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theses

This dissertation examines how the development of a mass consumer society during the dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco (1939-1975) inserted Spain into transnational consumer networks and drove its democratization. As they spread, Spain’s first modern department stores, supermarkets, consumer magazines, and advertising helped create a public sphere when the Franco regime had curtailed opportunities for public life. In these stores, Spanish consumers encountered foreign products and lifestyles that signaled cosmopolitanism and internationalism, undermining the dictatorship’s foundational discourse of Spanish exceptionalism. With these products came subversive ideas on issues like gender equality, which undercut Francoist patriarchy. Despite these emancipatory tendencies, Francoists also used Spain’s new mass consumption politically: premier Spanish department store Galerías Preciados, owned by a conservative Franco supporter, continued to govern its workers according to Francoist precepts well into the 1970s. Yet in the end, the consumer society forged in Spain’s department stores and magazines eroded the integrity of the Franco regime’s sociopolitical project and helped set the stage for the nation’s transition to democracy in the late 1970s and integration into the European Economic Community in the 1980s.

ETD_5758

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Alejandro Jose Gomez-Del-Moral

doi:10.7282/T3X34VXG

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.