In this article, we present a collection of letters written by Spanish exiles in France from internment camps and other shelters at the end of the Spanish civil war. We are interested here in the triple dimension of textual structure, pragmatics and linguistic variation of the letters in order to identify the strategies developed by the refugees, many of them semiliterate, in the elaboration of an epistolary discourse of formal request. We intend here to open some of the lines of research that will be developed subsequently in the framework of the CAREXIL-FR project for the edition and analysis of these letters.