The Politics of Everyday Life in Fascist Italy by Joshua Arthurs Michael Ebner & Kate Ferris

Author:Joshua Arthurs, Michael Ebner & Kate Ferris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US, New York

These instructions demonstrate that there were limits to the regime’s intentions to intervene in domestic consumption and that exceptions to the rule marked the resistance campaign from the off. The regime expected to be able to dictate what language was spoken and which newspapers were read “within the family.” However, while foreign brand tea was to be banished from sitting rooms when in company, that is, when the home became a semipublic space, those same foreign teas could still acceptably be consumed when guests were not present and the “privacy” of the home was restored. Such leaps of logic were echoed by the local Fascio when it issued its own instructions via the foglio d’ordine: “We are, however, intelligent people: foreign goods that have already been paid for and are already in our homes are by now national assets and hence should be consumed.” 37 The issuing of contradictory and changing messages only intensified as the sanctions resistance campaign progressed, making it tricky for consumers to be sure exactly which everyday practices would, and would not, conform to the expectations of the Fascist authorities.

The direct appeals to both shopkeepers and women consumers emphasized their place “at the battle outposts” of the anti-sanctions resistance and thus in defense of Fascism’s autarky project. 38 Both were entrusted with bringing about national self-sufficiency in foodstuff and with its corollary aim of effecting the transformation of Italian families into Fascist families. As the leader of the Venetian Fascio, Michele Pascolato, had said, the sanctions-busting price restrictions and other regulations could not succeed without them. 39 However, at the same time both groups were also viewed with suspicion and identified as potential impediments to, as well as instruments of, the anti-sanctions and wider autarky campaign. Already on 12 October 1935, over a month before the coming into force of the sanctions and in the same breath as Pascolato’s insistence on popular adherence and vigilance as key to the autarky project’s success, Italia Nova suggested that the source of any “potential violations” would be “unscrupulous merchants.” 40 Such invectives, which imagined shopkeepers as venal would-be hoarders and speculators, built on long-held stereotypes and narratives. In the aftermath of the 1919 cost-of-living riots, shopkeepers had been vilified by both left and right, labeled “starvation-mongers” by the Socialist daily, Avanti, and decried as “thieves!” and “a sort of dictator” for their control of consumer access—at a price—to decent-quality basic goods by the Fascists. 41 Although moments of overlapping interests and collaboration did shape relations between Fascists and retailers through the early to mid-1920s as Fascism came to power and moved toward dictatorship, especially via the Confederazione Generale Fascista del Commercio Italiana (the “Fascist” added to its title in 1925) led by Ercole Cartoni, the hostility of the “early encounters” between the two groups persisted and intensified. Popular images of profiteering merchants who sold basic goods “at prices so exaggeratedly high that it is enough to make you pull your hair out in despair” proliferated in the mid-1920s as

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.