Popular responses to postwar hunger: between survival, resistance and normalisation

Abstract

This article studies the daily, individual and subjective practices towards the misery of the postwar period (1939-1952). The objective is, first, to analyse the popular responses to hunger within and outside Franco’s autarkic legality. Second, we delve into the meaning of these small tactics and on the motivations of their protagonists, their manifestations, the results achieved or the way in which the dictatorship perceived them. We demonstrate that post-war shortages were the element that most conditioned and shaped popular attitudes towards the dictatorship until the 1950s. In the context of extreme poverty, ordinary men and women activated a whole series of ingenious strategies with the triple objective of obtaining food and improving their domestic economies, normalising their daily lives and expressing disagreement or disagreement with Franco’s interventionism. Hence, depending on the necessity of each moment, these strategies can be interpreted as survival, Eigen-Sinn or resistance practices.