Despite being an embassy before the Khmer Rouge regime, the French Embassy was marked as one of the prominent places during the capture and fall of Phnom Penh by Khmer Rouge soldiers. According to a French survivor and witness, Fr. Francois Ponchaud who later become the author of Cambodia: Year Zero, the French Embassy during the fall of Phnom Penh was a place where all foreigners stayed before being forced to leave Cambodia and go to the Thai border during April and May 1975. He recalled that on April 30, 1975 was the first wave of foreigner evacuations, followed by another one on May 7th and another one on May 23rd or 24th.

During that period, there were also some Cambodians who were seeking refuge at the French Embassy. Ponchaud claimed that only Cambodian women who were married to French men were allowed to leave the country, while Cambodian men who were married to French women were forced to leave their wife and stay in Cambodia.

A contemporary statue of an inverted body representing chaos during the April 17, 1975 event was a memorial dedicated by the Exterior Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) as reparation to the civil parties in case 002/01. The artist, Ing Phousera, was a Cambodian-French, whose father was forced to stay behind during that separation at the French Embassy. His father was Khmer and was never seen again since then. Now the statue is located in Tuol Sleng Memorial Museum.