After the liberation, the Resistance, particularly in the south, began a reign of terror summarily executing many collaborators around 9,000 people were killed in this way. De Gaulle recognised that examples had to made particularly of those who had most strongly supported the Vichy regime such as Piere Laval and Phillipe Petain. Between 1944 and 1951, 6,762 people were sentenced to death by French courts, of those, 3,910 were tried in absentia. The most common punishment metered out was the Degradation National, which stripped convicts of their political, civil, and professional rights, 49,723 people were punished this way. Pierre Laval along with 767 others were executed after their trials while Petain’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, some, however, did manage to escape to Spain, South America, or in the case of Marcel Deat a monastery in Italy. Alongside this, revenge was also metered out to horizontal collaborators such as women with German soldiers for companions, these were publicly humiliated forced to walk naked through the streets with shaved heads. De Gaulle’s main success came from his moderation calling for peace and a general amnesty in 1953, this allowed a number of Vichyites to be readmitted into society. Examples include; the prefect of the Paris Police, Maurice Papon, responsible for the 1961 Paris massacre, Francois Mitterrand, President (1981-95). In the 1960s the young began to question what their parents and politicians had done during the Vichy period, in particular, they drew parallels between the CRS, French Riot police, and the SS, perhaps not unreasonably since many members of the CRS had been Vichy collaborators. 

Further Reading

James F. McMillan, Twentieth-Century France, Politics and Society 1898-1991 (2010)

Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, History and Memory in France since 1944 (1987)