Recounting our travels through France last September, I mentioned how touched we were by the numerous monuments and memorials the French people have dedicated to the World War II Allied heroes who gave their lives to help liberate France and by “the many other monuments, memorials and public and private expressions of pride and honor towards their hundreds of thousands of fallen heroes and martyrs…”
I also mentioned the less than patriotic roles played by “the puppet Vichy government, the Vichy France military, some of the French people and even of some splinter groups of the French Résistance during the Nazi occupation…”
In particular:
Some seventy years after a particularly complex and troubled period in their long and proud history , the French have not forgotten the mistakes, collaboration and other disloyal actions by Maréchal Henri Philippe Pétain, by members of the Vichy government, by members of the Vichy French military and by others…
This brings us to an interesting issue and question.
France fought bravely and suffered greatly during World War I, La Guerre du Droit, and had many heroes. One of those heroes happened to be Philippe Pétain, the “conqueror of Verdun…the man who won World War I for the French” according to one of his admirers.
Just as they did after World War II, the French honored their World War I heroes with numerous monuments, memorials, statues—and street names.
Philippe Pétain was one of them.
But what is a Frenchman to do when the hero of one war becomes the villain of the next one?
Well, for one, you remove the memorials, the statues, the portraits and the street signs honoring the hero-turned-villain.
That is exactly what has been happening in the case of Marshal Philippe Pétain.
According to the New York Times, the municipal council of Tremblois-lès-Carignan, a tiny village nestled on the edge of the Ardennes Forest, recently voted to rename Rue Pétain, “the last in France in remembrance of Marshal Philippe Pétain” to Rue de la Belle-Croix, for a chapel that stands in a wood at the end of the 600-foot-long Rue Pétain.
Giovanni Del Brenna writes:
After World War I, virtually every town in France had its Rue or Avenue Pétain. So vast was his fame that a dozen or so towns and cities in the United States also named streets for him.
But when the signs here change this month, the last street in France bearing his name will have disappeared. Not everyone is happy with the decision.
Learn why not everyone is happy in the village of Tremblois, a village near the Belgian border, near Verdun, and a town that was virtually leveled by shelling during World War I, but left relatively untouched during World War II.
By the way, when Rue Pétain becomes Rue de la Belle-Croix, Tremblois will have changed a third of the village’s street names.
You see, this village of 114 residents has only three streets. The other two? They are named after two other World War I heroes: Marshals Ferdinand Foch and Joseph Joffre.
Photo: Monument to American World War II heroes in Persac, France.
