Nowhere was the repatriation more central to the post-war political challenges than in France. Unlike Belgium and the Netherlands, where pre-war governments prepared for their return to power after the liberation, the French National Liberation Committee had to struggle for legitimacy with Vichy, the constitutionally legitimate heir of the pre-war Third Republic.

The Vichy regime (and Pétain personally) had turned the exile of 1,500,000 French soldiers into a cornerstone of its ideology of atonement and resurrection, and, more unfortunately still, into a touchstone of the effectiveness of its policy of collaboration. The fate of the French army after its collapse in May and June 1940 had been a major argument for Marshal Pétain, commander-in-chief, to assume the political responsibility of the armistice and the subsequent ‘French State’, much in the way that the Belgian King Leopold had legitimised his surrender and his refusal to leave the country after the defeat. Philippe Pétain, the soldier-hero of the Great War, acted as the father of his troops, the saviour and protector from further useless bloodshed. One of the immediate consequences of national collaboration with the victors had been that Vichy took responsibility for the protection of its PoWs under the terms of the Geneva convention, instead of reverting to diplomatic representation by a neutral nation, as all other defeated countries had done.