PARIS — President François Hollande inaugurated a new Holocaust memorial center on Friday with an address that underscored the direct approach he has taken to France’s collaborationist past, a grim and still uncomfortable chapter that French leaders and politicians have often preferred to skirt.

The reality of French collaboration with the Nazis has been demonstrated and accepted, Mr. Hollande said in his address at the memorial, in Drancy, a city north of Paris that was the site of a major transit camp for Jews being deported to death camps in the east. He urged that the nation now turn to the “transmission,” or passing on, of that difficult history.

“Our work is no longer about establishing the truth,” Mr. Hollande said at the Mémorial de la Shoah à Drancy, a five-story glass and concrete structure that looks out upon the buildings once used to imprison tens of thousands of French and foreign Jews. “Today, our work is to transmit. That is the spirit of this memorial. Transmission: there resides the future of remembering.”...