Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The much-criticized extensive cultivation of cereals over large areas in Alentejo, with its masses of migrant workers hired only for short periods of time, was to be replaced by well-kept “wheat gardens” producing proud farmers who would constitute the backbone of the nation. For Pequito Rebelo, it did not matter that Alentejo shared with other Mediterranean regions, such as the Italian Mezzogiorno, many of the geographical characteristics that made wheat cultivation a taxing activity. Transforming defects into virtues, Pequito Rebelo saw in the use of “refined techniques” to overcome poor natural conditions the possibility to convert extensive cereals cultivation into a “sort of horticulture” that would have “a happy influence on the social type.”[17] The qualities of the national soil were to be measured not only by its productivity but also by its ability to “reveal the virtues of the race…. If cereal cultivation is complex, with plants regularly ordered, continual weeding interventions at each development stage and defense them against natural adversities; if all this is done using perfected tools that praise the inventive qualities of the farmer; then it must influence the social type for the better.”[18] In short, the challenges of Alentejo’s landscape made it possible to sustain a virtuous national community.

A few years before his visit to Italy, Pequito Rebelo had published Farmer’s Primer (1922), in which he had used the ordered fields of the Integral Method as a simple metaphor to help rural people to understand the new social order advocated by Luso-Integralists: “The counter-revolution, the reaction, is the same thing as taking over a poorly governed homestead and giving it order and good habits.”[19] In 1928, already two years into dictatorial rule, in a speech at the students union of the University of Coimbra (the first supplier of high-ranking bureaucrats to the state apparatus), Pequito Rebelo had in mind something more than just metaphors for simple-minded farmers. On that occasion, he argued that applying the Integral Method meant producing the Integral Nation. According to Pequito Rebelo’s political agenda, hard-working farmers and peasants organized in rural syndicates denied the individualistic theories of liberalism and formed the basis of a nation built on authentic corporations and not on artificial class organizations. Therefore, Pequito Rebelo urged “our dictatorial government” to “follow the example of our sister dictatorships and show its agrophile intentions as the fundamental idea of administration.”[20] More emphatically, “the political renaissance of the Latin people goes hand in hand with the apotheosis of Ceres. One just has to watch Mussolini calling himself the agricultural condottiere, designing and commanding the battaglia del grano, and asserting that bisogna ruralizare l’Italia, Italy must be ruralized.”[21] Ruralization was thus to become one of the main features of the recently inaugurated dictatorial regime.

The Portuguese Wheat Campaign: Chemical Fertilizers and Large Estates

In 1929, only three years after the military coup d’état that inaugurated in Portugal the authoritarian regime that would endure until 1974, the dictatorship launched a national mobilization for bread self-sufficiency evoking the enormous weight of wheat in Portugal’s commercial deficit.[22] The campaign was the final result of several initiatives since the mid 1920s to promote wheat production and support wheat protectionism against the menace of cheap foreign grain. These initiatives were undertaken by large landowners and their organizations, such as the Central Association of Portuguese Agriculture, in which Pequito Rebelo was a prominent figure. The Bread Week (1924), the National Congress of Wheat (1929), the Wheat Train (1928), the “best wheat spike” contest (1928), and a series of articles published in O Século, in Diário de Lisboa and in other major national newspapers were all direct precursors of the Wheat Campaign, officially launched in 1929 with explicit reference to the example of fascist Italy and the Battaglia del Grano.[23]

The mobilization for the production of the most basic good—bread—brought together big landowners selling cereal at prices guaranteed by the state, agricultural machine builders, chemical industries producing fertilizers, and masses of sharecroppers reclaiming land.