Should France honour Nazi collaborator Petain?

This weekend, of all weekends, is a moment for reflection. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month will be a real thing. One hundred years on, but remembered all the more because of that. Here, as all across Europe, the centenary of Germany’s capitulation will be marked by the customary services of remembrance. The Great War was not, as it turned out, the war to end all wars but the shadows it casts are with us still. 

And in France there is fresh “controversy”. President Emmanuel Macron announced he would honour Marshal Philippe Petain for his part in the saving of France. The Marshal was not the only man to do this but he was the pre-eminent hero nonetheless. That was 1918, however, and what came later is a different, and complicating, thing.

Bluntly, is it possible to separate the Petain of 1918 from the Petain of 1940? That seems the wrong question or, rather, the wrong set of dates.