Government in Exile

Counterpart to La Résistance. Their homeland has been invaded. They fought valiantly, but they were ultimately overwhelmed. But they refuse to admit defeat quite yet. They know that they have allies abroad, and it's only a matter of time before they can muster the support to fight back. So for today, the leadership of the nation and whatever citizenry they can bring along make a hasty retreat, taking refuge in a nearby allied nation. While much of their citizens are left behind, possibly forming La Résistance and waging a war from within, they work to muster up support and mount a counterattack from outside to reclaim their homeland.

Frequent any time Everything's Better with Princesses meets La Résistance in the same series. The princess in question will probably be a deposed Crown Princess trying to get her crown back.

If the monarch refused to leave In Its Hour of Need, this may be led by a successor. If only the armed forces are still fighting on, with their government having capitulated or otherwise done away with, then it is The Remnant.

Examples of Government in Exile include:

Anime

• In Mai-Otome, Garderobe is invaded midway through the series. Although it's the training ground for Otome, the elite warriors of the world, they don't have enough gathered at first, and then their abilities are cut off. The Headmistress, Natsuki, is one of only a handful to escape. She spends the next series of episodes taking refuge in nearby Aries and forming an alliance to mount a counterstrike.
• Amaterasu crew's justification to fight against Henrietta alliance in Starship Operators.
• In Code Geass one of the ministers of the former Japanese government claimed this. Of course, he was also a Chinese puppet...
• Although her kingdom consists of about 9 girls and a couple of cats, Sailor Moon is still their princess and they still treat her like one.

Fan Works

• In With Strings Attached, many Raleka fled Ketafa after the Idris started massacring them. They set up towns on the Rust Coast of Baravada, and some of them subsequently made the long pilgrimage to the Shining Coast in order to learn magic and combat skills with which to defeat the Idris back in Ketafa.

Literature

• In the novel SS-GB, England is conquered by Nazi Germany. King George VI is held prisoner. By the end of the novel, George is killed and his daughter in Canada, Elizabeth II, became Queen. One of the reasons why British La Résistance members arrange his death is so Elizabeth can be a legitimate Government in Exile.
• 1632 is a variant of this. Being irreparably separated from the United States, Grantsville re-founds America.
• The last book in The Westmark Trilogy has the protagonists form a Government in Exile while still in the country. The text even says it isn't a government-in-exile, it's a government-in-pawnshop.
• In the Yashim series, the heroes best friend is a Polish diplomat who is harbored by the Ottoman government as a Take That to Russia. The Polish diplomat is a one-man Government in Exile.
• In the later Honor Harrington books, the Peoples' Navy In Exile make allusions to this, but they never fool anybody but themselves. And then they don't even fool themselves anymore once they realize that they have crossed the Moral Event Horizon by cutting a deal with the Mesans to act as hired guns in return for support.

Live Action TV

• The Colonial Government in Battlestar Galactica can be seen as this. They even keep the trappings of their government for quite some time.
• Babylon 5 was this in a way being a government in exile from it's own government. It also harbored G'kar who was a more classic example of this, as well as Delenn's Ranger's which were a partial example: Minbar was not actively hostile to Delenn's war effort, but it was rather cool and much of her effort partook of Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right.
• The Targaryens in Game of Thrones think of themselves as this. They are under the impression that the common folk pray desperately for their return, and that the current king is seen as an evil usurper. Whilst (technically speaking) they have a point about Robert Baratheon usurping their father's throne, they are both too young to remember that their father was a raving nutter that everyone hated. (Robert, for all his flaws, is sane, and has maintained peace for seventeen years.)
• This is essentially the case in the season 3 finale of Merlin , when Morgana took over and Arthur, Gaius, Merlin and the knights escaped into hiding. Uther remained imprisoned, though, until the good guys returned to retake the castle and free him.
• One Mission: Impossible Mission of the Week involved the jailbreak of a political prisoner from an apartheid regime in order to set up a Government in Exile with him in charge.

Video Games

• Suikoden V: The royal palace is captured in an attack by the Godwin faction of nobles, with the King and Queen dead and Princess Lymsleia installed as a puppet Queen. The Prince and a handful of his bodyguards manage to escape, taking refuge at first in the territory of the Barrows faction, who's rivaled with the Godwins. They eventually carve out their own section of territory under their control, recruiting cities and neighboring countries to their side one at a time until they can retake the capital.
• In Suikoden IV, this happens to the kingdom of Obel. When Kooluk's forces invade, Lino En Kuldes escapes on the rebellion's future headquarters and promotes your hero to head of the rebellion, and you set out to free the other islands.
• Medieval: Total War had something like this as a gameplay mechanic. Even after defeating a nation, it was a common occurrence for "loyalists" to rise up and try fighting back.
• Pretty much half the plot of the original Fire Emblem for the NES (as well as the remake, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon for the DS). Altea is betrayed by their ally, Gra and have the shit kicked out of them - the only member of the royal family not killed or captured is Prince Marth, who, along with a remnant military force (Jagen, Cain, Abel, etc.) and ministers (Madelleus) escape and take refuge in Talys, one of the few countries which is truly an ally of Altea.
  • Likewise, the opening acts of The Sacred Stones play out very similarly.
• Warcraft II begins with Azeroth, having been conquered by the Orcs and its king slain, founding a government in exile in Lordaeron under Anduin Lothar as Regent.
  • In World of Warcraft, Gilnas is this after being invaded by the Forsaken. The Night Elves help as many people as possible escape the small nation and offer them a home on Teldrasil (Which considering the Night Elves' well known Xenophobia is a big deal). Their king however only stays for a brief period of time before going to Stormwind, where he stands next to its king.

Web Comics

• The Order of the Stick—the surviving residents and leaders of Azure City escaped on ships out to sea after Xykon's forces took over their homeland. Post-Time Skip finds them still trying to find a place to re-settle since the other Southern nations can't take in all the refugees. It finally takes a wizard to get them all to a suitably-inhabitable island to colonize. Meanwhile, the Azure City residents that were left behind form different factions of La Résistance and bicker amongst themselves.
• In Drowtales, the clans of Chel'el'sussoloth started out as this and believed in the Queen Sharess' promise to bring them back to the surface after war forced them underground, but by the time the main story begins it's persisted for a millennium and almost all of the original dark elves have been replaced by their children the drow, and the fact that they haven't adapted since then causes problems that become more and more evident as the series goes on and the office of the Val'Sharess, who supposedly speaks for Sharess, is shown to be either indifferent or powerless.

Web Original

• The Witches of Dathomir in The Gungan Council claims to be one of these. Yet, being composed of only Nightsisters and their allies, such a claim is contested by the rest of the galaxy.

Real Life

• Details from Wikipedia
• World War II had Charles de Gaulle, who initially lead part of the Free French Forces. As he continued to organize more exiled forces under his command, and even began to gain control of French colonies previously under the control of Vichy France, he gradually became the de facto leader of the French Government In Exile.
• Several nations that were invaded by Germany in WWII had governments-in-exile, often headquartered in London.
• One contingency plan in the unlikely success of a German invasion during WWII would have had the Royal Family (or at least Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret - who, famously, would not leave without their mother, who would not leave without the King, who would never leave), along with some senior British politicians, setting up a government-in-exile in Canada. Presumably members of the governments-in-exile already in London would have likewise fled to Canada or the United States.
• Liu Xie, AKA Emperor Xian the final Han Emperor, was theoretically this after fleeing the capital following the death of Dong Zhuo (who used him as a Puppet King) during the Three Kingdoms period. In practice anyone previously loyal to the Han simply smiled and nodded at his decrees until Cao Cao made him a puppet again, albeit with a Gilded Cage instead Dong Zhuo's abuse and perversion that has led to him being portrayed as a Complete Monster in every work of fiction he's been in.
• The pre-Communist government of Poland had one of the most elaborate of these ever seen. It was formed in the aftermath of the invasion of Poland by German forces in September 1939. Based in Paris, Algiers, and finally London (after the fall of France in WWII), it maintained conventional forces abroad and political advocacy groups throughout the Second World War, as well as an insurgent counterstate in Poland comparable to the Viet Cong in sophistication. When Poland became a Soviet satellite state after the war, the government-in-exile remained although largely unrecognized and without any real power. It dissolved itself in December 1990 after formally passing its responsibilities onto the post-Communist government.