The acquittal of French militiaman Paul Touvier when tried by a French court in 1992 for crimes against humanity prompted director Claude Chabrol to make his personal condemnation of the Vichy regime, The Eye of Vichy (1993).
When the film was first released in 1993, Claude Chabrol came under fire from some critics who chastised him for not showing more of what was really going on. By limiting the film's visual content to Vichy propaganda, he risked playing into the hands of France's present extreme rightwing political parties, particularly as some of what is seen in the documentary seems to echo the sentiment of Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National.