The prestigious historian Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand, a great connoisseur of the exile of the Spanish Republicans, in a conference cycle on the “Memories of Oblivion”, organized by the FACEEF Federation of Associations and Centers of Spanish Emigrants in France, denounced: time the participation of the Spanish in the Second World War – particularly in the Resistance – alongside the French, was a little known fact. It has been generally forgotten by the historians themselves and, in any case, widely absent in the French collective memory […] The reasons for this “historical oblivion” lie mainly in the way in which France wrote its own history of those years. In the predominant memories of the post-war period, the French ignored the participation of foreigners in the Resistance, to make the image of a broad national consensus against the Nazi occupation prevail, guided by a prestigious leader [De Gaulle] or a vanguard party [PCF ]. But the mechanisms of this dissimulation, of this forgetfulness, have a particular character in the case of the Spanish”(1) This paragraph perfectly reflects the reason for choosing this topic for my Thesis. The objective of the thesis is to obtain the maximum of bibliographic and especially documentary information from archives, which allows me to draw reasoned and acceptable conclusions about how it developed and the absolute and relative importance of the participation of the Spanish republicans in the French Resistance. both Interior and Exterior. The study of the Inner Resistance, given its wide geographic dimension, focuses particularly on the South of France, where a large part of the Republican exiles were concentrated (2, 3), and therefore where Spanish participation was more active, that allows a reasoned extrapolation of global participation. I start from the hypothesis that Spanish participation existed in both the Internal and Foreign Resistance. That it was not numerous in absolute values, but in relative value since the percentage of the total of Spanish exiles was higher than the percentage of participation of the French population. That his participation had relatively little influence on the liberation of France, although he had brilliant concrete performances. That the French people are unaware of this participation, since French historiography has ignored it, with few exceptions. / NOTES: (1) Dreyfus-Armand, 1995, 73 (2) Javier Rubio in his book “The emigration of the Civil War 1936.1939”, shows a map (8 p. 277) where it is clearly identified that at the end of 1939 The departments that had the most refugees were those in the south of France: Pyrenees-Orientales and Hérault, each with more than 25,000 refugees, and Ariege and Aude, between 10,000 and 25,000. The rest of the Departments, the vast majority, move between 500 to 1,000 refugees. (3) Serge Ravanel who was head of the Free French Forces FFI of Region 4, Toulouse, says that the Spanish resistance was born in the South of France, in intervention (5: 00-6: 06) in the report: 1940- 1945. Spaniards in the storm. resistance in France.
