PARIS, Dec 8 (AFP) - The French government faced mounting pressure on Thursday to revoke a law that casts a positive light on the country's colonial past and has fuelled a fierce row with Paris's overseas territories.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and several government figures moved to distance themselves from the contested law, which encourages schools to teach the "positive role" played by France during the colonial period.

"It is not up to parliament to write history ... There is no official history in France," Villepin told France Inter radio on Thursday -- although he stopped short of calling for the article in question to repealed.

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy was forced this week to cancel a planned trip to France's Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, where he faced the prospect of angry protests over the law.

Rights groups, politicians and writers in overseas French territories, themselves former colonies, suspect that the legislation is an attempt to gloss over the country's colonial past at the expense of black and Arab indigenous peoples.

The article at the centre of the dispute is an amendment to a much wider law on measures to improve the living conditions of French civilians repatriated at the end of the Algerian war in 1962.

It asks that "school programmes recognise in particular the positive role of France's presence overseas, notably in north Africa, and give due prominence to the history and sacrifices of French army fighters from these territories".

Introduced as a private initiative by a ruling party member and adopted without fanfare by parliament in February, the clause was later denounced by historians and left-wing politicians as an attempt to re-write French history.

Last week the centre-right ruling party voted down an opposition bid to repeal the article.

But Tourism Minister Leon Bertrand, a deputy from French Guiana, broke ranks with the government on Thursday, calling for it to be revoked in a letter to Sarkozy, who heads the ruling UMP party.

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