Les printemps de ce monde opens in the summer of 1939, when dark clouds were once again gathering over Europe. At Pradel, François and Aloïse Barthelemy are still working the family estate with the help of Edmond, their eldest son. Charles, now a teacher to the immense pride of his parents, has been appointed with his fiancée Mathilde to a school just a few hundred kilometers away. As for Louise, the youngest, her dream is to become a missionary in Africa.
The war arrives, upsetting yet again the course of their lives, as it did those of all the French who loved and suffered throughout the twentieth century. Inexorably they followed the evolution of a society that was slowly moving from the country toward the town, trampling underfoot "the old world," which even now continues to disappear into the mists of time.
Those happy childhood days when they welcomed the poor to share with them what little they possessed seem so far away... The troubled days of the Occupation and the Resistance would brutally tear the family asunder. But one same force continued to bring them back each Christmas to Pradel, to the land that nourished them, to the land they dreamt of when reality became too painful, where they would come back to die.
Like Les Noëls blancs published in 2000, this second episode of a magnificent saga that covers the 20th century from beginning to end is a moving testimony, written with force, to the shattering events of the 20th century. Christian Signol continues the story of the Barthelemy family, from the spring that saw the omens of the second World War to May 1968.