The dynamic tension between collaboration and resistance inevitably shaped the experience of liberation, when the resistance forces and governments-in-exile sought to settle scores with their domestic enemies and shape the post-war political order. There is a reason that historians of the Second World War keep turning back to France: the baffling complexities of the French response to occupation, from obsequious collaboration to heroic resistance, provide a window into the turmoil of a continent. The most influential historian of the dark years of occupation, Robert Paxton, has written that 'collaboration was a French proposal that Hitler ultimately rejected'. Resistance provided a foundation on which a story of national resilience and defiance could be based. Old elites fairly rapidly returned to positions of influence in post-war Western Europe, and their interests lay in a restoration of stability, economic reconstruction and a turning away from the bitter divisions of the war years.