‘Everyday Life’ and the History of Dictatorship in Southern Europe

Dictatorships are of course put into effect from ‘on high’, by the dictators themselves and the loyal individuals who support and enable them. However, in addition to being decreed and imposed ‘from above’, dictatorships are also effectively enacted ‘from below’, in the local spaces and everyday cultures inhabited and performed day-by-day by the people who live through them. Local representatives of the dictatorial state – party officials, civil servants, police officers, and so on – and those with semi-official positions of trust – for example, doctors, midwives, university professors, teachers and journalists – are charged with putting into practice the intended aims of the dictator, but in the process of doing so must absorb and interpret these aims, leading to their potential distortion or modification. Crucially, dictatorships are experienced subjectively by the individuals who live within their borders, who also, through their agency, actions, practices and attitudes, have some capacity – albeit heavily circumscribed in many ways – to contribute to the making – and potentially to the unmaking – of dictatorship. The basic ‘unit of experience’ of dictatorship, therefore, is locally and subjectively bound. ¹

This kind of understanding of how dictatorships have functioned in practice and of the need to uncover what can be called the ‘actually-existing dictatorship’ through the examination of the subjectivities and practices that made up their lived experience was pioneered by West German Alltagsgeschichte historians of Nazi Germany in the 1980s and 1990s, most notably by the (late) historian Alf Lüdtke, but also by historians working in other contexts, who didn’t necessarily label themselves Alltagsgeschichte historians, like Sheila Fitzpatrick in her formative work on Stalinist Russia. ² Whilst historians of the Soviet Union and of the dictatorships of post-war Eastern Europe took up the ‘everyday life’ frame relatively quickly, it has only been within the past decade or so that the influence of Alltagsgeschichte and of ‘everyday life’ history approaches (often in concert with Italian microhistory and Anglophone ‘history from below’) has been extended to the study of southern European twentieth-century dictatorships. Most notably this new work has focused on the dictatorships of Fascist Italy and Francoist Spain, but studies taking an Alltagsgeschichte-informed approach to understanding the Salazarian dictatorship in Portugal and the Colonels’ dictatorship in Greece are also beginning to emerge. ³

This special issue showcases the work of several scholars whose research is concerned with uncovering and understanding everyday life and the lived experience of dictatorship, and its aftermath, in twentieth-century Southern Europe. Our articles cover a temporal range from 1922 to the early 1980s and geographically extend from Greek-ruled (and Turkish-invaded) Cyprus to the Portuguese-governed Azores. Our aim in presenting this special issue is both to bring to broader attention the historiographical shifts represented by the extension of an ‘everyday life history approach’ to national case studies where these had been previously largely absent or under-developed, and to constitute in itself an important contribution and milestone in this development. Moreover, we demonstrate the value of bringing Southern Europe into the comparative frame of existing scholarship on historical dictatorships; with a few notable exceptions, comparative histories of twentieth-century European dictatorships have tended to pivot on Nazi Germany–USSR, Nazi Germany–Fascist Italy, Germany–Eastern European axes. ⁴ Whilst the individual articles in the special issue focus on single national cases, these are (often consciously) understood within thoroughly transnational frames of reference.

Importantly, the articles in this collection take different routes into the exploration of day-to-day lives and ‘ordinary’ people's lived experiences of dictatorship and what that might entail, methodologically and empirically. ⁵ Crucially, though, all the articles find some degree of inspiration in Alltagsgeschichte approaches and specifically in the conceptual and analytical tools used by Alf Lüdtke, and those coined by Michel de Certeau in his observations on The Practice of Everyday Life. ⁶

Since its origins in the 1970s, Alltagsgeschichte has proved, with its attention to daily life and to the fragmentary episodes that comprise it, to be a fruitful avenue of research, helping us to better understand the relationships between dictatorial power and society. As an approach it has, of course, not lacked its critics. As Lüdtke set out himself, the not-insignificant criticisms levelled at everyday life histories, especially by structuralist historians of Nazi Germany, pinpointed its supposed focus on the ‘tinsel and trivia’ of history with woolly definitions, unscientific methods and anecdata, with results that – they argued – risked romanticizing, normalizing and thereby minimizing the (criminal) responsibilities of historical actors – an always heavily weighted accusation but one with the most serious impact in the context of Third Reich history. ⁷ For Hans-Ulrich Wehler, speaking in 2000, the ‘failure, theoretically speaking’ of Alltagsgeschichte was evidenced by the rise of the culturalist approach. ⁸ These charges, not least the accusation of relativizing Nazi crimes, were strongly countered by Lüdtke and others, as they pointed to the possibilities of everyday life histories to complicate our understanding of dictatorial society and its power dynamics, and thereby to complicate, but not dissolve or absolve, the widely-used categories of perpetrator, victim and bystander. Undoubtedly, despite the (West) German social historians’ critiques, the approach captured many historians’ attention internationally, perhaps especially in the US, and its champions defended its capacity to produce ‘relevant’ history that shapes, and at the same time is shaped by, politics. ⁹ Moreover, in the resurgence that Alltagsgeschichte has undergone in more recent decades – described by Steege et al. as a ‘second chapter’ ¹⁰ – its relationship with culturalist historical approaches has been marked by compatibility and engagement, such that researchers have called for a re-reading of its contributions and the application of these to the study of specific, and novel, cases. ¹¹

The inherent ambiguity of everyday life becomes, paradoxically, a key source of its attraction for researchers from diverse disciplines. Everyday life is polyphonic, complex and dynamic, comprising a scenario of multivalent interactions between elite and mass, between micro and macro, and between public and private. ¹² Thus, Alltagsgeschichte has laid bare the permeability of political and societal structures and their discontinuous and unstable nature, in the face of those who would see these as defining schematic frameworks of thought and action. ¹³ Without overlooking the objective existence of structure, Alltagsgeschichte historians placed emphasis on the agency of individuals and groups to act within and, indeed, upon their immediate surroundings. Hence, scholarly interest is located in the divergences from normative patterns of behaviour and in modes of behaviour and ‘lived experience’ related to everyday life, giving rise to a messier and less dichotomous account than those derived from perspectives that frame dictatorial society and politics according to a binary of dominator and dominated. ¹⁴

In this sense, Alltagsgeschichte enables us to pose an essential question: how were official policies and discourses received? Referring to the attitudes of the German population towards Nazism, Ian Kershaw noted that, ‘the cool deliberations of historians can seem painfully detached and remote’ and to a certain extent, sterile, to those who lived through that period. ¹⁵ Nevertheless, we can offer conjectures based on what was offered to society. We must delve more deeply into the capacity of the dictatorships to disseminate and ensure that their ideas fully penetrated, and did not simply circulate at the margins of the social sphere. ¹⁶ However, for this very reason, we must continue to investigate the ways in which historical subjects – actors – creatively shaped and acted upon the reality that surrounded them. ¹⁷ In other words, we must analyse what, following an Alltagsgeschichte approach, can be labelled ‘appropriation’, which refers not only to the ways in which people make grand abstractions ‘their own’ in order to render them more manageable, but also to the way in which discourses and policies are re-worked ‘from below’ through complex processes of adaptation and negotiation that take place in the spaces and practices of daily life. ¹⁸

In effect, the populations that lived with(in) these regimes made use of a wide repertoire of attitudes and actions that fit within Michel de Certeau's analytical framework of ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’ – the former denoting actions taken by the powerful to exercise and maintain their authority and control; the latter describing, conversely, those opportunistic, adaptive and resourceful acts which necessarily operate in the ‘space of the other’ – and/or within James C. Scott's conceptualization of ‘weapons of the weak’, used to analyse forms of peasant resistance. ¹⁹ From Alltagsgeschichte we might employ the concept of the ‘patchwork of practices’ to highlight in particular the importance of going beyond theory and focusing on the concrete practice enacted by historical actors within the contexts in which they live, what they do and how they do it. ²⁰

The emphasis on historical actors’ practices is vital in order to better understand how dictatorships were effectively realized in everyday spheres, the actual development of their projects and their capacity for shaping people's lives. ²¹ At the same time, the focus on concrete practices connects to two of the principal contributions of the Alltagsgeschichte approach. The first of these is the need to broaden our conception of what we understand as ‘politics’, extending this beyond political parties and political institutions and linking it to the myriad microsocial interactions that take effect in people's everyday lives. ²² In addition, it is within everyday life that historical actors utilize their own ways of doing politics and the capacity for agency of some historical subjects, for example women, becomes more visible. ²³ The second key contribution is the pertinence of paying attention to the everyday experiences of individuals, that is, to their particular modes of perceiving historical processes and the ways in which they interact with articulations and representations of power. ²⁴ Such experiences – complex, multiple and non-linear – will naturally offer us fragmentary and inconsistent accounts. ²⁵ However, this does not mean that they lose any validity for our analyses. By attending to these experiences and to how past actors appropriated the lived realities that they were furnished with, we can work to rethink the nature of power relations and move beyond the binary explanations of consent/resistance. ²⁶

This special issue brings together and showcases the work of an international group of scholars, who are all conducting innovative research into questions around symbolic practice, subjectivity, agency, Eigen-Sinn, space and memory during and in the immediate aftermath of four twentieth-century dictatorships in Southern Europe: Mussolini's fascist dictatorship in Italy; the Francoist dictatorship in Spain; Salazar's regime in Portugal; and the Colonels’ dictatorship in Greece.

Kate Ferris’s article investigates how everyday life and the lived experience of dictatorship was spatially framed in Fascist Italy. Focusing on bars and other spaces in which alcohol was consumed, the article traces the evolution of political practices and interactions enacted in bars, and connected to alcohol consumption, before, during and after the fascist seizure of power and the consolidation of its dictatorial rule. Drawing on a varied source base including osteria guidebooks, Blackshirt memoirs and a ‘collage of miniatures’ made up of police reports into political crimes of subversion, Ferris makes the case for understanding everyday spaces and practices as operating in mutually impactful interaction to shape modes of everyday political sociability and comportment, including those marked by violence and conflict.

Two articles examine facets of lived experience of dictatorship in Francoist Spain. Claudio Hernández Burgos looks at the Francoist post-war period during the 1940s, exploring the diverse responses and attitudes of ordinary Spaniards to the situation of hunger and scarcity that the population experienced for several years. In this way, his article makes the case that understanding the ‘years of hunger’ – the immediate post-war period marked by extreme poverty and harsh political repression during which it is estimated that between 150,000 and 200,000 people died from hunger and diseases caused by malnutrition – through the lens of everyday life allows us to better grasp the meaning of the particular practices through which ordinary Spaniards dealt with misery and the ways in which, within the circumstances, they sought to ‘normalize’ their everyday lives. In her article, Gloria Román Ruiz examines how acts of ‘symbolic resistance’ functioned during the desarrollismo years of the 1960s in ways that were at once highly individualized and more ideological than comparable dissenting episodes during the preceding ‘years of hunger’. Forms of ‘everyday expressions of irreverence’ towards the dictatorial regime included ‘speech acts’ such as jokes and blasphemies, texts including pamphlets and graffiti, and material objects such as flags and caricatures, often focused on the figure of Franco. As Román Ruiz shows, these constituted ambiguous but significant episodes of ‘symbolic resistance’ that pointed out the ‘cracks’ in, and contributed to disrupting, the caudillo myth, all the while within a framework of repressive, punitive and centralized dictatorial power.

Daniel Melo's article analyses everyday life under the Portuguese Estado Novo. His study explores multiple aspects of societal experience and practice: popular culture, festivities, mechanisms of repression, the world of the press and literature or mass culture. The long time frame allows the author to evaluate the continuities and ruptures in Salazar's policies and discourses as well as in the daily lives of the population. Moreover, Melo pays particular attention to the construction of everyday nationalism, which, through formal and informal/banal instruments, contributed to disseminating the Estado Novo's ideology among wide sectors of the population.

A further two articles explore the lived experiences of dictatorship at the geographical edges of those regimes. In so doing, both demonstrate the heuristic value of examining everyday practices and experiences at societal ‘margins’, as Michel de Certeau put it, or, as Jon E. Fox alternatively framed it with respect to everyday or ‘banal nationalism’, at the ‘edges’ of the entity under examination. ²⁷ Exploring dictatorship at its ‘margins’ or ‘edges’, whether these be political, societal or spatial, brings the possibility of uncovering tropes, practices and world views that might more commonly lurk under the surface, ‘taken-for-granted’ and ‘implicit’, by examining these at times and places – ‘edges’ – when they are rendered (momentarily) explicit. Underpinning this is the premise that (not unlike microhistorians’ notion of the ‘exceptional typical’) uncovering what is extraordinary, unusual and marginal has much to tell us also about what is ordinary, common and normative. In the case of Beatriz Valverde Contreras and Alexander Keese’s article, the dictatorial edge they explore is that of Salazar's Portuguese regime – which, like Francoist Spain and Fascist Italy was also a colonial regime – in this case as it was manifested in the mid-Atlantic Azorean islands. Through the examination of PIDE (Polícia Internacional e da Defesa do Estado; political police) files, the article outlines the ‘room for manoeuvre’ that could be eked between the multiple sources of authority, including police agents, civil governor and the American military base, operating in this peripherical zone of the Salazarian regime. The results of such manoeuvring for some allowed them to evade dictatorial repression. For Huw Halstead, the recollected experiences of Greek Cypriots in 1974, caught between the Greek dictatorship's coup d’état and Turkish invasion, proves a fertile ground for exploring the possibilities for acting with agency amid and despite the chaotic delimitations of military mobilization, warfare, displacement and division, on what effectively constituted a temporal and geographical ‘edge’ of both regional powers’ authority. As Halstead shows, whilst the Greek Cypriots he interviewed considered themselves powerless ‘pawns’, their testimonies reveal evidence of exercising individual choices, enacting countless ‘micro-acts’, of ‘making do’ and of mobilizing oneself in spite of the ‘asymmetries of power’ in which they remained caught.

Finally, two articles explore the lingering impact of dictatorship on everyday lives following the end of dictatorial rule, in periods of transition towards democracy, demonstrating how the after-effects of the regimes continued to reverberate and to shape ‘ordinary’ people's relationships with the state and with one another, often long after the official fall from political power of its rulers. Luke Gramith's article investigates how processes of ‘defascistization’ in Monfalcone, a town close to Italy's north-east border, were indelibly marked by residents’ everyday lived experiences of fascism over the preceding twenty years and were understood not only as processes to dismantle the political hierarchies of the regime but also to dismember the structures and manifestations of ‘everyday fascism’ in their locality. In so doing, Monfalcone residents’ understanding and practices of defascistization could be at odds with those of the Allied Military Government which filled the political vacuum left by the fascist regime from 1945, an incompatibility that had significant consequences. In their article exploring the ‘Azure Generation’ in Greece in the aftermath of the Colonels’ dictatorship (1967–1974), Ursula-Helen Kassaveti and Nikolaos Papadogiannis examine everyday ‘cultures of conservatism’ through the reception and performance of political songs by young Greeks who identified as Liberals. Listening to and singing particular political songs, composed through top-down and bottom-up interaction, comprised key forms of ‘symbolic practice’ by members of the youth wing of the Nea Dimokratia (New Democracy) party, ONNED, through which they both reconfigured their understanding of recent Greek history and mobilized themselves in the complex political landscape of their post-dictatorship present.

Individually, each article draws on the peculiarities of their case and sets out the possibilities an ‘everyday life’ history approach offers to historiographical debates that may be nationally bound – whether this is a way through and beyond the fractious disputes around consent for Italian fascism or a shift in focus that complements, but moves forward, the concentration of research efforts on questions of political violence in Francoist Spain. At the same time, there are marked similarities and nodes of connection between the articles, which are perhaps most visible in relation to their methodological approaches and the analytical and theoretical tools they deploy. Collectively, the issue points to the ways in which histories examining questions of subjectivities, experience, agency and practice allow us to challenge and complicate some of the binary oppositional categories through which the histories of European dictatorships have so often been viewed: those of coercion and consent; ideology/culture and reality; totalitarianism and authoritarianism; perpetrator and victim; fascist and anti-fascist; consensus and resistance.

A key thread linking all the articles – and practitioners of everyday life history more generally – is a focus on the ‘microscopic’, on individuals, small groups and communities, small-scale events, objects, practices, localities and neighbourhoods, and on what Alf Lüdtke called ‘miniatures’ – the scholarly recreation and investigation of these small, individualized or localized situations – with the conviction that these have much to reveal about the complexity of dictatorial rule (as these regimes actually existed, as well as how they imagined and projected their rule). In this vein, all the articles in this special issue work to amplify our understanding of what might be considered ‘political’. As Luke Gramith points out in his article, what the (in this case fascist) dictatorship effectively was for many of those who lived through it, was the dictatorship as it presented itself through its policies, its individual representatives, its structures and its actions in localities and in everyday life.

In addition, the articles are held together by shared theoretical concerns and, often, common conceptual tools. Perhaps above all is the concern for understanding the functioning of agency in dictatorships, of individual human actors, exerted through their own comportment but also relationally, via familial, friendship or other interpersonal relationships. Claudio Hernández Burgos, Gloria Román Ruiz and Huw Halstead find value in Lüdtke's notion of Eigen-Sinn, often (imperfectly) translated as ‘self-willed’ action or ‘stubborn wilfulness’ to account for creative acts and modes of behaviours that allowed the actor to disrupt routines and (temporarily) evade the expectations or impositions of those in power; Lüdtke's example was that of factory workers engaging in jokes or pranks or taking advantage of machinery breakdowns to gain (albeit temporary) breathing space from mechanized production lines on the factory floor, which he mapped on to workers’ ‘patchwork’ responses to the political intrusions of Nazism through similarly personalized acts of (temporary) self-assertion. Analogously, de Certeau's notion of ‘tactics’, already mentioned, operates in a similar fashion, to carve out the possibility of (partially) autonomous action, through opportunistic, flexible practices, whilst still continuing to inhabit and operate within asymmetrical power structures and spaces. Hernández Burgos, in his article, demonstrates how individuals made use of highly heterogeneous strategies, including those which could be labelled as Eigen-Sinn, to cope with the harsh living conditions caused by Francoist economic policies during the 1940s; Román Ruiz shows how mocking the dictatorship was not (only) implemented by political enemies of Francoism, but also by individuals who could be ‘in’ and ‘outside’ the regime at the same time. Finally, Halstead's article focuses on the multiple ‘tactics’ enacted by Greek Cypriot men and women during the Turkish invasion of the island. He pays particular attention to the ways in which people ‘navigated’ their everyday lives by performing micro-acts which allowed them to meander through official narratives and policies. Despite being conditioned by regime structures, individuals actively manoeuvred themselves to take care of their ordinary needs and concerns.

Along similar lines, Lüdtke's assertion that such opportunistic practices allowed individuals to carve out ‘room for manoeuvre’ between, around, and indeed within, the confines of Nazi German violence, policy and strictures finds a clear echo in Fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, Salazarian Portugal, and Cyprus under Greek dictatorial rule and Turkish invasion. Daniel Melo documents the roles played by cultural and recreational societies in providing space for the Portuguese to encounter and discuss alternative ways of conceiving and organizing society. In Italy, meanwhile, bar owners and their patrons deployed situative tactical modes of behaviour and agency to negotiate Blackshirted violence, strict licensing and public security laws, police surveillance and informants in order to maintain the long-standing political sociability function that bars and alcohol consumption facilitated, including political activity that was anti-fascist or somehow antithetical to the regime. Such manoeuvrings were not always successful – many bars known for anti-fascist political leanings were closed down and anti-regime speech acts and practices enacted in bars and/or under the influence of alcohol, if detected, were very often punished as political crimes of ‘subversion’, including with sentences to confino [internal exile] – but the tenacity with which so many Italian bar owners and clients adapted to, and worked their way through, the regime's changing regulation of these everyday spaces and of the comportments conducted therein is striking.

Further, many of the articles identify practices that the authors label as ‘symbolic’ and even as ‘symbolic resistance’. Again following the example of earlier studies, including those of Luisa Passerini, James C. Scott, and Lüdtke, the articles by Kasseveti and Papadogiannis and by Román Ruiz interrogate various forms of symbolic practice, including songs and other speech acts, to ask how and to what end these were deployed as individuals negotiated the dictatorial state. ²⁸ In their article on post-dictatorial Greece, Kasseveti and Papadogiannis suggest that listening to, singing and performing political songs by moderately conservative young Greek Liberals (members of ONNED) constituted sets of ritualized, simultaneously symbolic and prosaic, practice that served to delineate and differentiate themselves both from left-wing youth and from other factional cohorts within the ONNED group. Román Ruiz, meanwhile, makes a compelling case for understanding the speech acts – insults, blasphemies, jokes, toasts, rumours and more – she studies in Francoist Spain from the 1960s as forms of ‘symbolic resistance’ which allowed those Spaniards who engaged in them to articulate ‘minor’ but no less meaningful ‘expressions of dissidence’. As she shows, whilst the repressive violence with which the state punished ‘daily acts of resistance’ may have lessened by the 1960s, the risks those who engaged in forms of ‘symbolic resistance’ were willing to take increased. What's more, the impetus and shape of these acts changed. Less motivated, necessarily, by economic deprivation and desperation than they had been during the ‘years of hunger’ (1940s), transgressive acts of symbolic or ‘elliptical protest’ (to borrow Graham and Labanyi's term ²⁹ ) took a more ideological character and were intended to be seen or heard by others, often taking place in public spaces including streets, squares and taverns.

Elsewhere, our authors present ‘miniatures’ elucidating practices that are more difficult to pin down and, certainly, to define as forms of ‘symbolic resistance’. In Claudio Hernández Burgos’s article, we encounter practices that do not fit neatly into moulds of ‘resistance’, ‘opposition’, ‘support’ or ‘consent’. Spanish farmers’ refusal to comply with government diktats on autarchy and, indeed, their participation in the black market cannot be read straightforwardly as ‘resistance’. Motivating their actions were complex rationales and attitudes including the possibility for increasing personal wealth and a perceived need to protect long-standing communitarian interests. Their non-compliant (with government restrictions) and black-marketeering actions could sit alongside other forms of ostensible support or real approval for the regime and were not intended to dislodge or undermine the dictatorship; indeed, in many respects, they effectively shored it up. Conversely but similarly, the several examples he cites of Spaniards, often women, who framed their requests for state assistance to alleviate their desperate hunger and living conditions in the language of the regime, even in the case of some widows of Republican prisoners from La Alberca near Salamanca appearing to tacitly accept the state's execution of their family members, may not only be read as evidence of their acquiescence to the Francoist state. Working ‘within the law’ and along, rather than against, the grain of Francoist language and narratives may also be understood as a tactic informed by ‘imposture’ and ‘feigned behaviour’. ³⁰ Certainly their actions indicate a refusal to do nothing in the face of the material consequences of living in the dictatorship. Consequently, when placed together in conversation, what our articles show is the importance of recognizing and taking into account how attitudes and behaviours that historians – and contemporaries – have frequently labelled as ‘resistance’, often at the same time contained other, perhaps contradictory or restraining, elements such as acceptance, half-hearted commitments, conformism, negotiation or limited reciprocity.

In what constitutes more of a theoretical and methodological departure from the work of earlier Alltagsgeschichte historians, an important arena of analysis for this special issue is that of space and the everyday. Indeed, it is the dominant concern for Kate Ferris’s article, as she uncovers the ways in which the everyday spaces in which individual Italians interacted with each other and with agents and representatives of the state – in this case bars – were actually used and experienced. Crucially, she shows how everyday spaces and practices were mutually impactful; the spaces in and through which people lived their day-to-day lives shaped in important ways the practices, interactions and interrelationships that took place within them but likewise those spaces were themselves conditioned by those comportments and relations, that is by the ways in which the spaces were used. Even if less explicit, this connection between space and practice is evident in the other articles in this issue. For Kassaveti and Papadogiannis, for example, it is not only the lyrics of the political songs sung by ONNED youth, the people who sung them, or the broader environment that conditioned the occasions on which they were sung, but also the spaces in which they were sung – in the corridors between lecture theatres in universities, at student gatherings in rooms and apartments, and in taverns – that enrich our understanding of the roles played by political songs in shaping political identities and cultures in post-dictatorial Greece.

Where we would like to highlight divergence between the articles in this collection, rather than their points of convergence, is in the diversity of source materials we examine. There is no obvious or clear-cut archive for everyday life history (as is the case for many fields, of course). On the contrary, the everyday lives and lived experiences of ‘ordinary’ historical actors are less likely to be recorded, certainly from their own perspectives and in their own voices, than are the lives of those who occupied prominent positions or enjoyed a particular status in past societies. As such (and as will be familiar to historians in many other fields, not least those seeking to recover the experiences and legacies of colonialism), everyday life historians deal with a necessarily fragmentary and sparse source base. In addition, our focus on dictatorship and the fostering of climates of violence, surveillance, restriction and censorship (including self-censorship) by the regimes under study add further challenges to the collating of an archive. All the contributors to this collection have had to grapple with these issues as they explore dictatorships from both the ‘bottom up’ and ‘top down’, at the meeting point between the intended dictatorship and the actually-existing dictatorship. All make recourse to multiple source types as a means of expiating patchy, incomplete and sometimes problematic source material. Kassaveti and Papadogiannis, for example, construct an archive from newspaper reports, political pamphlets, interviews and autobiographies, as well as song lyrics. Gramith draws on a varied source base composed of multiple archival holdings including the records of the Allied Military Government in post-war Italy, the Italian Communist Party, local government, local employers, the Cantieri Riuniti dell’Adriatico, as well as contemporary national and local publications.

‘Official’ sources, records housed in (state) archives produced by regime officials, by its ministries, quangos, agents and by the dictators themselves, as well as those produced by semi-official organizations, by commercial companies, by occupying forces, and so on, can be read ‘along the grain’ for what they tell us about the intended policies, ideas and strictures that dictatorial regimes and allied bodies expected to impose on people's everyday lives. They can also be read ‘against the grain’ for all that they reveal, albeit indirectly and in fragments, about subjective lived experience and the potential gaps – as well as overlap – between the intention and the reality of both. Valverde Contreras and Keese, Román Ruiz, and Ferris all make use of police reports, which offer (filtered and mediated) access to accounts of political encounters and altercations, speech acts, anti-regime graffiti, jokes, songs and more. Such files often incorporate own-voice accounts of events as part of the process of reporting and investigating the ‘crime’, including witness statements, the accused's defence, and in some cases even including written materials and material objects kept as evidence. Hernández Burgos reads local government reports ‘against the grain’ and in conversation with oral history testimonies to the enrichment of both source types. Contemporary published material, including newspapers, journals and guidebooks are also all in evidence here, often for what they expose about political or societal prescriptions, but also provide another source-type for gleaning own-voice accounts indirectly, though they must always be used with an awareness of the censorial framework that conditioned their publication. Finally, we, of course, make recourse to the ego documents that testify directly (though inevitably also selectively) to ‘ordinary’ inhabitants’ subjective experiences of dictatorial rule, and to their thoughts, acts, practices and beliefs, including those recorded contemporaneously to those experiences (diaries and letters, for example) and subsequently, very often following the regimes’ end. These includes memoirs as well as oral testimonies, the latter not only forming a key source for Halstead's examination of Cyprus under dictatorial rule and invasion but also for his reflections on the processes through which historical actors narrated their lived experience of dictatorship and, in so doing, ‘made sense’ of these experience – effectively constructing their own ‘miniatures’ – and bridged for themselves the so-called micro–macro gap. ³¹

In this way, we see important points of connection between the articles offered in this special issue, along with possible avenues for further comparative research. In addition, we hope that readers of this collection will find other links between the articles collated here with their own work and with their wider fields. Thus, we hope to make a positive and incisive contribution to what is a dynamic and exciting area of scholarship.