During the German occupation some clandestine tank development took place in France, mostly limited to component design or the building of tracked chassis with either a pretended civilian use or with a Kriegsmarine destination.

These efforts were coordinated by CDM (Camouflage du Matériel), a secret Vichy army organisation trying to produce matériel forbidden by the armistice conditions, with the ultimate goal of combining these components into the design of a possible future thirty ton battle tank, armed with a 75 mm gun.

Firms involved were Laffly and Lorraine; also a military design team in occupied France, headed by Maurice Lavirotte, was active.

[2] When in August 1944 Paris was liberated, the new provisional government of France did its utmost to regain the country's position as a great power, trying to establish its status as a full partner among the Allies by contributing as much as possible to the war effort.

[3] However, French pre-war light and medium designs had become completely outdated and there was no way to quickly make up for the time lost and immediately improve their component quality.

An important secondary goal of the project was simply to ensure that France would in the future have a sufficient number of weapons engineers; if these could not be employed now, they would be forced to seek other occupations and much expertise would be lost.

As a result of the reliance on older types, the ARL 44 was to be fitted with a very old-fashioned suspension system with small road wheels, using the same track as the Char B1, limiting maximum speed to about 30 km/h.

The suggestion to use a more modern foreign suspension system was rejected as it would have compromised the tank's status as a purely French design.

To maintain some continuation in French tank design and bolster national morale, on 23 May 1945 it was decided to build 150 vehicles, even though there was no longer any real tactical need for them.

[3] The Atelier et Chantiers de la Loire built the ACL1 turret used for the prototype, fitted with the American 76 mm gun; this was later replaced by a Schneider turret based on the one designed for the Char F1 and fitted with the 90 mm DCA naval AA-gun which had a muzzle velocity of 1000 m/s (AP; 1130 m/s HE) and a muzzle brake — thus the ARL 44 was the first French tank to feature this item.

They were fitted with captured German Maybach HL230 600 hp engines (real output 575 hp), brought back by a mission headed by General Joseph Molinié in the summer of 1945, repeating the course of events with the Char 2C, which after the previous war had also received captured Maybach engines.

This was also partly due to the lack of a sufficiently powerful engine; it had originally been intended to compensate for this by using a more efficient petro-electrical transmission.

This kind of transmission has as a major drawback that it very easily overheats and the ARL 44 as a result was fitted with an impressive and complex array of ventilators and cooling ducts; the engine deck was made to extend behind the track to accommodate them all.

In all, the ARL 44 was an unsatisfactory interim design as the "Transitional Tank", the main function of which was to provide experience in building heavier vehicles.

The main lesson learned for many engineers was that it was unwise to construct too-heavy types, and this opinion was reinforced by the failure of the tank project to which the ARL 44 formed the transition: the much more ambitious heavy AMX 50.

In service the ARL 44 was at first an unreliable vehicle: the brakes, the gear box, and the suspension were too frail, resulting in several serious accidents.

The ARL 44 made only one public appearance, ten vehicles participating in the Bastille Day parade on 14 July 1951.