It didn't take long for the French to investigate who had collaborated with the Nazis. In December 1944, four months after the liberation of Paris and as World War II continued on various fronts, the new democratic authorities of the Provisional Government of the French Republic, headed by General Charles de Gaulle, sought to determine responsibility for the persecution of the exiled Republican officials in 1939. One of the arrests they investigated was that of the president of the Generalitat, Lluís Companys.