About two dozen people attended a prayer service for Nazi collaborator Philippe Pétain on Saturday at a church in France, prompting condemnations and threats of legal action.
Xavier Delarue, the prefect of the department of Meuse in eastern France, said he would file criminal complaints against some of the organizers of the mass in Verdun over assertions they made outside the Catholic church that hosted the event, the Liberation newspaper reported. The assertions violated laws against Holocaust denial, he said.
One of the people outside the event at the John the Baptist Church of Verdun called Pétain “first among the resistance fighters.” Several dozen protesters also gathered outside the church to protest the event.
Yonathan Arfi, the president of the CRIF umbrella of French-Jewish communities and institutions, condemned the event in a statement but stopped short of qualifying it as a criminal offense. Arfi said celebrating Pétain’s legacy was “treason” and an “insult to the memory” of about 76,000 Jews that French collaborators helped the Nazis murder.
The organizers of the event belong to a group called “The Association for Defending the Memory of Marshall Pétain,” (ADMP).
French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez condemned the event, saying: “The remarks made today on the sidelines of a mass in ‘tribute’ to Philippe Petain in Verdun go against our collective memory.”
Verdun Mayor Samuel Hazard had banned the event, but the Administrative Court of Nancy lifted the ban on Friday, citing the fact that the venue was a church and the event a religious mass. Banning it would be an unconstitutional violation of the principle of the separation between church and state, the court said.
Verdun was the site of the longest battle in World War I, where hundreds of thousands fell. Pétain was a hero of that war, a status that opened his path to leading the collaborationist entity known as the Vichy Government after the Nazis occupied France in 1940.
The Nazis allowed Pétain to administer a part of France. Pétain, who died in 1951 amid preparations for his release from the prison where he was serving a life sentence for treason, is widely held responsible for the death of much of French Jewry during the Holocaust.
Several French presidents since Jacques Chirac have acknowledged collaboration by the French government, and public monuments honoring Pétain have been removed across France. A plaque honoring him remains in place in New York City: A granite plaque for him and former Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval.
Their names are engraved into the “Canyon of Heroes” sidewalk. The plaques honor participants of ticker-tape parades, in which Pétain and Laval took part in 1931. Pétain attended in honor of his World War I heroism, whereas Laval was honored as the French prime minister at the time.
