After four years of delay and debate, France appears ready to try the notorious Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie for crimes against humanity.

Many said the proceeding, now scheduled for May, could never be held because of its potential for reopening wounds to French honor and conscience during the World War II Nazi occupation.

Barbie, 73, was extradited from Bolivia in February 1983 and imprisoned in Lyons, where from 1942 to 1944 he ran a Gestapo unit in charge of repressing the anti-Nazi underground. His brutality against French Resistance leaders and Jews during those years earned him a reputation as "the butcher of Lyons."

His job also put him at the center of a struggle matching Frenchmen in the Resistance against those who cooperated with Nazi occupation authorities and France's own collaborationist government in Vichy. Memories of who did what during that period have remained an important theme in French political and social life 40 years later.

Against that background, many French commentators predicted the government would never dare go ahead with the trial. Barbie could make damaging revelations about the wartime past of current political leaders, they said, or at the least drag France through a part of its history that most of the country would prefer to forget.

One of those making that prediction most loudly was Barbie's defense lawyer, Jacques Verges. However, Verges said he now has become convinced the trial will be held.

Justice Ministr Albin Chalandon recently declared the trial will begin before summer. Court officials in Lyons have drawn up plans for a six-week drama expected to be attended by hundreds of spectators. The Lyons general prosecutor, Pierre Truche, officially suggested May 19 for the opening after a meeting Saturday with lawyers in the case.

"Four years," Verges complained in an interview. "That is longer than the German occupation of France."

Serge Klarsfeld, a lawyer who represents families of Jews sent to deportation camps on Barbie's authority, said French justice officials spent the time gathering fresh evidence, some from Klarsfeld's long research with his wife Beate on former Nazi leaders.

French courts convicted Barbie of war crimes, including the killing of legendary Resistance leader Jean Moulin, and sentenced him to death in absentia in 1952 and 1954. But those sentences, void after 20 years, could no longer be carried out under law. As a result, Barbie had to be charged for the upcoming trial with different crimes.

Additional delay was caused by a French court's decision in 1985 that crimes against humanity could include measures against anti-Nazi activists, not only against noncombatant victims as defined in previous trials for crimes against humanity.

This expanded the case against Barbie to include complaints by Resistance fighters as well as deported Jews. Dozens of victims or their familes have become plaintiffs or associate plaintiffs, with a total of 40 lawyers.

Previously the case was limited to survivors and families of 86 persons arrested during a Gestapo raid on the Jews of France Committee headquarters in Lyons and of 51 persons, including 44 children, similarly deported from the nearby village of Izieu.

The broadening has heightened fears that the trial will shine an unwelcome spotlight on French conduct during the war. Verges, long a controversial and provocative figure in France, has played to these fears by predicting this will be a pillar of his defense.

"This trial is less the affair of Barbie than the affair of French society," he said. "There are some problems that the national consciousness has suppressed, the way a man might suppress desires he felt for his mother, or the homosexual tendencies he might have had between the ages of 15 and 20."

Verges, who rose to prominence defending Algerians during France's colonial war there, asked, for example, how Barbie could be tried for what he did as a lieutenant when President Francois Mitterrand, who was interior minister for a time during the Algerian war, has never been held accountable for abuses committed by French police against Algerian rebels.

Andre Frossard, a commentator in the conservative newspaper Le Figaro, referred to these fears today, regretting the expanded scope of the trial. "War crimes, this devil of a lawyer will find some to attribute to every army on earth," he wrote, "and, within two days, the whole world will be on trial, except Barbie." CAPTION: Klaus Barbie