La fin de l’espoir

La fin de l’espoir is a clandestine testimony about young Spaniards who risked their lives resisting Franco after the Allied victory in the Second World War, believing that the defeat of the Axis would also end the dictatorship. Written by Marcelo Saporta and published under the collective pseudonym Juan Hermanos, it transforms that belief into a record of political failure and abandonment: its young protagonists’ efforts do not bring the intervention they expect, but their witness survives the struggle that nearly silences them.

Composition and clandestine passage

The book’s path to publication is part of its meaning. In 1941, banker Jaime Saporta secured Spanish nationality for his family through the Spanish consulate in Paris. Because the family traced its ancestry to Sephardic Jews from Salonika, the 1924 decree of Miguel Primo de Rivera made Spanish passports available to them. The papers helped the family escape Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws and Nazi occupation, and settle in Madrid. Marcelo, eighteen when they arrived, did military service; contact with young Spaniards in the barracks helped lead him toward resistance to the dictatorship.

After returning to Madrid, Marcelo joined former pupils of the French Lycée who were connected with a republican student movement that had reconstituted the Federación Universitaria Escolar. The movement opposed the Falangist dominance of the Sindicato Español Universitario. Marcelo’s brother Raimundo, by contrast, adapted to Francoist Spain and later became a prominent Real Madrid executive and an associate of Santiago Bernabéu. Their divergent lives give the book’s political choice a tangible family contrast: the cost of resistance was chosen, not imposed by poverty alone.

During the Easter week of 1947, the arrests of two veteran members of the student movement, Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz and Manuel Lamana, convinced Marcelo that his testimony might serve the cause better from exile. In 1948 he crossed clandestinely into France carrying a manuscript he had spent the previous two years writing in French. He called it Sous peine de mort, or Under Sentence of Death. French was not his mother tongue, but it was the language he considered his own. Once in France he changed his name to Marc and chose not to sign the work with his personal identity.

Jean-Paul Sartre, editor-in-chief of Les Temps Modernes, read the manuscript and changed its title to La fin de l’espoir, Témoignage. The new title made the book a dark counterpoint to André Malraux’s L’espoir, associated with international antifascist solidarity during the Spanish war. Where that earlier work evokes solidarity, Saporta’s testimony recounts its failure: a long history of forgetting, indifference, and abandonment. The authorial pseudonym Juan Hermanos extends that reframing. Rather than present the manuscript as one man’s possession, it claims to speak for a collective experience shared by Spanish resisters.

The witness and its warning

An accompanying note, dated Madrid, January 1946, insists that the manuscript was written to prove its author could still resist, not to win fame or money. Its creation and transmission are themselves described as life-threatening: the typist and the person carrying it beyond the border would also risk death. The anonymous writer says that the world must learn what is happening, distinguishes the account from autobiography and propaganda, and asks readers to act before the remaining fighters have fallen. The appeal ends with the words “POR EL HONOR DE LA REPÚBLICA.”

The note’s apparent immediacy is complicated by the book’s actual language history. Its Spanish text, published with the notice in 1949, is not the original manuscript but a translation from the French version. Gallicisms in the final paragraph reveal that direction of translation: what readers might take for a Spanish testimony translated into French is, in fact, Spanish rendered back from French. The text therefore carries its passage across borders inside its own sentences. That formal detail does not undo its testimonial claim, but it makes clear that testimony reaches its readers through translation, editing, and concealment as well as through the witness’s original act of writing.

The manuscript appeared in the December 1949 issue of Les Temps Modernes, the fiftieth number of a journal founded in 1945 by Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The journal’s name recalled Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times and its depiction of the exploitation of American workers during the crisis that followed 1929. Its political, literary, and philosophical commitments, shaped by its founders’ resistance to Nazi occupation, made it a setting in which Saporta’s account of Spanish resistance could be presented as more than private recollection.

The young resistance and its failed expectation

La fin de l’espoir differs from accounts centered on seasoned fighters who had fought in the war, endured prison, and remained within established clandestine organizations. Its protagonists are students, apprentices, and young women just beginning working lives. Most come from middle-class families impoverished by their republican identity, but not from the desperate destitution that drove many others underground. Their sacrifice is thus represented as the consequence of a difficult, conscious decision. They had been children during the war and possessed little political training; after the Axis defeat, they nevertheless entered the struggle with formidable conviction because they believed Franco would fall next.

The book follows how that hope becomes organized action. Its narrator recruits cautiously among people he knows, while the young resisters gather to listen to the BBC and make bombs that fail to explode. Love develops alongside the distribution of pamphlets; affection and danger are not separate episodes but parts of the same precarious clandestine life. The testimony also records how the resistance turns toward an armed uprising. Its members retrieve weapons kept in hiding places around their homes—the weapons with which their parents or older siblings had fought—and prepare to take Madrid at the moment the United Nations removes Franco from power.

That plan rests on a political expectation the book exposes as tragically misplaced. On 12 December 1946, the anticipated opening fails, as other opportunities had failed, but the young people’s resistance does not simply end with the collapse of the plan. The account holds two outcomes together: the revolt does not deliver the political change its organizers expect, while their testimony and the surviving work of resistance remain as the fruits of their sacrifice. The title names not only a hope’s death but the historical interval in which a whole generation has to discover that Allied victory will not mean liberation in Spain.

Publication and the afterlife of a testimony

Sartre supplied a preface to the book, which was printed in Paris on 25 April 1950. It was published in Mexico in 1953, but young Spanish exiles later wondered how a work like this could have passed almost unnoticed. Its reception thus echoes the abandonment it describes: a testimony about people left without the intervention they expected was itself left at the margins of public memory.

It took until 1998, more than twenty years after Franco’s death, for Tecnos to publish the book in Spain for the first time. That edition included Sartre’s preface and a substantial introductory study by Francisco Caudet. A later edition from Oberon reissued the same text in 2004 but did not sell out; copies have remained findable through second-hand online booksellers. The publication history makes the book’s neglect concrete without suggesting that it disappeared altogether: it circulated abroad, returned belatedly to Spain, and remained available without becoming a widely exhausted edition.

The novel presents La fin de l’espoir within a broader practice of combining fiction with historical events and figures. Its nonfiction interludes narrate authenticated events in the historical present, while invented characters interact with real people and circumstances. The book’s account of the testimony consequently occupies a double position: it is a work within the novel’s world and a historical artifact whose author, route out of Spain, publication, and reception are addressed as matters of record. In the novel’s larger account of resistance and postwar impunity, the anonymous collective voice stands against both the silence imposed on clandestine fighters and the later forgetting of their testimony.