ABSTRACT
Members of the prewar parliament who were declared ineligible to hold office after the Liberation were being punished for their vote on July 10, 1940, or for their subsequent association with Vichy. A decade after the Liberation, voters were increasingly disenchanted with the Republic, critical of its operation and bitter about the unfulfilled ambitions of 1944. In the wake of Liberation they levelled similar charges against Pétain and other prominent Vichyites. The commission probed, albeit in a somewhat unsystematic way, the pre-armistice relationships of those who later came to prominence in Vichy. The amnesty debate reopened the issue of Vichy's legality and the degree of culpability involved in following the orders of a duly constituted legal authority. For neo-Vichyites, too, de Gaulle's challenge to the Fourth Republic was more than just an irony.
