A merciless winter - Spain under Franco's boot
After winning the Spanish Civil War in 1939, Francisco Franco, rejecting any idea of reconciliation, subjected his Republican opponents to an unimaginable repression. For many years, Spain entered a « merciless winter » of massacres and oppression, which this book chronicles. Tens of thousands of Republicans were murdered after the announcement of the Francoist victory in April 1939. Hundreds of thousands of other « Reds » were thrown into prison, incarcerated in concentration camps, or sent to forced labor units, while a large part of the population was oppressed and ostracized by the regime.
Fifty years after the death of the Caudillo (November 20,1975), it was important, in the face of historical revisionism, to recall this dark and criminal period of the Francoist dictatorship.
The author, Gilbert Grellet, a writer and journalist, knows Spain well, having notably headed the AFP bureau in Madrid for five years (2005-2010), writing on the theme of the Spanish Civil War and Spain’s « historical memory. » This new book is a logical continuation of his previous book on the Spanish Civil War, Un été impardonnable (An Unforgivable Summer), in which he denounced the policy of non-intervention by Western democracies in the face of the 1936 coup against the Spanish Republic, launched by military officers supported by Hitler and Mussolini.
The author of several other books, Grellet notably won the prize for best French suspense novel in 1988 for Le Souffle Austral (Wind of death).
