Por el honor de la República

Por el honor de la República is the phrase chosen to close the novel, joining its fictional narrative to a postwar act of remembrance and to the republican cause that shapes the book’s historical world.

The Phrase and Its Source

The novel’s final words repeat the expression with which Marcelo Saporta concluded a note written for Les Temps Modernes in 1949. The connection is explicit: the phrase is not presented as an incidental flourish, but as a deliberate echo of Saporta’s ending.

A Chosen Conclusion

The author identifies the expression as the words selected to end the novel. Its placement makes the close an act of emphasis: after tracing lives caught in the Spanish conflict and its aftermath, the narrative ends by naming the Republic’s honor as its final point of reference.

Historical and Literary Resonance

The phrase also shares its title with one of historian Ángel Viñas’s books, a detail the author notes in explaining the choice. This association connects the novel’s fictional reconstruction with scholarship on republican diplomacy and the international dimensions of the conflict. The ending thus brings together a remembered political commitment, a prior literary-historical use, and the novel’s own final gesture without treating those distinct contexts as interchangeable.