Légion Française des Combattants

Membership was extended in December of the same year to include veterans of the 1940 campaign, although most were still being held as prisoners of war in Germany.

Non-veterans who sympathised with the Vichy region's project of "National Revolution" were permitted to join, and the legion was renamed the French Legion of Veterans and Volunteers of the National Revolution (Légion française des vétérans et des volontaires de la Révolution nationale).

[1] Marshall Philippe Pétain, chief of state, believed that the Legion was an important tool for the Vichy regime.

[2] As well as metropolitan France, it had sections active in Vichy-controlled colonies in French North Africa, Indochina, and the Levant.

"Unwieldy, ill-organized, and embracing far too wide a compass of political conviction from those who welcomed it as neo-fascist to those who saw it as a mass patriotic resistance movement, the Legion as a 'single party' was an abysmal failure.