The organisers of a music festival in northern France have defied pressure to cancel a performance by a once-idolised French musician who has served a jail term for beating his girlfriend to death.

More than 65,000 people have signed a petition demanding that Bertrand Cantat, former frontman of Noir Desir, be removed from the programme of the Papillons de Nuit festival, which takes place in May in the Normandy town of Saint-Laurent-de-Cuves.

“By putting Bertrand Cantat in the spotlight you are normalising violence against women and even condoning it,” claims the petition on the Change.org website, started by a “citizen feminist”.

The organisers of the festival, which drew 68,000 rock fans in 2017, have rejected the call, saying in a statement: “We consider that our only criteria should be artistic.”

In a profile on the festival website, Cantat, 53, is described as “having lost nothing of his brooding nature, rage and critical thinking”.

Cantat, whose group enjoyed cult status in France in the 1990s, killed Marie Trintignant in a hotel room while on tour in Lithuania in 2003. Trintignant, an actor, died following severe brain damage after Cantat beat her during a fight.

The killing sent shockwaves through France, where Cantat was known as a champion of social causes.

He was sentenced to eight years in prison, of which he served four before being released on parole in 2007.

Trintignant’s family were dismayed by his return to the stagein 2013 with a new group, Detroit.

This week Cantat begins touring his first solo album, Amor Fati (a Latin phrase associated with Friedrich Nietzsche meaning “a love of fate”), kicking off with a concert in the western city of La Rochelle.

The venue for the solo gig on Thursday said it had received “three or four disapproving emails”.

Cantat plans several other dates in the coming months, only one of which has been cancelled due to opposition.

Last year, as the outrage over sexual violence triggered by the Harvey Weinstein affair in the US was building, the rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles apologised after putting Cantat on its cover.