France
Mayor defends Pétain portrait
Article published on the 2010-01-25 Latest update 2010-02-01 07:26 TU
The portrait of Philippe Pétain (top row, right) in Gonneville-sur-Mer's town hall.
Photo: AFP
Local state administrators instructed the Mayor of Gonneville-sur-Mer, a town on France’s north-east coast, to remove the portrait after receiving a complaint by the International League against Racism and Antisemitism, Licra.
Yet Mayor Bernard Hoyé has refused, on the grounds that the picture is part of a series of portraits of French heads of state.
“This picture has been there for decades,” he told local reporters. “Whether they are controversial or not, I don’t have to take sides, unlike Licra which is not objective.”
Historians have joined Licra in expressing their concern.
“I’m surprised and shocked,” military historian Stéphane Simonet of the Caen War Museum told RFI, stressing the distinction between a head of the French Republic and a head of the French state, which was the regime in place between 1940 and 1944 under the German occupation of France.
“It means that the history of the Vichy regime is being forgotten,” Simonet warns. “Let’s not forget that Marshal Pétain also covered the transportation of French Jews, which the Germans had not demanded. What scares me, it’s that we’re forgetting this very, very dark aspect of the Vichy regime.”
Yet Mayor Hoyé has the support of his local member of parliament, Nicole Ameline, of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s right-wing UMP party.
"The figure of Marshal Pétain has its place in the town hall, as do the memories of the most painful and the most glorious moments in our history," the MP told news agency AFP.
Images of Pétain are rare in modern-day France, thanks to his collaboration with France’s Nazi occupiers.
Having once been viewed as a hero for his military leadership during World War I, Pétain was eventually convicted of treason and sentenced to death for his actions in World War II.
