand escape to London by plane in November 1943.

Subsequently Bettencourt was said to have been arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo. In 1995, however, Serge Klarsfeld claimed that he could find no evidence of Bettencourt's involvement in the Resistance earlier than July 1944, a month before the liberation of Paris, when records show that he travelled to Geneva and managed to persuade the Americans to give him a large sum of money (ostensibly to support a revolt of French PoWs during the Allied invasion of Germany) which he duly passed on to Mitterrand. Bettencourt's claims to have been a Resistance delegate in Geneva were also challenged by a Swiss MP, Charles Poncet.

In France the allegations became caught up in the tide of sleaze and corruption surrounding the Mitterrand administration in its final years, fuelling interest in the President's own murky pre-war and wartime record.

The son of a lawyer at the Court of Appeal in Paris, André Bettencourt was born into a staunchly traditional Catholic family on April 21 1919 at Saint-Maurice d'Ételan in Normandy. In the 1930s he studied Law in Paris and lived in a boarding house run by the Marist Fathers.

He became a member of La Cagoule, attending meetings with his fellow Cagoulards and future Résistants Pierre Benouville and François Mitterrand. He soon got to know Eugène Schueller; after the war his testimony, along with that of Mitterrand, would be crucial in helping Schueller to avoid disgrace.

Following the liberation Bettencourt was honoured for his activities in the Resistance with the Croix de Guerre, the Rosette de la Résistance and the Croix de Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. To begin with he returned to journalism, founding the Journale Agricole and running the Courrier Cauchois.

In 1950 he married Schueller's daughter Liliane and joined the company. Mitterrand, meanwhile, became editor of the company's magazine Your Beauty.

Bettencourt also became involved in politics as a member of the council at Saint-Maurice d'Ételan, where he served as mayor between 1965 and 1989.

Elected to the National Assembly in 1951 as an Independent, he served between 1966 to 1973 as, successively, minister for transportation, interim minister for foreign affairs, minister for posts and telecommunications, minister of industry, minister for foreign affairs and minister for cultural affairs.

He was a member of the French Senate from 1977 to 1995, representing the Right-wing Union for French Democracy. In 1986 Mitterrand was reported to be considering him as a possible prime minister. In 1988 he was elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts.

André Bettencourt is survived by his wife and daughter.