Fall of Catalonia, refugees and exile

The Battle of the Ebro, which took place between July and November 1938, represented the last and final defeat of the Republican army. With an army with little military capability, when Franco launched the final offensive against Catalonia, the Republic could hardly stop the aggression, and gradually, from December 1938 to early February 1939, it occupied the Catalan territory until the arrival at the border. Thus began an unusual phenomenon until then in no war: an avalanche of refugees, about half a million, were to end up in the south of France, setting up a series of concentration camps. Otherwise,
a long exile began that for many did not end until Franco’s death in 1975.