Neither Resistance nor Consent: Alltagsgeschichte,Everyday Economy and Eigen-Sinn in Franco’s Post-War Spain (1939–1951)

Over a decade ago, Ian Kershaw, one of the foremost experts on Nazi Germany, observed an alternating tendency in approaches to the relationship between the German population and the Third Reich. Whereas scholars of social attitudes under Nazism in the 1970s had highlighted the predominance of consensus over violence and social control, since the year 2000 the pendulum ‘appears to be swinging back again towards coercion’. ¹ Such an oscillation is also evident in other historiographical contexts as researchers grapple with the difficult task of describing the complex relationship between society and dictatorial states without reducing it to a dichotomy. ² ‘Navigation’, negotiation and tacit compromise have predominated instead of clearly delineated positions of support or rejection of a dictatorship. ³ As the number of actors and factors have multiplied, we have drawn a much more complex picture of dictatorial regimes. Yet disturbing the reassuring sensation generated by a binary depiction of dictatorships (consensus-resistance; perpetrators-victims; supporters-detractors) has also raised even more questions. ⁴

Faced by this panorama, it is not surprising that over the past few years there have been calls to revisit the principles of Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life). ⁵ There are several reasons to do so. First, the loosely defined, fragmented nature of Alltagsgeschichte has become a strength, rather than a weakness. Everyday life is by its very nature multi-vocal, dynamic, contradictory and threaded with heterogeneous and changing power relations that reveal both the permeability of structures in dictatorships and individuals’ capacity to ‘negotiate’ them. ⁶ Second, by emphasizing individual agency Alltagsgeschichte locates politics in ‘micro-social interactions’ that occur at an everyday level. Such an approach examines both formal and informal politics, including how people receive, exercise, co-produce or reject power in their daily lives. ⁷ Third, Alltagsgeschichte consequently pays particular attention to the everyday and the subjectivities that arise in this sphere of human experience. ⁸ By focusing on an individual’s own perception and experience, Alltagsgeschichte reveals the artificiality of presupposed categories and the multiple ways of ‘making do’, ‘tactics of the habitat’ and ‘patchwork of practises’ evident in daily life. ⁹ Finally, this perspective favours small-scale analysis. Close attention to everyday lived experience – ‘reality par excellence’ – provides an opportunity to explore the ambivalences that characterize the behaviour of historical subjects at a micro level. Such an approach does not neglect the ‘surface’. Indeed, it recognizes that different planes overlap and employs ‘maps’ of differing scales in order to capture the complexity of individual and collective experience. ¹⁰

This article draws on this re-evaluation of Alltagsgeschichte in order to explore the relationship between Spanish society and the Francoist dictatorship during the post-war period (1939–1951). Using a variety of archival sources, including the press and oral testimonies, it focuses on everyday practices and attitudes towards the hunger and scarcity that characterized this period, which throws their ambiguities, contradictions and multiple meanings into sharp relief. Particular – although not exclusive – attention is paid to south-eastern Spain, a region in which the effects of hunger were especially acute. The situation here was nonetheless comparable to other areas, like Extremadura, Castilla-La Mancha or Murcia. After the war, food became the most important and most everyday of needs. In order to understand the quotidian nature of hunger, attention has to be paid to the strategies people used to satisfy their needs, their interactions with the authorities and the ways in which they tried to construct a certain normality and independence in their lives. Accordingly, this article seeks to evaluate the usefulness of the concept Eigen-Sinn, concluding that it facilitates the exploration of the space between the objectives of the Francoist authorities and the interests, compromises and everyday needs of those Spaniards who had to adapt to a situation of scarcity in order to survive when faced by hunger. ¹¹

In addition, such an approach allows the comparison of the Spanish experience and other contexts shaped by misery, including Europe under Nazi occupation or many areas of the continent after 1945. Each context had its own specificities, but issues like the central importance of food, reduced calorie intake and, in particular, the attitudes and strategies employed to escape misery or to mitigate poor rationing were common in countries like the Netherlands, Greece, Germany and France. ¹² Inserting post-war Spain into this context can allow us to draw new connections between them.

It is odd that the Francoist dictatorship has barely figured in general or comparative studies of social attitudes, public opinion or daily life under non-democratic regimes. ¹³ This is all the more surprising given that the Francoist dictatorship was, together with Salazar’s Estado Novo, the longest-lived of all the dictatorships born in interwar Europe. Indeed, the longevity of Franco’s regime offers an opportunity to better understand the coexistence and dynamism of different state projects, policies and discourses – as well as how society responded to them – in very different contexts. As a consequence, this study aims not only to insert the Francoist dictatorship into international debates about everyday life under dictatorship, but also to contribute to the wider re-evaluation of Alltagsgeschichte. Spanish peculiarities aside – not least the traumatic impact of the Civil War (1936–1939) – the underlying objective is to reveal similar ways of relating to power and strategies for feeding oneself under non-democratic systems. To this end, the first part sketches the panorama of hunger and scarcity that characterized the post-war period and assesses the role of Francoist autarchy and its effects on different sectors of the population. The second part concentrates on the different strategies used to palliate misery, with particular attention paid to, on the one hand, those who broke the law, and on the other, those who tried to work within the parameters of legality. The final part analyses attitudes towards hunger, highlighting the important level of discontent and criticism present in the post-war period, even if this was not significant enough to destabilize the regime.

Hunger, Autarchy and Victory

A recent study of famine in European history concluded that after the Peninsular War (1808–1814) Spain ‘never again experienced major famines, not even significant increases in mortality in years or periods of high food prices’. ¹⁴ The reality of the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, however, dispels such a notion. Although the figures are difficult to calculate, current estimates suggest that between 150,000 and 250,000 lost their lives due to hunger and disease caused by malnutrition after the War. ¹⁵ This does not include the increase in suicides, the effects on height caused by scarcity and resultant deficiencies in diets, or the repression’s wider repercussions by preventing the formation of new families thanks to the execution or imprisonment of many males of a marriageable age. ¹⁶ It is not an exaggeration to label this a famine, similar to the situation that wracked wider Europe after 1945. ¹⁷

To understand scarcity and misery, and their effects on Spanish society, it is important to examine them in the context of ordinary Spaniards’ individual and collective experiences after the war. Hunger is a cultural concept. While there are objective measures that demonstrate its existence and grade of intensity, subjective experience, individual attitudes and specific contexts allow us to understand its reach and effects on a particular society. ¹⁸ Spaniards did not experience misery and scarcity in the same way, yet the post-war period has been etched into collective memory as the ‘years of hunger’. ¹⁹ This shows us not only a great deal about how collective memory works, but also the need to connect hunger and everyday experience in order to understand different perceptions, discourses, attitudes and behaviour when faced with this reality.

As a witness to the period recalled, ‘the postwar was much worse than the war, because the war was temporary and had to end. But the aftermath … the aftermath lasted too long […] And hunger for not only a year or two, but fifteen years – until 1950-something!’ ²⁰ Indeed, Spaniards endured a miserable situation for more than a decade, with particularly acute conditions between 1939 and 1942, and again in 1946, when the country experienced a genuine state of famine. In 1940, the British ambassador, Sir Samuel Hoare, stated that hunger was a terrorizing experience for Spaniards. ²¹ This was exacerbated by the growth of diseases like tuberculosis and typhus epidemics, as in Malaga in 1941, where it reached more than 100 cases per week. ²² The most dramatic consequence of this situation was the deaths by hunger documented by the regime and foreign authorities, particularly in the south of the country. ²³

As many scholars have highlighted, this situation was exacerbated by the regime’s policy of autarchy, poor organization of the food supply, deficiencies in rationing and corruption in the public administration. ²⁴ In the immediate post-war period, the ‘distressing situation’ caused by the lack of bread or sparse rations was constantly referenced, whether in reports by the provincial authorities or diplomatic correspondence. ²⁵ In areas like Granada and Malaga, there were even occasions in which beans, chickpeas or rice had been ruined by being stockpiled for too long. ²⁶ The lack of food was an everyday reality, which rendered the authorities’ efforts useless. The situation worsened at the end of the Second World War, due to the combination of poor harvests, mismanagement of resources and international isolation. In 1946 the Dirección General de Seguridad (General Directorate of Security) warned that food supplies were scarcely sufficient to ‘live poorly for 10 days per month in the cities and five in the towns’. ²⁷ The autarchic measures prolonged misery in such a way that by the mid-1950s, unemployment and malnutrition continued to affect much of southern Spain, which forced many to migrate in order to survive. ²⁸

Hunger and scarcity impacted everyday life at all levels of society, yet it would be a mistake to suggest that every Spaniard shared the same experience, as in any post-war context. Everyday experience in Spain was shaped by the consequences of the Francoist victory. Autarchy became a fundamental political tool for rewarding the regime’s supporters and excluding those who had lost the war. The local authorities’ monopoly on existing resources made them the administrators of hunger. Moreover, many producers benefited from the low salaries and oppressive labour framework designed by the Francoist regime. ²⁹ Others increased the size of their landholdings during the 1940s thanks to their role in local power structures and often at the expense of their former owners, as the properties had been seized by the state. ³⁰ This was the case of Agustín Soto, a small landowner in Santa Fe (Granada), who managed to double the size of his farm thanks to his position in municipal government. His neighbour, Manuel Alguacil, similarly benefited from links with the local political right and his membership of the Hermandad Sindical de Labradores y Ganaderos (Syndical Brotherhood of Farmers and Stock-Farmers) which enabled him to increase his property. ³¹ In a similar way, many small- and medium-sized property owners in rural areas tended to enjoy greater access to foodstuffs, even if they did not form part of the local Francoist elite. This allowed them to grapple with scarcity from a much more advantageous position. ³² ‘I didn’t go hungry’, stated a resident of Teba (Malaga), ‘because my father had a vegetable garden’. ³³ ‘It was worse in the big cities than in the villages, because here […] they had a pen [for livestock]’, recalled Pepe, whose family had land in Terque (Almería). ³⁴ Mariano, who had a farmhouse in Guéjar Sierra (Granada), summarized everyday life: ‘we didn’t go hungry because we had land and we raised all kinds of things, but those who didn’t have land or from whom it had been taken, well, they did go hungry’. ³⁵

Those who ‘did go hungry’ were essentially the defeated. For them, the economic cost of having lost the Civil War was very high and combined with social stigma and the experience of everyday violence. At the end of the war, many were imprisoned, purged or else sacked. Many families lost their only source of income. Lola’s father spent five years in prison for belonging to a socialist trade union in Granada, which left the family in a precarious situation. ‘We were very hungry, because we didn’t have anything and at home it was just us women’, Lola remembered. ³⁶ In a similar vein, Alfonso S. recalled that ‘For a year and a half our stomachs howled with hunger’. His father’s membership of a left-wing organization meant dismissal from his job and the loss of his property. ‘We lost everything’, Alfonso S. emphasizes. ³⁷ The Comisiones de incautación (Seizure Commissions) added further agony. These Commissions confiscated possessions and property from a range of individuals who were considered to be ‘opposed’ (desafecto) to the regime. The Commission in Ávila seized such a number of properties – even while the war was still raging – that they became concerned at their ability to manage and distribute them. ³⁸ The confiscation of property marked an important economic setback for families, who, like many of their neighbours, relied on the land in order to live. In addition, the social exclusion they suffered in their own communities left them very exposed in a time of scarcity. The only option was to wrestle with the reality of hunger, and to try to survive.

Yet the fracture caused by the Francoist victory only goes so far in explaining hunger. The experience of post-war hunger cannot be neatly reduced to the experience of the vanquished versus that of the victors. Classifying society in a binary fashion simplifies complex life courses that are marked by ambivalence and contradiction. Just as there were some of the defeated who managed to avoid hunger, so there were victors who were forced to rely on survival strategies in order to eat. Despite the inescapable reality of social divisions, only through exploring the shifting relationship of the personal and the political that characterize individual and collective experience can we start to understand ordinary people’s practices and attitudes in the face of official policy and discourse. ³⁹ For this reason it is vital to analyse these experiences where they happened, that is, in everyday life.

Everyday Practices in the Face of Hunger

‘If you had limited means, you either used the black market or you sorted yourself out as best you could’. ⁴⁰ Gumersindo’s words shed light on an attitude that was prevalent in a post-war society wracked by hunger. He opted to navigate the black market. Indeed, there only appeared to be two options available: break Francoist law or accept the situation in a more or less resigned manner and find a solution within the confines of legality. However, everyday practices reveal a greater complexity than this simplified projection. A wide range of people demonstrated ambiguous and contradictory behaviour. Most of the population resorted to a ‘patchwork of practices’ and ‘the little tactics of habitat’ that allowed them to ‘negotiate’, ‘resist’ and ‘move within’ or ‘take control’ of the ‘general parameters of life’ established by the regime. ⁴¹ The meanings of such acts were, as a result, diverse. In a few cases, they were acts of everyday resistance which would eventually undermine the regime’s discourse and politics. On other occasions they were a form of adaptation by which ordinary Spaniards tried to normalize their everyday existence. ⁴² The ambiguity and heterogeneity patent in many of these acts means that they can be categorized as Eigen-Sinn, in that they were an attempt to build an autonomous space of one’s own. This was not a form of resistance, but rather a space that allowed a degree of manoeuvrability and capacity for self-distancing within the overall normative framework provided by the dictatorship. ⁴³

Beyond the Law

Of all the strategies used to alleviate hunger the best documented are criminal acts. The variety of such acts and their importance in the grim, challenging post-war context has meant that they have become a crucial prism for understanding everyday life in this period. These tactics were the riskiest. In most cases those responsible lived in the most desperate economic circumstances, but there were those from the ranks of the victorious or in a relatively secure position who flouted the law in order to improve their lot under the Francoist regime.

Theft of food was one such criminal act. Statistics show that crimes against property increased significantly after the end of the war in 1939. ⁴⁴ Most thieves were children, youths and women who struggled to obtain enough food so as not to die of hunger. These individuals belonged to families who had lost the war and had few means on which to draw. The following three examples sketch a profile of this sector of society. In 1939 the Civil Guard arrested a woman in Carboneras (Almería) for collecting almonds on land that did not belong to her. When questioned by the authorities, she explained that she was a widow and responsible for eight children. She justified her actions in reference to them: ‘they had to eat something’. ⁴⁵ A similar case occurred in Caudete (Albacete), where a woman was arrested while stealing peas in order to ‘give my children something to eat’. ⁴⁶ The loss of property due to the consequences of the war often formed the backdrop to such cases, which added a symbolic, political side to the crime and its punishment. This was the case in Vélez de Benaudalla (Granada), where the Junta Local Agrícola (Local Agrarian Board) reported the son of a known ‘Marxist’ to the authorities for collecting fruit from a property that had been taken from him. ⁴⁷

Another common way of alleviating hunger was through the fraudulent use of ration books. Meagre allowances meant that some individuals continued to use books belonging to imprisoned or dead family members, or else they forged birth certificates for non-existent children. ⁴⁸ Press reports demanding the return of these books and the measures implemented by the government to prevent the duplication of coupons and books reveal these fraudulent practices to have been frequent. However, hoarding or forging ration books was not limited to the hungriest. Even the wealthy and well connected took advantage of opportunities to increase their food stocks. ⁴⁹ In 1941 the British Consul in Malaga reported on the laxity of the local authorities towards the regime’s supporters. There were even those who enjoyed a third-category ration book, which were designed for the poorest families, even though they ‘are quite willing and able to pay for their bread’. ⁵⁰

If there is one particular strategy that has remained part of the collective memory of the post-war period, it is the estraperlo (black market). ⁵¹ Participants were usually young, women and/or from a humble background and had only one motive: to feed themselves. One day-labourer from Cespedosa de las Torres (Salamanca) arrested at midnight while transporting potatoes explained that he committed unlawful acts ‘so as to be able eat’. ⁵² The black market also operated in the full light of day, to the extent that provincial authorities believed it to be simply an ‘inevitable evil’. For those in charge of supplying Cádiz province the situation was clear: ‘only by breaking the law, in other words, through the black market, is a family able to obtain enough [foodstuffs] so as not to die of hunger’. ⁵³ The authorities in Granada agreed – deficiencies in the rationing system had transformed the black market into ‘a visible and daily need’, through which to obtain any kind of foodstuff ‘without a limit on quantity’. ⁵⁴ This quotidian character of estraperlo was also confirmed by the Francoist hierarchy in Almería, who denounced the ‘large number of goods on offer in the street’. Many of these came from the poorest classes, who kept their bread rations and sold the rest on the black market. ⁵⁵ Common sites for these transactions were train stations, food markets, shops and homes. Estraperlo enabled Spaniards to acquire products to compensate for the faults in the rationing system and to normalize their everyday life. Above all, however, it was a strategy that silently appropriated a space which the regime sought to regulate and control. ⁵⁶

Finally – and in a similar vein – there were other strategies which could be described as acts of community defence in the face of Francoist autarchy. In the miserable post-war atmosphere, access to communal resources, like hunting, wood or esparto grass, became crucial for many families. Attempts by the regime to limit or prevent access to these resources were met by peasant hostility. Reforesting projects, for example, sought to increase timber production but sparked discontent when they removed access to traditional sources of sustenance for rural communities. Many channelled their protest through the state, but on occasion there were organized acts of resistance, like sabotage and fires. ⁵⁷ In February 1948 the residents of several municipalities in the Galician province of Lugo, tired of being ignored, destroyed more than two million plants and 22,000 trees after warning the forest ranger not to intervene. The authorities arrested and imposed severe fines on eight people, but the protest was successful in that restrictions were introduced on the project. ⁵⁸

Defending community interests was also the reason for many protests against the institutions that managed autarchic policies. The Fiscalía de Tasas (Tax Office) was the organization tasked with pursuing offences against officially regulated prices and considered to always act ‘against modest people for their insignificant infractions’. Resentment at the Office’s actions even led to community-level protests. ⁵⁹ Children and women led an apparently spontaneous riot in Elda (Alicante) in protest at the presence of tax inspectors in several neighbouring localities. ⁶⁰ On a few occasions, such protests were accompanied by violence, as occurred in a village in Asturias in 1946, when a group of women, angry at poor quality food rations, insulted and threw rotten potatoes at the authorities, for which they were arrested. ⁶¹ Discontent with autarchy also surfaced in collective action against the Servicio Nacional del Trigo (National Wheat Service – SNT), the institution which had a monopoly on cereal production and distribution between 1937 and 1950. ⁶² Peasants resented the obligation to hand over a fixed quota of their harvests and this led to complaints, protest and even riots. In 1943, farmers in Tordoia (La Coruña province), angry at the SNT’s poor management, attacked grain stores and seized their contents. ⁶³

There were also supporters of the regime who refused to cooperate with an administration which they felt had wronged them. Aware that they could obtain much higher profits via the black market, many peasants decided to hide part of their harvests. The refusal to handover their assigned quota led to many farmers receiving administrative sanctions. ⁶⁴ But this resistance was also protected by the local authorities. The town councils and Juntas Agrícolas (Agrarian Commissions), which formed the first link in the chain of agrarian autarchy, hindered the work of institutions tasked with collecting quotas by misrepresenting the size of cultivated land and yield per hectare. ⁶⁵ Such was the case in Benalúa de las Villas (Granada). In February 1945, the civil governor of the province informed the mayor of the town of the need to resolve the ‘obvious irregularities’ that had occurred in the handover of wheat. The response appears to have been lax, as months later the governor again wrote to the mayor to remind him of the need for farmers to reduce ‘their reserves for sowing and consumption’. ⁶⁶

Farmers’ refusal to cooperate and the lenient attitude of some local institutions demonstrate the complexity of practices at an everyday level. There were a variety of motives behind these acts, including the desire to create an autonomous space through the normalization of family finances, the defence of communitarian interests and the goal of increasing personal wealth. Yet most were Eigen-Sinn practices. First, they did not usually constitute a direct attempt to undermine the dictatorship. Second, practitioners were very heterogeneous and included those who supported the regime. Third, these acts often worked to reinforce the system of domination. Generalized corruption and defects in the Francoist state became embedded in the everyday workings of the Francoist regime and also strengthened its ability to suppress possible threats to its stability.

Within the Law

The alternative to breaking the law was to work within it. However, following the law did not always mean accepting misery as an irreparable reality, not least as practices of toleration complemented and ran parallel with illegal strategies. Individuals used multiple discourses and masks, and shifted register in accordance with their own circumstances and needs. ⁶⁷ In addition, acting within the bounds of legality did not remove an element of challenge. Legal ways of trying to alleviate hunger included practices that were heterogeneous in terms of motive, actor, meaning and manifestation.

The context of victory and the culture of repression imposed by the dictatorship are crucial for understanding practices of compromise and, above all, the profile of those who engaged in them. Faced by a lack of food, some Spaniards consumed less-commonly eaten products, like orange peel, banana skins, animal feed, tree bark and all kinds of plants. The authorities in Almería attributed the increase in cases of tuberculosis to the widespread ingestion of products not destined for human consumption. ⁶⁸ This is an extreme case, but the post-war period did force citizens to hone their ingenuity. It was not only a case of filling one’s stomach, but also of distracting oneself from a daily reality shaped by scarcity. Bread, the cornerstone of Spaniards’ diet, is a paradigmatic example. In the absence of the wheat flour used for white bread, they used acorns, rye, maize, lupin (altramuz) and grass peas (almorta). ‘Black bread’ became a daily reality for many families. ‘The [only] bread there was’, Alfonso R. recalled, ‘was black bread […]. It was of very poor quality. Sometimes it even contained threads from the sacks’. ‘We only had black bread – for that reason now I can’t even look at it’, stated Lola, the daughter of a victim of the Francoist repression. ⁶⁹

The lack of many foodstuffs was remedied in part by substitutes and creatively reimagined dishes from the safety of one’s home. Infusions were concocted that bore a resemblance to coffee and an egg-less tortilla was invented, as well as other ingenious creations. ⁷⁰ Alfonso S. recalled that his grandmother used to say: ‘Come on, let’s eat our chips! But they weren’t potatoes – they were turnips’. ⁷¹ Other foodstuffs hitherto considered taboo were added to the daily menu of families with a meagre income. Donkey, cat and dog meat were used in stews in an attempt to conceal their flavour and make their culinary use culturally acceptable. Shame meant that consuming these products took place behind closed doors, but it must have been relatively frequent amongst the poorest. In 1943 a British report relayed that cats were ‘killed and eaten’ in Seville, citing several testimonies including that of a woman who maintained that ‘My cat has disappeared … 12 days ago, and I fear he has made a dinner for somebody’. ⁷²

Housewives, who were the pillar of the family economy, played a central role in this culinary creativity and used a range of strategies to feed their loved ones. They used different tricks to make full use of rations without exhausting all of their resources. ⁷³ Some post-war testimonies make reference to the figure of the sustanciero. This ‘condimenter’ was a man who went from house to house with a ham bone tied with a string. Women paid the sustanciero to dip the bone into the stock and hold it there for a given length of time to impart flavour. ⁷⁴ Middle-class housewives drew upon a different resource. They made use of coupons printed in magazines and issued by some companies in order to purchase products. ⁷⁵ Women from the poorest sectors of society decided to work in domestic service in the houses of the wealthy, which was one of the only ways the regime allowed them to earn an income. ⁷⁶ This was not always sufficient to improve their – and their families’ – plight. On occasion they turned to prostitution, an activity which was legal until 1956. ⁷⁷

Despite imaginative and frugal use of available foodstuffs, many families faced no alternative but to turn to charitable initiatives provided by the state to alleviate their hunger. Soup kitchens and orphanages (hogares infantiles) provided by state and religious institutions became the only option for many women, children, orphans and the elderly. As occurred in other contexts, some citizens were pragmatic in their appeals to institutions and feigned support for the regime only in order to ensure their own survival. Most of those who requested state aid did so purely out of material need, given that they came from the ranks of the defeated. ⁷⁸ Some resisted turning to these initiatives for they saw it as humiliating oneself before the enemy. Resistance was also common in these institutions, such as when faced with ideological indoctrination. ⁷⁹ For others, on the other hand, begging for food from the authorities was the only solution, even if their status as the defeated constituted an important hurdle. In 1940, a resident of Colmenar de Montemayor (Salamanca) wrote to the mayor of the wider municipality to request food for her and her son as her husband was in prison and ‘they don’t want to give me my rations in the village’. ⁸⁰ That same year, Feliciano Pérez sent a letter to the civil governor of the province asking for a job as he lacked ‘the economic means to survive’. The local Employment Office denied his request on the grounds that priority had to be given to veterans from the Francoist army. ⁸¹

However, such pleas to the regime also contained a much more complex hidden transcripts. Imposture and feigned behaviour combined with expressions of self-indictment that appeared to accept the official discourse. Some of the letters sent directly to Franco used the regime’s language to frame their requests, as was the case of Carmen, who wrote from the small village of Villahoz (Burgos) to ask the ‘Caudillo’ for economic aid. She cited the promise made at the end of the war that firewood and bread would be provided for every Spanish home. ⁸² Indeed there were some, like a group of widows from La Alberca (Salamanca), who appeared to bestow legitimacy on the shooting of their husbands in an attempt to ensure their survival. In their letter, the women said that they understood that the authorities had had to resort ‘to such measures’ for the ‘rebirth of our beloved Spain’. They requested a ‘small measure of daily aid’ to alleviate a situation marked by social exclusion and the stigma of defeat. ⁸³ Many others employed similar strategies that formed part of a heterogeneous ‘patchwork of practices’ through which they tried to make their lives more manageable and cope with the dictatorship. ⁸⁴ While the multiple meanings of such acts make identifying the motive difficult, they nevertheless reveal the inherent complexity of daily interactions between individuals and the state, in which strategies of distancing combined with the absorption of the narratives that underpinned the structures of domination.

The Limits of Everyday Resistance: Between Discontent and Conformism

Eigenn-Sinn practices could be collective, but they were also the expression of desires, needs, hopes and fears of individuals. They were mechanisms through which individuals tried to make their lives more ‘tolerable’ and imbue their existence with meaning. ⁸⁵ As a result, they were linked to an array of attitudes that, for the most part, revealed a desire to normalize everyday life. These attitudes were far from straightforward and often included multiple motives; they were characterized by the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in everyday life. It is therefore necessary to pay attention to the micro-level social interactions in which the interests of ordinary people collided with state discourses. Only by interrogating how people ‘accommodated’ and recoded state discourse and policy in their day-to-day reality is it possible to understand the complexity of everyday practices. ⁸⁶

Discontent flourished in Spanish society in the post-war period owing to the level of hunger and poor administration by the authorities. ⁸⁷ A British report in 1940 highlighted the growing dissatisfaction in Madrid at the lack of bread, olive oil and rice soon after the harvest. ⁸⁸ Another report from 1943 attributed Franco’s cool reception by crowds in Bilbao to the food situation. ⁸⁹ A few years later, the Italian authorities noted ‘people’s exasperation’ at the ‘poor administration of resources’. ⁹⁰ The regime itself was conscious of this discontent and its possible political effects. In 1946 the civil governor of Cuenca warned that criticism was not limited to the ‘enemies of the regime’, but rather there was ‘profound discontent’ amongst ‘people from a range of political and social backgrounds’ due to the state of the food supply in the province. ⁹¹ The authorities in Salamanca predicted that dissatisfaction with the economy would have ‘unfavourable consequences’ for the stability of the dictatorship. ⁹² For the regime, every problem was reduced to a single issue: the lack of food. As the civil governor of Murcia explained: ‘if the people eat, the atmosphere is calm; if supplies are scarce or non-existent due to the force of circumstance, discontent, criticism, etc. is immediately apparent’. ⁹³

This criticism was replicated across the whole of Spain. Some questioned a specific policy, others the whole economic system, but each emerged from the daily experience of local authorities considered corrupt and institutions believed to be useless. A report from 1941 relayed that in Barcelona ‘everyone is disillusioned’ because ‘while they lack everything, the authorities can obtain anything they like’. The ‘complaints about the government’, it added, ‘are of such a nature that they cannot be put in writing’. ⁹⁴ In contrast to small-scale estraperlo, which was accepted by the community as a means of survival, large-scale corruption stirred anger. Particular offence was taken at the double standards apparent in the policing of the black market. While civil governors boasted of their anti-corruption efforts in towns and cities, other national-level reports admitted that ‘estraperlo cannot be stopped because state officials are involved’. ⁹⁵ The local authorities and the institutions administering autarchy became the main target for criticism. In 1940, in Teba (Malaga), a food inspector was insulted and expelled from the business he was attempting to investigate. A decade later, the syndical representative in Torrevieja (Alicante) was ‘publicly criticized’ when it came to light that he had been blackmailing several local producers. ⁹⁶ Women, the backbone of everyday economic life for the family, featured prominently in these episodes. Carmen, waiting in a queue to obtain flour in the centre of Santa Fe (Granada), called the poor management of resources an ‘outrage’ and singled out municipal leaders as being responsible. In 1949, Mariana Santos, a resident of Sama de Langreo (Asturias), went further still, ignoring warnings from the authorities and declaring that ‘all those managing the food supply are crooks’. By making use of a public discourse of subordination, these women tested the limits of authority on a daily basis, prioritizing the defence of their families over following the letter of the law. ⁹⁷

However, the discontent that propelled such criticism of the authorities overlapped with other feelings and was limited by a number of factors. It was not uncommon for dissatisfaction to combine with resigned acceptance, acquiescence, or even approval of the dictatorship’s economic policies. Historical subjects move fluidly and dynamically between multiple registers and it should not therefore be surprising that contradictory attitudes are detectable in the same individual. ⁹⁸ The same people who protested against the increase in prices or insufficient rations could also show their consent towards other policies or state discourses. Criticism of the management of the food supply is a case in point. While members of the Falange, the regime’s sole political party, frequently complained that Spaniards blamed them for problems in the supply chain, Franco was rarely singled out for criticism. As in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, following the maxim of ‘If only Franco knew’, many believed the ‘Caudillo’ to be unaware of prevailing injustices and so absolved him of all responsibility for the situation. ⁹⁹ According to the authorities in Cuenca province, faced by rumours and external attacks, it was ‘as though the figure of our Caudillo had suddenly grown enormously. He alone fills the nation and everything is expected from him’. ¹⁰⁰ A decade later many continued to exonerate Franco for Spain’s problems. As American journalist Herbert Matthews observed:

People would tell you that Franco was a buenissima [sic] persona –a ‘Very good man’, but there were others around him who cheated. Franco, it was asserted, did not know that potatoes cost six pesetas a kilo, or whatever the price might have been, or that some ministers or Falangist officials were enriching themselves. ¹⁰¹

But the Franco myth was not the only one to be effective. The propagandistic discourse constructed by the dictatorship that sought to justify the prevailing situation of economic misery also took root amongst certain sectors of society. The numerous arguments used by the regime to explain why Spaniards were hungry – poor climatological conditions, international isolation, destruction wrought by the war, bankruptcy leftover from the Second Republic – were absorbed, at least partially, by the population. ‘There are no longer droughts like those ones’, a lawyer from Córdoba, Rafael P., tried to explain, on recalling the time. ‘Of course there was hunger!’ lamented Daniel, a middle-class cabinetmaker, ‘but they [the Republicans] had left the country completely destroyed’. ‘They were years of very poor harvests, which coincided with the rest of the world ignoring us’, noted Rafael G., a businessman from Granada. ¹⁰² The effectiveness of the regime’s social policies should not be overlooked, particularly Auxilio Social (Social Assistance), given that some argued that its soup kitchens and ‘patriotic’ teas (meriendas) had contributed to reducing hunger. ¹⁰³

The acceptance of official reasons for hunger and the policies to alleviate it was not immediate. It is also impossible to understand this attitude without acknowledging both the improvement in economic circumstances that many families experienced in the 1960s and the traumatic memory of misery. By the 1960s the regime was able to benefit more clearly from economic and social progress, which many social sectors attributed to the effectiveness of the dictatorship’s policies. ¹⁰⁴ But in the post-war period, the majority, including the authorities, were aware of the limitations of official discourse and policies. Even though the regime asked Spaniards to face the difficulties with ‘resignation’ and ‘serenity’, the authorities were aware that discontent was widespread – even if this only manifested openly on a few occasions. ¹⁰⁵ However, this does not mean that instrumentalizing hunger was ineffective or that it was not a useful way of demobilizing society. Accepting scarcity as part of their day-to-day lives was a way of giving meaning to everyday realities. It was a sort of self-deception through which they convinced themselves that the solution to their problems would only arrive if they accepted the difficult context that they were unfortunate enough to live through and hoped for a better future. ¹⁰⁶ ‘Because we didn’t know any better, we made do’, stated Eugenia, an underprivileged woman from a working-class neighbourhood. ¹⁰⁷ This attitude was echoed by Salud Molina, a woman from Cordoba who admitted that ‘as we were used to being poor, we were happy’. ¹⁰⁸ To be hungry, moreover, became a sign of stigma and shame. For this reason, it is common to hear examples of those who denied having experienced scarcity – or at least compared to other families – or having had to rely on social assistance. A man from Extremadura expressed this when he recalled that ‘Hunger was for others […]. We made do’. ¹⁰⁹ Such words reflect the attitude of many families who decided to scrape by as best they could when faced by misery and little hope of improvement. Making do, adjusting to live with very little and tolerating misery with resignation were common attitudes during the post-war period, to the point that feeding oneself seemed to become the only priority for a long time. Such was the observation of the British ambassador, having travelled southern Spain in 1941: ‘The obsessing problem is a domestic one: food […]. Nothing is beyond the horizon of this people but a wish to live and let live’. ¹¹⁰ Herbert Matthews echoed the sentiment fifteen years later: the locals ‘only do ask for enough food, decent housing, good working conditions, some education […] that they need for their daily life’. ¹¹¹ These were attitudes forged by hunger and the memory of scarcity, in which misery had become poverty and suffering became backwardness, to which many seem to have ‘become accustomed’.

Conclusion

Eating is perhaps the most quotidian of activities in which human beings engage. In traumatic contexts, such as following a war, food occupies an even more important role while other personal needs and interests pale in significance. The Francoist victory and its consequences in terms of violence and hunger forced many Spaniards to live through some extraordinary times. Everyday life was profoundly changed and governed according to different parameters, but customs, habits, rituals and family routines continued to be important. To describe this everyday life as abnormal would simplify a complex reality. Normality and abnormality are not objective categories, ‘but subjective experiences produced through cultural mechanisms’. ¹¹² As a result, the tools that ordinary Spaniards used to shape their daily lives were disconnected, dynamic, contradictory and multiple in nature.

It is essential to focus on lived experience in order to overcome binary explanations regarding social behaviour and practices under dictatorial regimes. This article has demonstrated the importance of using a more variegated lens in order to study everyday strategies and their responses to a reality of scarcity and hunger. In this way, re-evaluating the methods of Alltagsgeschichte can help us to deepen our analysis of how people avoided or accepted state demands and how they positioned themselves ‘along the spectrum between the sidelines and the firing lines’. ¹¹³ Concepts like Eigenn-Sinn can shed a different light on how ordinary subjects recreated, recoded and re-appropriated the conditions of their lives, including in the most repressive situation, and their capacity to shape the reality that they found themselves in, even if only in part, and to fill the vacuum between official demands and people’s desires and needs. ¹¹⁴ In addition, examining the reality of the post-war period with a focus on everyday life can make it possible to render our understanding of the relationship between society and the state – understood as a series of networks consisting of varying nodes, in which there are multi-directional interactions, and in which individuals can be ‘outside’ or ‘inside’ the system – much more complex. Finally, by focusing on lived experience, Alltagsgeschichte can contribute to the comparative and transnational study of dictatorships, moving beyond a reductive macro-level, structuralist approach to politics that neglects individual agency.