A Memory in the Will: The French Novel of the Spanish Civil War, Flight and Exile

Abstract

Th e remembrance of the Retirada is improved today in France by a porous memory community that admits, close to legitimate heirs to Republicans exiles, a great number of late additions. Grasping these others of the memory, the diversity of their social recruitment and the issues which are bound to their intentional adoption, makes a huge ambition, from which choosing to conduct the survey from one specifi c memory production, the memory novel to be specifi c, allows to delimit a more easily seizable fi eld. While it contributes to clear up the reason of these others, the novel’s ethnography opens new viewpoints on the fl ight and exile memory that the voice of the activist associations for memory recognition tends to drown out. It’s true that the novelist makes a dissonant point of view heard, in which four sensitivities mingle, the witness’, the historian’s, the moralist’s, the Frenchman’s ones. According to his writings, victimizing and “heroising” views, that public commemoration sets, are remarkably tempered by politic commitments’ denigration and the idea of a possible resilience. Likewise, accusations against the France of 1939 give way to a positive picture of the reception. Analysis attempts to show and explain this hidden memory dissidence.

Key words: memory, memory community, memory novel, Spanish Civil War, Spanish Republicans.