France has a long history of naming roads or train stations after notable people – and not just its own. The Burgundy town of Avallon followed the tradition by naming a street after the Labour MP

In France, recognition for public service and achievement comes in the form of a Légion d’honneur if you’re still alive, or a street name – or train station – when you’re dead.

In Paris, more than 100 rues, places and boulevards are dedicated to mathematicians alone, according to City Hall, including Isaac Newton, Galileo, Nicolaus Copernicus and Leonhard Euler.

During the summer, the Burgundy town of Avallon named one of its streets Rue Jo Cox in honour of the Labour MP murdered during the Brexit campaign by a gunman who shouted “Britain first”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jo Cox. Photograph: Reuters

The street signs, in traditional white lettering on a blue background reading “British MP. Killed for her convictions”, reflect the community’s wish “to pay homage to the pro-European MP”, local newspaper L’Yonne Republicaine wrote.

At a name-changing ceremony on the unremarkable road running through a housing estate behind the library in the town’s Morlande district, mayor Jean-Yves Caullet said Cox was a “committed female politician murdered for her ideas, her convictions”. “She was a pacifist and she lost her life because of hate speech,” he added.

The tribute went largely unnoticed beyond the local French press at the time, though it gained wider attention online over the weekend. Indeed, naming places after notable people is one particular way France pays tribute not just to its own but – like Cox – foreigners, too.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An Avenue Victor Hugo street sign in the 16th district of Paris France. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

You can find Emile Zola, Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, André Citroën, Pierre and Marie Curie, and Charles de Gaulle, represented across the country, but the Paris metro also stops at George V (named in appreciation of the UK’s support for France during the first world war), Michel-Ange (Michelangelo) and Franklin D Roosevelt. Several French cities, including Montpelier and Tours have streets named after the British astronomer Edmund Halley, and Angers has one of many rue Anne Frank. There’s a Rosa Parks station on the RER suburban line in north Paris.

However, the practice has also brought criticism that France is engaging in political correctness and whitewashing its urban landscape of those whose reputations are more divisive, even dubious.

Cox’s name, for example, replaces that of Pierre-Étienne Flandin, an Avallon MP who died in 1958, but who was a member of collaborationist General Philippe Pétain’s Vichy government during the Nazi occupation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rosa Parks station in north-eastern Paris. Photograph: Jacques Demarthon/AFP/Getty Images

Paris’s socialist administration has also refused a request to name one of the city’s streets after Maximilien de Robespierre, the controversial revolutionary and architect of the “Terror”, who is also credited with first saying “Liberté, egalité, fraternité” – and opposed slavery. Robespierre does have his own metro station – but for how long?

Two years ago, the feminist group Osez le féminisme pointed out only 2% of French streets (2.6% in Paris) and 3% of Paris metro stations had female names. They suggested there should be a Pont Josephine Baker and Quai Nina Simone. Afterwards, La Ville-aux-Dames near Tours named all its streets after women.

The naming of Rue Jo Cox can also be seen as a mark of French dismay over Brexit and the country’s enduring fondness for us “Anglo-Saxons”. It’s hard to imagine though, that the UK would name a street after Jean de Broglie, one of General de Gaulle’s ministers, shot dead in the street in 1976, or former government minister Joseph Fontanet, also gunned down in Paris in 1980.

• This article was amended on 28 November 2017. The original stated that Jean-Yves Caullet was deputy mayor of Avallon: he is the mayor of the town.

