Bastille Day's events masked reported tension between Sarkozy and the military brass [AFP]

Two units of UN blue helmets were to lead off the traditional march from the Arc de Triomphe down to Place de la Concorde, with Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, as the guest of honour.

Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, was among the more than 40 leaders who inaugurated Nicolas Sarkozy’s new Mediterranean union project on Sunday.

But the French president's invitation to al-Assad has angered opposition politicians and some in the French military who served in a UN peace force in Lebanon, where Syria for years was the main power broker.

A group of French veterans accuse Syria of being behind a 1983 bomb attack on a Beirut building that killed 58 French soldiers and said al-Assad was not deserving of an invitation to France's national fete.

French soldiers should not file past al-Assad during the march down the Champs Elysees, Jean-Luc Hemar, head of the Association of Veterans from Camp Idron in central France, said.

"We feel uneasy about this," he said, especially since some of the soldiers graduated from a military academy named in honour of one of the victims of the Drakkar bombing.

"Drakkar will cast a shadow over the 14th of July," he said.

Festivities 'tainted'

Francois Hollande, the opposition Socialist leader, said Bastille Day festivities were being "tainted by controversy" over al-Assad's presence for celebrations marking the storming of the Bastille in 1789 at the start of the French Revolution.

But Sarkozy defended on Sunday his decision, saying that the 1983 lorry bombing of the Drakkar building in Beirut was carried out by the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah and not Syria.

"To blame Syria for Drakkar is a historical mistake," said the Elysee official. "There's really no reason for such controversy."

Bernard Kouchner, France's foreign minister, said last month that he was "not particularly pleased" by al-Assad's presence at the national fete.

Jacques Chirac, the former president, who cut off high-level ties with al-Assad over the 2005 assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister and a close personal friend, will be conspicuous by his absence from the event.

Officials have denied that Chirac's decision to stay away was linked to al-Assad.

Colourful parade

Sarkozy was leading his second national day festivities since taking office in May last year, with some 4,000 soldiers and more than 60 aircraft set to take part in a colourful parade starting off at the Arc de Triomphe.

After watching a fly-past of Alphajets, Sarkozy and invited guests including Ingrid Betancourt, the freed Colombian hostage, were to view the march, with seven paratroopers set to wrap up the parade with a jump on the Place de la Concorde.

But the military display comes amid some tensions between Sarkozy, the army commander-in-chief and the armed forces over plans to slash more than 50,000 defence jobs and shut down dozens of bases.

A group of senior officers last month openly criticised Sarkozy's new defence strategy that calls for reducing the size of the armed force to allow for massive investment in state-of-the-art intelligence technology.

The officers who called themselves "Surcouf" wrote in a newspaper commentary that France's military stature would be reduced to "the same league as Italy", bolstering Britain's defence role in Europe.

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