The internment camp is not something from a far away or the distant past but a system of displaced population management used in France for over a century. We have undertaken a socio-historical study of a forced residence centre during the Liberation of France. Instituted by the ministry of Interior in 1944, these centres were a coordinate repressive space, run in parallel with penal system, and applied a makeshift and totalitarian policy. The population lodged and forcibly detained in these centres was heterogeneous, their way of life is dominated by hygienic constraints and forced labour. These centres were in a constant shortage of basic requirements and were as much asylum or humanitarian institutions as repressive one. The study of management archives for forced residence centres in the South-East, and in particular theses about the centre of Saint-Mître at Aix-en-Provence, allow us to grasp the gradual development of cognitive framework of institutions used today to manage detention centres for illegal immigrants.