In the Roussillon plain, 50 kilometers north of the Franco-Spanish border, the Rivesaltes camp stands on dry and windy land. Converted into a Memorial in 2015 and recently renovated, the barracks of the former internment camp that operated here between 1941 and 1964 are still visible. Spanish refugees who fled Franco’s troops in 1939 were the first to be confined in Rivesaltes, a supposed “reception center” that was very similar to a concentration camp, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by the French army. Conditions were precarious, but in the improvised camps on the beaches of Argelès, it was even worse. Although the policy of interning “undesirable foreigners” began in the 1930s, it was the authoritarian and pro-Nazi Vichy regime that truly boosted it from 1940 onwards.