His house bears the sole sign for Rue Pétain (street signs in France are often on the sides of houses), and he says he is comfortable with it. He opposed a proposal to rename the street Rue Charles de Gaulle, for the leader of the French resistance in World War II and postwar president. “If it’s Pétain or de Gaulle,” he said, “then Pétain!”

The commotion around Rue Pétain began last year when a local journalist discovered the street and wrote several articles for his newspaper. At the time, two other towns in northern France had streets named for Marshal Pétain, and his portrait hung in the hall of a third town, in the west of France. Under public pressure, the other streets were renamed, and a court ordered the portrait taken down. Tremblois remained the marshal’s last refuge.

“It was scandalous,” said the journalist, Guillaume Lévy. “I met the mayor. There were different reactions; the arguments were not political.”

First there was the enduring image of Marshal Pétain as the “conqueror of Verdun,” the man who won World War I for the French, Mr. Lévy said by telephone. Then there was also the inconvenience. “I talked to the man on whose house the sign hangs,” he said. “He said how much it would cost, that the postman wouldn’t know where to bring letters.”

“Then,” he said, “it got all polemical.”

Partly, it was town versus country. The village mayor, Jean-Pol Oury, shows visitors the hate mail he got, including threats, for keeping the name Pétain. Mr. Oury, 56, who runs a public relations company when not steering the affairs of Tremblois, said he did a survey among its 114 residents. “A majority said, ‘It doesn’t disturb me,’ ” he said.