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Pieds-noirs is the common category used for Europeans who arrived in metropolitan France from Algeria during the summer of 1962. Upon request, such individuals could apply for status as rapatriés once in France. However, such a status was reserved to those with French nationality although it constituted a condition for access to state aid. The authorities henceforth proceeded to try to identify French nationals amongst migrants from Algeria, in order to support their settlement in metropolitan France. This article attempts to denaturalize the institutional labels of citoyen and rapatrié through analyzing the ways in which they were constructed by public authorities, received by people, and used by social scientists. At once migrants and citizens, the rapatriés have never been considered as a legitimate object of study by the sociology of immigration and they were made invisible by the categories employed in official statistics. This article therefore examines the construction and the performative effects of this “paper identity”, based on legal texts, interviews, and archives of official statistics. It further interrogates some prenotions about Europeans from Algeria in France.