One of the principal tasks of government is to frame the language that is used to talk and think about what is happening.¹ For the French political and intellectual elites at the end of the war, reinventing France began with the search for a suitable language and terminology to describe the military and political events of 1944, and the processes that followed from them. In the twenty-first century, when instant worldwide communications have made the media a battlefield of war, it seems obvious that words and labels are important weapons. When, in April 2003, the slogan "Occupation is not a Liberation" was adopted for an international campaign of opposition to American intervention in Iraq,² it recalled the many instances when those terms have been invoked to describe post-conflict situations over the previous sixty years. It also emphasised the way in which the words have come to summarise powerful interpretations of complex political scenarios. The notion of liberation was rapidly adopted to describe the position of France as it emerged from the war. Though this was not the first time it had been used, liberation was fashioned into a potent and wide-ranging concept in 1944, and became a successful tool for the reinvention of France in the eyes of its own people and in the eyes of the world. This chapter will examine how that tool was forged, and will examine the struggles to find a similarly suitable language to describe the processes of rebuilding that followed.