Abstract
It is well known that, from the middle of the nineteenth century, France experienced a particularly difficult apprenticeship in universal suffrage.1 The number and the frequency of non-contested elections is perhaps the most striking evidence of this. Between 1848 and the end of the century, elections were often won by candidates who faced no opponent, or at least no opponent who posed any danger. Over and above the high number of these single-candidate constituencies (French-style ‘rotten boroughs’, so to speak), the electoral map of France was also distinguished by the proliferation of ‘fiefs’. A candidate could stand successfully, time and again, facing only rivals who were more or less beaten in advance. The competition was often purely formal, and only slight differences distinguish the case of the rotten borough from those of the electoral fief.
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Notes
Universal (manhood) suffrage was instituted, precociously, in 1848. For these difficulties, see the enduring work, which was very new for its time, by Alexandre Pilenco, Les Mœurs du Suffrage universel en France (1848–1928) (Paris: Editions de la ‘Revue Mondiale’, 1930), especially ch. 1, where he depicts the electoral situation in 1848.
Pierre Rosanvallon, Le modèle politique français. La société civile contre le jacobinisme de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 2004), pp. 13–14.
The figure of 20–30 000 francs seems to be the average recognized by contemporaries to calculate the cost of a campaign: see, for example, Antonin Lefèvre-Pontalis, Les élections françaises et les élections anglaises (Paris: Dentu, 1893), p. 8.
Maurice Agulhon describes the case of the department of the Var in the first half of the nineteenth century, and this case has become classic. There popular politicization allowed the creation of properly political forms of mobilization: Maurice Agulhon, La République au village: les populations du Var de la Ret’volution a’ la Seconde Ret’publique (Paris: Plon, 1970). But we cannot extrapolate from this case to other French departments. Hyperpoliticized departments like the Var were still in the minority in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Siegfried noted that universal suffrage was content ‘to sanction the de facto supremacy of natural social authorities’: André Siegfried, Tableau politique de la France de l’Ouest (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1995), p. 89.
It was Antonin Lefèvre-Pontalis who rightly emphasized the role played by mayors under the Second Empire: see Antonin Lefèvre Pontalis, Les lois et les mœurs électorales, new edition (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1885), p. 50 (analysis of the 1863 elections when Lefèvre-Pontalis was an unsuccessful candidate).
Sudhir Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen. The Second Empire and the Emergence of Modern French Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 41, 44.
Of whom 240 were Bonapartists, 125 were Monarchists, 98 were Legitimists and 27 were Orleanists: see Louis Puech, Essai sur la candidature officielle en France depuis 1851 (Mende: Chaptal, 1922), p. 161.
Jean-Paul Charnay, Les scrutins politiques en France de 1815 à 1962. Contestations et invalidations (Paris: Colin, 1964), p. 82.
H. Avenel, Comment vote la France. Dix-huit ans de suffrage universel, 1876–1893 (Paris: Quantin, 1894).
See Raymond Huard, Le suffrage universel en France (1848–1946) (Paris: Aubier, 1991), p. 297.
This was the sense of the official candidature under the Second Empire: see Charnay, Les scrutins politiques en France de 1815 à 1962. Contestations et invalidations (Paris: Colin, 1964), p. 48.
The study undertaken by Frédéric Monier tends to show that in the Vaucluse the system of favours lost much of its power from the inter-war period. See Frédéric Monier, La politique des plaintes. Clientélisme et demandes sociales dans le Vaucluse d’Edouard Daladier (1890–1940) (Paris: La Boutique de l’Histoire, 2007).
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© 2012 Nicolas Roussellier
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Roussellier, N. (2012). Electoral Antipluralism and Electoral Pluralism in France, from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to 1914. In: Wright, J., Jones, H.S. (eds) Pluralism and the Idea of the Republic in France. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137028310_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137028310_8
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