PhD thesis defence by Lewis Driver
This is a study of early Fascist strategies of conquest and rule in provincial areas of Italy and Spain, and of how ordinary citizens interacted with and responded to these developments. Studying Fascist practices in the local space including violence, governance, repression, mythmaking, and empire remembrance, the thesis brings together two case studies from distinct geographical spaces and time periods to show the connections between ordinary experiences of life under dictatorship in unique, rural settings. To reveal these everyday life experiences in the context of provincial Fascism, the thesis draws on a range of material from municipal archives, private collections, state archives, and libraries from across the two provinces.
The first part of the thesis focuses on the province of Arezzo, Tuscany from 1920 – 1926. It first investigates the violent conquest of the province by Fascist paramilitary organisations and the impact of this on traditional community structures, before reducing the scale of analysis to uncover patterns of life under Fascist rule in the municipality of Civitella della Chiana. Chapter 2 looks at politics in the local government, demonstrating that at the early stage, Fascism was often superseded by local loyalties and animosities. Chapter 3 uncovers examples of Fascist spectacle in the local space, setting the perspective of the local authorities against the ordinary citizens called on to participate and revealing the interactions between both parties. The sources demonstrate that by underestimating the importance of the personal and the local, provincial Fascist organisations often struggled in their mission to dominate the physical and rhetorical spaces of the province.
The second part of the thesis moves the analysis to the province of Caceres, Extremadura, from 1933-1945. The first chapter in this section covers the rise of the far Right in the province and argues that disparate right-wing groups merged into a coherent Fascist culture and movement. Following this, Chapter 5 reduces the scale to the municipality of Trujillo, where it studies the repressive policies of hunger management and the policing of morality employed by the Falangist municipality to punish the ‘losers’ of the Civil War and to control the general population. Chapter 6 widens the scale of analysis again to study the Francoist persecution of Freemasons in the province and the culture of denunciation that this practice generated, before Chapter 7 zooms back in on the theme of Fascist empire remembrance in Trujillo which was centred around the fascistised myth of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro.