Indignité nationale

Indignité nationale (French “national unworthiness”) was a legally defined offense, created at the Liberation in the context of the “Épuration légale”. The offence of Indignité nationale was meant to fill a legal void: while the laws in application in 1939 had provisions against treason, murder and such crimes, they did not take into account reprehensible behaviours which occurred during the Occupation and in the Vichy regime, such as participation in the Waffen SS or in the Milice. The bill of the "Ordinance Instituting National Indignity" was presented by the Provisional Government of the French Republic government on June 26, 1944 and adopted by the national Assembly on August 26, 1944.Indignité nationale ceased to be a criminal offense in January 1951 but the people convicted in 1944–1951 remained deprived of their civil rights until August 1953.

Gaullist legal preparations to post-war purges started in Lyon in 1942. Chief prosecutor for Paris Maurice Rolland joined the Lyon Commission in 1943.Charles de Gaulle leaned to leave the post-war purification to ad hoc decisions of the judges, relying solely on the 1939 statute that punished treason with death. Meetings of the Consultative Assembly, which convened beginning on January 11, 1944, persuaded de Gaulle that "containing vengeance" would be more difficult than he thought. Indeed, in the few months that followed the Normandy landings, at least 4,500 alleged collaborators were killed in summary judicial executions.

De Gaulle and his government needed a legal instrument which, unlike the 1939 law on treason, would not involve harsh sentences and could thus be applied to a wide circle of offenders. They also wanted to avoid enacting an ex post facto law, and created the concept of continuing "state of indignity" as a workaround solution. The new law instituted a new concept of a criminal state of a person, the state of indignity. A person entered the state of indignity through committing certain acts (not necessarily crimes) in the past, and this state continued until redemption through punishment. The acts leading to "state of indignity" included any voluntary aid to Axis powers after June 16, 1940, or any of numerous specific offences outlined in the law:

...
Wikipedia