Granted, Alsace was liberated and once again under French jurisdiction. But meanwhile the Pétain government, at Admiral Darlan’s behest, had adopted an anti-homosexual law, the first in 150 years—indeed, the first since the Old Regime. At the Liberation, de Gaulle’s government had implemented a highly approximate cleansing of the French penal code. But while the shameful anti-Semitic laws disappeared, the anti-homosexual law survived. It took pitched battles to wipe that law off the books forty years later, in 1981.
