Class and Patrimony

For Karl Marx, France was a prime testing ground for his theories of class struggle, in particular the experiences of the 1848 revolution. (See especially his Class Struggle in France, 1848 to 1850; various editions dating from 1850.) As Theodore Zeldin (1973, p. 477), a leading British historian of France, remarked, “The importance of 1848 is that the masses were drawn into politics, and won over to the movement” of republicanism and electoral politics. The class stakes waged in the 1936 Popular Front elections were the heaviest to that time, with abounding talk of a “popular vote” and “working class” victory. Seymour Martin Lipset (1960, pp. 223–4), noteworthy political sociologist of the twentieth century, summed up the dominant modern hypothesis on social class and voting: “The most important single fact about political party support is that … the lower income groups vote mainly for the parties of the Left, while the higher income groups vote mainly for the parties of the Right.”