PARIS — Nicolas Sarkozy’s visit to Rwanda on Thursday, the first by a French president since the 1994 genocide there, is intended to improve the fraught relations between the countries.

Mr. Sarkozy will meet with President Paul Kagame in the capital, Kigali, and visit a genocide memorial, according to a spokesman for the Élysée Palace.

“They will now turn their attention toward the future,” the spokesman said, speaking on normal ground rules of anonymity.

France once held enormous sway in Rwanda, a French-speaking former Belgian colony, and Mr. Kagame’s government has long accused the French of providing training and arms to the Hutu militias and former government troops who led the genocide, in which more than 800,000 Rwandans, mainly Tutsi, were killed.

France has always insisted that it had no involvement in the genocide, though, according to a 1998 parliamentary report, it acknowledged “errors of analysis” and mistakes linked to “institutional dysfunctions.”

Rwanda broke off diplomatic relations in 2006, after a French judge implicated aides to Mr. Kagame in the event that set off the genocide: the shooting down of a plane carrying the Rwandan president at the time. Diplomatic relations were restored only in November, and the Rwandan Embassy reopened in Paris on Monday.

Mr. Sarkozy, who was in Gabon on Wednesday, was scheduled to be in Kigali for about three hours on Thursday. In advance of the visit, the Élysée Palace was unusually explicit about his intentions.

“We will recognize the errors of judgment that France and the international community made,” said the palace spokesman, adding that the purpose of Mr. Sarkozy’s visit was not to ask pardon but to open a new chapter in relations.

In an interview last week, with the weekly newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, France’s foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, suggested the creation of a commission of historians on Rwanda, “to find out what happened then.”

“It will take months, years but we will do it,” Mr. Kouchner said.

Mr. Sarkozy, he said, “is not opposed to having France look at its history.”