During the Spanish Civil War, Caudillo Francisco Franco garnered support throughout the Spanish countryside with his military campaign slogans, “For country! Bread! Justice!” And, “wood in every home and bread for every Spaniard”. But the reality of rebuilding a war-torn Spain proved to be a difficult task, and the dictator’s ...
(Show more)During the Spanish Civil War, Caudillo Francisco Franco garnered support throughout the Spanish countryside with his military campaign slogans, “For country! Bread! Justice!” And, “wood in every home and bread for every Spaniard”. But the reality of rebuilding a war-torn Spain proved to be a difficult task, and the dictator’s promises of bread were never realized for many Spaniards during a famine remembered as “the hunger years”. Bread has long been an essential component of the Mediterranean diet, and its centrality to culture is reinforced by religion, cuisine, and popular customs. The Nationalists and subsequent regime sought to control bread, both materially and symbolically, in order to coerce and repress the population to the dictator’s fascist will. Spanish foodways in the postwar were restructured by the Franco regime to embed fascist doctrine into bread at every step of the production process. My paper analyzes the foodway that bread traveled from farm to table during the early Franco dictatorship, and how the regime embedded ideological significance to the commodity throughout the supply chain. My paper also addresses the breakdown of the bread supply to adequately feed the Spanish population, alluding to a breakdown in the indoctrination process that Spaniards failed to internalize through the consumption of postwar bread.
With the adoption of autarky, or extreme government intervention into food production and the economy, Franco’s control of bread was consolidated. The regime provided military escort to wheat and bread as the foodstuff traveled from farm to market. Consumers could only buy bread at official dispensaries and in fixed quantities. Spaniards who attempted to make their own bread faced fines or prison for subverting state control of the commodity. The physical regulation of bread and its consumption was intended to subdue the population and coerce Spaniards to fascist expectations for society. From the ideological side, I draw from Arjun Appadurai, Kathleen LeBasco, and Peter Naccarato to examine how the materiality of bread came to symbolize sustenance, family, and religiosity within Spanish society. From the harvesting of the fields to the shape, color, and texture of the goods sold in dispensaries, the paper demonstrates that each step in the process of making bread reinforced the policies and ideologies of the Francoist state.
Yet, from a material standpoint, the Franco regime failed to adequately control the bread supply during the hunger years. The black market flourished as women feigned pregnancy to transport sacks of flour, they shared recipes for making bread at home, and Spanish women in positions of authority often syphoned bread from the official dispensaries to friends and family in need. From an ideological standpoint, I interpret this breakdown in the food supply to correspond to a breakdown in the propagandistic meaning of bread that the fascist regime intended to control. Although the regime attempted to embed bread with religious and national ideology, an investigation into the practice of everyday life demonstrates the historical agency of Spaniards to consume their daily bread on their own terms.
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