Ruedo ibérico was a publishing house founded in France as a political tool to generate an intellectual challenge to the Francoist regime through the introduction into Spain of rigorously researched information that could demonstrate the lies and manipulations of the dictatorship, and which would allow for the recovery of a historical memory. Its ethos, as previously attempted by Las Españas in Mexico or Ibérica in New York, was not partisan. This was demonstrated by the different political sensibilities of the five co-founders who signed the constitution of Éditions Ruedo ibérico in March of 1961 in Paris. Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz was a left-wing activist; Ramón Viladás was connected to Catalan nationalism; Vicente Girbau was a card-carrying member of the University Socialist Union (Agrupación Socialista Universitaria, ASU); Elena Romo was a communist and José Martínez Guerricabeitia came from an anarchist background.

Forged in the fight against Franco and members of a second generation of refugees, they were linked by having been persecuted and imprisoned by the regime and for having to go into exile. They met in Paris and became friends during the seminars on Spanish history ran by Pierre Vilar in the École de Hautes Études. The only professional editor amongst them was José Martínez, who worked for the scientific publishing house Hermann. Coming from an anarchist family and member of the literacy squads of the Juventudes Libertarias (Libertarian Youth) during the war, he was later the victim of reprisals and after travelling to France in 1948 he worked in metallurgy and unloaded lorries in Les Halles, but also studied at the Sorbonne. José Martínez, because of his personality, training and professional ambitions was the one who drove the publishing house forward, making of Ruedo ibérico a second skin that would never leave him.