La guerra de España

Entering today into the Spanish Civil War not to reopen old wounds, but to discover that all ideologies, of one sign or another, brutalized and defeated the moral and spiritual unity that constitutes the historical roots of the peoples of Spain. For great spirits of that time, like the German conservative liberal Thomas Mann, the Civil War constituted "the dirtiest scandal in the history of mankind", a crime that challenged the consciences of men of all conditions, times and origins . The leftist André Gide and the then still communist Albert Camus agreed that it was "an unprecedented degradation of spirit". At the same time, the novelist Georges Bernanos, of Catholic thought and monarchical affiliation, saw in her "the disappearance of the man of good will". Understanding in all its depth how four such disparate political sensibilities coincided in their moral understanding of that conflict is one of the objectives that Jean-Pierre Barou sets for himself. The war in Spain: reconciling the living and the dead is a return to the scene of the crime from a new perspective, closer to the sensitivity of the young generations of Spaniards. Barou travels and reinterprets with originality and lucidity some key moments in our history, and links them in a tragic continuity: from the Fuenteovejuna by Lope de Vega to the Yerma by García Lorca and the subsequent murder of the poet. And he shows once again the astonishing ability of literature to transcend the history of fait accompli.