President Emmanuel Macron waded into controversy on Wednesday by praising a general who helped win World War I but became a top Nazi collaborator in World War II — comments that triggered outrage among French Jews.

Marshal Philippe Petain will be honored alongside other top military chiefs this Saturday in a ceremony at the Invalides monument, site of Napoleon’s tomb, to mark the centenary of the end of World War I.

Touring battlefields ahead of a formal commemoration of the Nov. 11, 1918, armistice that ended the war, Mr. Macron said Petain was worthy of the honor for his leading role in the World War I victory.

“Marshal Petain was also a great soldier during World War I” even though he made “fatal choices during the Second World War,” Mr. Macron said in the northern town of Charleville-Mezieres.