Xavier Benguerel's novel, Els vençuts (“The Vanquished”) (1969), begins with the evacuation of Barcelona in the last days of January 1939 and ends when Joan Pineda, the novel's fictional author, leaves the camp of Sant Cebrià (Saint Cyprien) in Roussillon. In the foreword to this work Benguerel comments on the paradox besetting the writer who hovers between objectivity and verisimilitude. Later, he would write in his memoirs: “In 1955, when I published Els fugitius, what was rigorously historical was objected to on grounds that it was ‘exceedingly literary.’ The way I have recently ‘imagined’ it in Els vençuts has been deemed absolutely verisimilar and logical” (Memòries 1905–1940, 301). The inversion of the reception between historical and fictional discourses calls for analysis of the status of historical truth in collective memory and of the role of testimonial fiction in revising epistemological routines in the present. In the case of Benguerel, the difference between the two texts mentioned is not in their adscription to this or that discursive modality (literary versus historical narrative) but in the method of composition and, above all, in the history of its reception. Benguerel wrote Els fugitius upon returning from exile in 1955, a time when the story of the losers in the Civil War could not gain a foothold in public life, and the experience of exile was lost on the generations that had grown up or lived in Spain after 1939 (Els vençuts 15).