Dictatorship as experience: a comparative history of everyday life and the 'lived experience' of dictatorship in Mediterranean Europe (1922-1975)

Project Information

DICTATOREXPERIENCE

Grant agreement ID: 772353

DOI

10.3030/772353

Project closed

EC signature date 6 February 2018

Start date 1 September 2018

End date 31 August 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 497 724,00

EU contribution

€ 1 497 724,00

Coordinated by

THE UNIVERSITY COURT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - DICTATOREXPERIENCE (Dictatorship as experience: a comparative history of everyday life and the 'lived experience' of dictatorship in Mediterranean Europe (1922-1975))

Reporting period: 2023-03-01 to 2024-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

This project is the first to explore ‘everyday life’, the subjective lived experience and practice of dictatorship in comparative perspective in four Southern European countries, all of which subjected to authoritarian or fascist(ic) rule in the twentieth century: Fascist Italy (1922-1943/5); Salazar’s Portugal (1933-1974); Francoist Spain (1936/9-1975); Greece under Metaxas and the Colonels (1936-41; 1967-1974). The project is guided by the research intention to examine how dictatorships functioned in practice, to uncover what can be termed the 'actually-existing dictatorship' (as opposed to the dictatorship as intended or imagined by the dictator and their ideologues and propagandists), and thus to demonstrate how, in effect, dictatorial regimes in practice are constructed 'from below' as well as 'from above'. In particular we explored the following research questions:
How did the dictatorships seek to intervene and remodel key spaces and practices of everyday life?
What happened to dictatorial policies, propaganda and rhetoric as these moved from the centre of power to the localities in which they were put into effect and experienced?
What range of modes of behaviour, comportment and attitudes can be detected in ‘ordinary’ people's experiences of and responses to dictatorship?
In the final phase of the project, we expanded our comparative remit further to explore connections between histories of everyday life in the Southern European dictatorships and histories of everyday life in dictatorial, colonial and illiberal regimes in Southern Africa and Latin America.

This project is important because it has moved beyond conventional historiographical binaries of dictatorial rule such as consent and dissent, resistance and oppression, persuasion and coercion, perpetrator and victim, and because it has engaged and make links with existing scholarship on 'everyday life' in non-European dictatorships, highlighting fruitful areas for future research in other historical and geographical contexts. Furthermore, the project’s importance lies in its demonstration of how the dictatorships were effectively constructed – made and unmade – in localities and 'from below' as well as in the centre and from 'on high'. This has enabled us to better understand how dictatorships and other illiberal regimes function in actuality. As such, our investigation into ‘ordinary’ people’s modes of behaviour, practices, speech acts, ways of relating and of exercising agency in the context of an illiberal regime hold relevance for understanding functions of agency, subjectivity and practice in illiberal contexts in diverse geographical and temporal settings.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The research team was established in Sept-Oct 2018, comprising the PI, 2 PDRAs, and 2 PhD students. In the first semester, the research team conducted weekly methodology reading groups, bi-monthly team meetings, set up the project website, developed a detailed archival research plan, and completed required PhD training and review procedures.

The archival research phase of the project began in Jan 2019, involving extensive source material collation in the following archives:

Italy: Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Roma; Archivio Provinciale di Stato, Bologna; Archivio Provinciale di Stato, Palermo; Archivio Nazionale Diaristico, Pieve di Santo Stefano.

Spain: Archivo general de la Administración; Archivo histórico Nacional; Archivo del Partido Comunista Espanyol; Archivo Histórico Municipal, Sevilla; Archivo Histórico Provincial, Sevilla; Archivo de la Diputación provincial, Sevilla; Archivo histórico de Comisiones Obreras de Andalucía, Sevilla; Archivo Histórico Provincial, Valladolid; Archivo Histórico Municipal, Valladolid; Archivo General e Historico de Defensa; Archivo Histórico Provincial, Cadiz; Archivo de la Real Chancillería, Granada; Archivo Histórico Provincial de Asturias; Archivo Histórico Provincial de Málaga; Archivo Regional de la Comunidad de Madrid; Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca.

Portugal: Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo; Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa; Arquivo Distrital do Porto; Arquivo Distrital de Évora; Fundação Mário Soares; Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal; Biblioteca Municipal Figueira da Foz

Greece: General State Archive; Contemporary Social History Archives; Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation.

Between April 2019 and April 2021, PDRA1 conducted 162 oral history interviews.

From June 2021, the project team moved the next phase, focussing on the writing-up of research findings. Over the course of the project, we have disseminated our research findings in multiple forms including academic journal articles, books, a documentary reader, conferences, keynote lectures and seminar presentations, and a project podcast, ‘Miniatures’.

Finally, from early 2023, the project entered a final phase: PDRA1 departed for a permanent lectureship, while the appointment of PDRAs3 & 4 allowed for the extension of our comparative framework to examine how histories of everyday life in dictatorial and illiberal regimes have been written in Southern Europe, Southern Africa and Latin America.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The innovation and importance of this research lies in how it extends our understanding of how historical dictatorships have functioned, in praxis, and posits a new way of interpreting dictatorship in 20th century Southern Europe and beyond. It has develop novel methodologies around spatial and temporal framings of ‘the everyday’ and applies methodologies and conceptual tools associated with Alltagsgeschichte / everyday life history approaches to national cases where these have been largely absent or under-developed and it brings Southern Europe into the comparative frame of existing scholarship.

In our various publications and dissemination outputs we have explored many different forms of everyday practice, spaces and relationships including: domestic spaces; family relationships and friendship networks; the experience of solitude ad isolation; the consumption of everyday goods and materials; recreational and leisure time and practices; transient public spaces; and the temporalities and rhythms of everyday life. Of course, there are significant distinctions between – and within – the different dictatorial settings we examine, such as longevity of rule, the apparatus of coercion and violence and the use of this, and the intentions and expectations of dictators to rule ‘totally’, which translate into important distinctions in the way in which these regimes were experienced and lived. Similarly, the ‘positionality’ of individuals living through dictatorships – who they were, where they lived and so on – also impacted significantly on how they subjectively experienced dictatorial rule. However, our research findings, which examine comparatively, ‘ways of experiencing’ and ‘modes of behaviour’ within dictatorial contexts and the possibility for autonomous action or enacting agency, found remarkable similarities in ‘ordinary’ people’s deployment of behavioural tools as they negotiated life within dictatorships. These behavioural tools included, for example, the use of ‘tactics’, ‘mediators’; ‘false compliance’ and ‘feigned ignorance’; ‘evasion’ and finding ‘room for manoeuvre’. Put together, these illustrate the complex interplay for forms of everyday complicity as well as everyday resistance in dictatorships.

Biblioteca de la Facultad de Empresa y Gestión Pública Universidad de Zaragoza from Huesca, España -