It also made several important reforms and political decisions, such as granting women the right to vote, founding the École nationale d'administration and laying the grounds of social security in France.

[1] The CFLN itself had been created exactly one year earlier through the uniting of de Gaulle's (Comité national français, or CNF) and Henri Giraud's organisations.

[2] After the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944, it moved back to the capital, establishing a new "national unanimity" government on 9 September 1944, including Gaullists, nationalists, socialists, communists and anarchists.

It was well equipped and well supplied despite the economic disruption brought by the occupation thanks to Lend-Lease, and grew from 500,000 men in the summer of 1944 to over 1,300,000 by V-E day, making it the fourth largest Allied army in Europe.

On 22 April 1945, it captured the Sigmaringen enclave in Baden-Württemberg, where the last Vichy regime exiles, including Marshal Philippe Pétain, were hosted by the Germans in one of the ancestral castles of the Hohenzollern dynasty.

He refused to make a speech to open the first meeting of the provisional government in September 1944, stating that the republic continued but in reorganized form.

[5] The provisional government considered the Vichy regime (officially: "French State") to have been unconstitutional and all its actions therefore taken without legitimate authority and illegal.

[10] Jacques Chirac, who became president in 1995, was the first French leader to accept collective guilt for Vichy's deeds, stating on the anniversary of the July 1942 Vel' d'Hiv Roundup that France had committed an "irreparable" act.

This alliance between the three political parties lasted until the May 1947 crisis during which Maurice Thorez, vice-premier, and four other Communist ministers were expelled from the government, both in France and in Italy.

It started decolonisation by recognising the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, but the refusal to include Cochinchina in the new state led to the First Indochina War.

In addition to de Gaulle's edicts granting, for the first time in France, right of vote to women in 1944, the GPRF passed various labour laws, including the 11 October 1946 act establishing occupational medicine.

[11] The provisional government resumed the project started in 1936 by Jean Zay to create a national administration school (École nationale d'administration), which was founded on 9 October 1945, to ensure high-ranking civil servants of consistent high quality, as well as allow gifted people to reach these functions regardless of social origin.

Following the elections for a new Chamber of parliament held on 10 November 1946, former Popular Front leader Leon Blum became the Chairman of the last interim government on 16 December.