Several elected officials as well as citizens gathered this Saturday morning to prevent the holding of a mass in honor of Pétain, which the mayor tried to ban.
“Pétain = anti-Semitism, shame! », We can read on one of the signs. About a hundred people, supervised by about twenty police officers, gathered peacefully this Saturday in the square in front of the church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Verdun to denounce the holding of a religious ceremony “in honor of Marshal Pétain and his army”.
It started a few minutes late, in a closed church and reserved only for members of the organizing association – the association for the defense of the memory of Marshal Pétain (ADMP) – said the prefect of Meuse, who was present in front of the religious building this morning.
A “small number” of people, “at most about twenty people”, attended the service at the Saint-Jean-Baptiste church, prefect Xavier Delarue told AFP.
The State Representative explained that he had spoken before the ceremony with the priest celebrating the mass, to ensure that the regulations arising from the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State were complied with, namely that there would be no discussion or distribution of leaflets of a political nature.
“The revisionist thesis is clearly stated”
The meeting brought together several local elected officials, including the department president and the mayor of Verdun, as well as residents. “I was very shocked, because I thought of all the victims of Nazi barbarism and the national revolution, the ideology of Marshal Pétain,” the city’s mayor, Samuel Hazard (wide left), told the press.
He had issued an order banning the mass, which was overturned on Friday by Nancy’s administrative court. He regretted the court’s decision this Friday evening in a video on his social networks. “I want to express my very deep disappointment, my disgust, my anger,” he said.
In front of the church this morning, a parishioner held up a poster that read: “Catho but not fascist”.
“Under the guise of a religious ceremony, we are proclaiming clearly revisionist ideologies and theses,” denounced Fabrice Hagnier, Verdun city hall lawyer, on BFMTV.
Philippe Pétain, a First World War hero and later leader of the Vichy regime that collaborated with Nazi Germany, was sentenced to death – a sentence commuted to life imprisonment by de Gaulle – and suffered national humiliation in 1945.
