City of Paris criticised for refusing a plaque to honour the late great composer.

The City of Paris has rejected an application to commemorate the home of the composer Henri Dutilleux with a plaque, claiming the moment “inopportune” and suggesting the composer had collaborated with the Vichy regime during the Second World War.

Dutilleux, who had been awarded France’s highest state award, the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour in 2004, died in 2013 at the age of 97 and was one of the late 20th century’s more performed composers. The plaque had been commissioned by the Mayor of the 4th Arrondissement, Christophe Girard, as long ago as December 2013. However, as Girard explained, although the History Committee of the City of Paris issued a generally positive opinion, it “wishes to note collaborative facts with the Vichy regime.”

In fact, Dutilleux, who had won the Prix de Rome in 1938 for his cantata L’Anneau du Roi, was forced to leave Rome by the outbreak of World War II and worked for a year as a medical orderly in the army before returning to Paris in 1940, where he worked as a pianist, arranger and music teacher. In 1942, while...