The two soldiers of the Guardia Civil, who seem to merge with the dark green background with only the light patches of their faces and hands standing out, and the diagonals created by their weapons serve to concentrate visual attention on the central figure of the condemned man, led handcuffed to his execution. Sassu uses here a rapid and at the same time vigorous brushstroke and chooses a pasty pigment, with tones of red that seem deliberately to allude to blood, to create his first manifestly political statement in painting. Created in Paris in 1935, the composition was inspired by the insurrection in that Spanish region which took place in November 1934, foreshadowing the civil war. Sassu knew about the event from French newspapers, which followed very closely the evolution of the situation in Spain.