Ler História | 72 | 2018 | pp. 151-173 SHIRT MOVEMENTS IN INTERWAR EUROPE: A TOTALITARIAN FASHION Juan Francisco Fuentes 151 Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
[email protected] The article deals with a typical phenomenon of the interwar period: the proliferation of socio-political movements expressing their “mood” and identity via a paramilitary uniform mainly composed of a coloured shirt. The analysis of 34 European shirt movements reveals some common features in terms of colour, ideology and chronology. Most of them were consistent with the logic and imagery of interwar totalitarianisms, which emerged as an alleged alternative to the decaying bourgeois society and its main political creation: the Parliamentary system. Unlike liBeral pluralism and its institutional expression, shirt move- ments embody the idea of a homogeneous community, based on a racial, social or cultural identity, and defend the streets, not the Ballot Boxes, as a new source of legitimacy. They perfectly mirror the overwhelming presence of the “brutalization of politics” (Mosse) and “senso-propaganda” (Chakhotin) in interwar Europe. Keywords: fascism, Nazism, totalitarianism, shirt movements, interwar period. Resumo (PT) no final do artigo. Résumé (FR) en fin d’article. “Of all items of clothing, shirts are the most important from a politi- cal point of view”, Eugenio Xammar, Berlin correspondent of the Spanish newspaper Ahora, wrote in 1932 (2005b, 74). The ability of the body and clothing to sublimate, to conceal or to express the intentions of a political actor was by no means a discovery of interwar totalitarianisms. Antoine de Baecque studied the political dimension of the body as metaphor in eighteenth-century France, paying special attention to the three specific func- tions that it played in the transition from the Ancien Régime to revolutionary France: embodying the state, narrating history and peopling ceremonies.