Fear of repatriation

Antonia Marcinaire and Francesc Torrades crossed the French border at the end of the Civil War. He was interned at the camp at Bram and she was sent to a centre for civilians in Villers-Cotterêts, in the north of the country. They came from Caldas de Montbui where they had become engaged years before. During the first months of their exile, they kept up an intense correspondence in which they shared memories, concerns, joys, and much hope. In this letter, Antonio told Francesc that the French authorities were forcing Spanish women who were single, widowed, or whose husbands were not in France to return to Spain. Since they were not married, Antonia decided to pretend she was in order to avoid being deported. She made a declaration to the mayor that she was married to Francesc and therefore “obliged to go where her husband goes… These people scare me”, she continued, “the day we least expect it they will hand us over to the Franco”.

Antonia and Francesc were among the almost half a million people who arrived in France fleeing from the Francoist troops between January and March 1939. The French authorities separated the civilians: women, children, and old people, from the men of military age. They interned the former in centres located across the country and the latter on the beaches of Roussillon in what both they and the Spanish internees called concentration camps. Internment and separation made the refugees highly vulnerable, subject to the power of the state, and lacking any family or friendship networks with which to confront the upheaval, the uncertainty, and the fear that swamped everything.

Very quickly, and especially once the Civil War had ended, the Daladier government encouraged – when it didn’t compel – repatriation. It put particular pressure on the women, who were understood to be non-political people who would have nothing to fear from the Francoist regime and could return home without any problems. However, the letters from Spain that the refugees began to receive contained veiled information about the repression to which the “vanquished” were being subjected, whether or not they had been politically active. In this context, refugees like Antonia Marcinaire had to find strategies like pretending to be married or even arrange marriages to men they did not know in order to avoid repatriation to Spain.

AMM