French election maps

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Any idea why she scored quite well in Hautes-Alpes and in the Geneva commuter belt areas in Ain and Haute-Savoie? That area doesn't have a particularly large black population (although there is quite a large North African community), and it doesn't have any sort of leftist tradition, although there is quite a strong Christian-Democrat centrist one.

It's not leftist, but it fits with the pattern of her doing well in educated, socially liberal middle-class areas, of which the Geneva commuter area, particularly in the Ain, is a very good example of.

Hautes-Alpes is trickier; she also did quite well in the Diois in the Drôme, which always has a thing for minor left-wing candidates and parties and has a substantial population of leftist néo-ruraux. I'm unsure if the same holds true for the villages of the Hautes-Alpes, which are quite random in their politics.

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Secularization is the main underlying political trend in those departments and others, the other one being the very strong growth of the left in the urban areas, like Le Puy-en-Velay, Aurillac, Mende and even Saint-Flour. Sarkozy was also a very poor fit for the right in that general region, which is more Christian democratic or at least moderate right and who like their politicians to be very boring. Hollande, on the other hand, despite being a Socialist, was a good fit for the region, like Chirac had been. Hollande definitely did have a knock-on effect in Cantal, like Chirac had in 1995 and 2002.

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I watched the new French Netflix show 'Tapie' about, well, Bernard Tapie. The show is decent but is rather fictionalized and sometimes structured like an epic, and his political career is very rushed and not well written. It did, naturally, prompt me to revisit the Tapie list's performance in the 1994 EP elections.

Tapie's MRG list, Énergie radicale, won 12% and 13 seats, not very far behind the PS list led by Michel Rocard, which won only 14.5%, and ended his prime political career and presidential ambitions. It is well known that Mitterrand did everything he could to sabotage and undermine Rocard, although Mitterrand noted that Rocard didn't need any help doing so, and he is widely perceived as having implicitly supported Tapie's list. Bernard Tapie, of course, owed his political career and brief ministerial posting to Mitterrand, who was quite fond of him and his style.

Unsurprisingly, Tapie had a strong 'favourite son' vote in Marseille and the Bouches-du-Rhône, where he was deputy (reelected in a not particularly safe leftist seat in the 1993 debacle) and, of course, owned the OM football team, which made him a local hero and icon, even though Tapie was not from Marseille. He won 25.7% in the Bouches-du-Rhône and 28.7% in Marseille, the only department he won in metropolitan France (his best result, however, was 36.3% in French Guiana, thanks to one Christiane Taubira, elected deputy the year before). He won 27.6% in his constituency (Bouches-du-Rhône 10th), but his best results came from the fourth (34.5%) and seventh (34.8%) constituencies in the north of Marseille.

These results point to a general pattern in his support: Tapie did best in lower-income urban and suburban areas, and in some depressed industrial areas. This can be seen in the Parisian region (Tapie won in Sarcelles, Garges-lès-Gonesse among others), the Roubaix area of the Lille metro, the Dunkerque area, the Pays Haut (Meurthe-et-Moselle), the industrial valleys of Moselle, parts of Oise, Aisne and Ardennes. Tapie was good at marketing himself as an anti-elitist, anti-system rags-to-riches man of the people, the working-class kid who made it big. In some places, he likely did bite into the FN vote somewhat but his map was not really that of the FN at the time. More than anything else, he stole votes from the PS (and, in much more limited numbers, the PCF).

You can kind of see the MRG vote - most clearly in Corsica, where the local Radical barons' clientelist networks got Tapie 19% in Haute-Corse 2nd and 17.5% in Émile Zuccarelli's Haute-Corse 1st. It can also be seen in the Lot, Tarn-et-Garonne, Aveyron, Hautes-Pyrénées and perhaps Michel Crépeau's La Rochelle (but the strong result in the Charentes is more than just that).

Tapie's list led one of the most explicitly pro-European campaigns that year (in an election that saw the emergence of Eurosceptic movements on the right - Philippe de Villiers' list - and left - the Che's MDC list), but paradoxically he was weak in the most pro-European regions: Paris (8.4%), Brittany, Alsace (just 6.9% in Bas-Rhin), the southern Massif Central. Not too surprisingly, he also did poorly in wealthy areas.

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The data compiled for Une histoire du conflit politique. Élections et inégalités sociales en France does seem to offer an unexplored treasure trove of old electoral data. It allows me to look at detailed results for 1974, the closest presidential election runoff (and a 'pure', old left-right battle). Here are the results for Brittany (five departments, obviously):



Giscard won 56.8% and four of the five departments: Mitterrand only won the Côtes-d'Armor (with 51.5%), while Giscard won 61.1% in Ille-et-Vilaine, 57.2% in Morbihan, 57.5% in Finistère and 57.6% in Loire-Atlantique. Needless to say, Brittany's politics have shifted a lot since then.

The traditional political regions of Brittany are very obviously visible: the ultra-clerical 'theocratic' Léon, the reactionary clerical eastern Vannetais and the eastern Ille-et-Vilaine (politically and socially similar to Mayenne) on the right, and the 'red country' of the Trégor and Haute-Cornouaille (a Communist stronghold) and the industrial regions of Saint-Nazaire and the Loire estuary outside Nantes. All major cities except for Saint-Brieuc and Saint-Nazaire voted for Giscard, most of them narrowly: Brest (53.3%), Quimper (51.1%), Lorient (51.4%), Rennes (51.1%) and Nantes (52.6%), only traditionally conservative Vannes voted by Giscard by a large margin (63.4%), all of them except for Vannes would vote for Mitterrand in 1981.

There's a lot more to say but I don't have the energy to write more.

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Now a map of the 1965 second round results in Brittany:



Charles de Gaulle won by a landslide in Brittany, with 62.6%, over 7% better than his nationwide result. He won all five departments, with his best departments being Ille-et-Vilaine (67.6%) and Morbihan (66.5%), and his weakest being the Côtes-du-Nord (-d'Armor) with 54.8%. He won 60.7% in Loire-Atlantique and 63.2% in Finistère.

The map is quite similar to the 1974 map, except bluer. The traditional conservative strongholds are even more strikingly blue, with many results over 90% in the Léon, Vannetais and eastern Ille-et-Vilaine. Mitterrand only won the red 'blob' in central Brittany and the industrial Loire estuary outside Nantes and around Saint-Nazaire, with only a tiny handful of victories elsewhere. De Gaulle won all major cities and towns, except for Saint-Nazaire (and Guingamp), and nearly all by comfortable margins - 54% in Saint-Brieuc, just over 55% in Rennes, Lorient, Quimper and Nantes, over 60% in Brest and 68% in Vannes.

To the best of my abilities, I tried to take into account former communes that were abolished after 1965 (this required actually looking at the procès-verbaux scans) - there were several, the most important of which being the three communes of Saint-Malo which would merge in 1967 (Saint-Malo, Saint-Servan and Paramé). However, it's very hard to find maps of old communal boundaries online, so some of them are very rough guesses.

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1981, Mitterrand elected. In Brittany, Giscard won narrowly - with 50.8% against 49.2% for Mitterrand, a substantial swing to the left from seven years prior, when Giscard won 56.8%. Interestingly, Giscard still won four of the five departments, with the exception again of the Côtes-du-Nord. Giscard won 54.2% in Ille-et-Vilaine, 54% in the Morbihan, 50.9% in the Finistère and 50.1% in Loire-Atlantique.

In a significant shift from 1974 and laying the grondwork for the region's future political evolution, nearly every major city voted for Mitterrand - Nantes (51.6%), Rennes (56%), Saint-Brieuc (57%), Lorient (53.8%), Quimper (57%), Brest (51.5%) and obviously Saint-Nazaire (63.7%) as well as smaller towns like Guingamp, Lannion, Morlaix, Châteaubriant and Redon. Only Vannes and Saint-Malo voted Giscard, along with smaller towns such as Vitré, Fougères, Dinan and Ploërmel. The growing urban/suburban influence of the big cities can also be seen for the first time - around Rennes, Nantes and even Brest.

The conservative bastions of Léon, Vannetais, eastern Ille-et-Vilaine and Loire-Atlantique south of the Loire were still solid enough to put Giscard over the top, but Mitterrand now pulled well over 20%, even 30%, in some communes in those right-wing strongholds (you can see the shades of blue becoming lighter compared to 1974).

An interesting result: Mitterrand won 69% in Plogoff (Finistère), a 20-point swing from 1974, in the wake of the large local protests against plans to build a nuclear power plant in the commune (Mitterrand, once elected, cancelled the project as he had promised).

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A rather interesting map: Ile-de-France in 1974. A very evenly divided region as always. Giscard won in Paris (56.7%), Yvelines (52.9%), Seine-et-Marne (50.7%) and Hauts-de-Seine (50.1%) while Mitterrand won in Seine-Saint-Denis (61.7%), Val-d'Oise (54.8%), Val-de-Marne (53.4%) and Essonne (54.7%).

Some familiar patterns and results in many places, but also some more surprising results and some very clear shifts from the current map.

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Some familiar patterns and results in many places

Would you be able to explain more about them? My knowledge of Paris geography is not amazing (though I can make a few educated guesses).

It's a very big topic and a lot could be said, but I'll try to keep it short. Île-de-France region has the biggest socioeconomic inequalities in the country - the wealthiest and poorest (major) communes in metropolitan France are located in the region (Neuilly-sur-Seine and Grigny, respectively). To oversimplify things grossly, wealth spreads westwards from the centre of Paris, into the Hauts-de-Seine and Yvelines departments, as well as the northwestern corner of the Essonne around the Paris-Saclay research corridor, with other more isolated wealthy suburban areas like Saint-Maur-des-Fossés (Val-de-Marne) and around Fontainebleau (Seine-et-Marne). On the other hand, low-income areas are concentrated in the east of the Petite Couronne (the inner ring around Paris, made of the departments of Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne), particularly in the Seine-Saint-Denis (the 'infamous' 93), the poorest department in metropolitan France, and parts of the Val-d'Oise and Val-de-Marne, as well as in more 'isolated' low-income towns with 'difficult' pauperized tower-block housing projects (largely depressed old industrial towns, primarily around rivers and old railway lines). These include towns such as La Courneuve, Grigny, Villiers-le-Bel, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, La Courneuve, Clichy-sous-Bois, Stains, Aubervilliers, Bobigny, Sarcelles, Garges-lès-Gonesse and so forth. The map below is a bit outdated (2015) but is a decent representation of income inequalities in the region, with red showing wealthy areas and blue poor areas.



The green category on the map is a bit of an overly broad 'leftovers' category without too much rhyme or reason to it besides 'nondescript suburbia' of sorts, although the darker green shades are lower-income outer suburbia (mostly).

In political terms, the bulk of what is today low-income suburbia formed the ceinture rouge, or Red Belt, the 'belt' of industrial working-class towns around Paris which became strongholds of the Communist Party (PCF) as early as the 1920s or, in some cases, following the war (1945). Obviously, the PCF's strongholds in the Red Belt have been chipped away over the past decades, by both the right and the Socialists, but in many cases those areas remain left-wing strongholds -- even though demographics have changed with deindustrialization and immigration (the Muslim immigrant vote heavily favours the left for rather obvious reasons). You'll find that the places in blue on the map above are basically all very left-wing, and have voted heavily for the left in nearly every national election (and very heavily for Mélenchon in 2022). There have been some cases where demographic changes combined with urban planning policies have completely changed the politics of certain places - this is the case for Boulogne-Billancourt, Puteaux and Suresnes (Hauts-de-Seine) which were industrial working-class towns until the 1960s-1970s (on my map, Puteaux and Suresnes narrowly voted Mitterrand in 1974 and Boulogne-Billancourt gave him 43%). On the other hand, demographic changes from gentrification in Paris proper and its inner suburbs, like Montreuil (93), have been more politically favourable to the left.

On the other hand, wealthy areas have always been the stronghold of the right - the Hauts-de-Seine and Yvelines are the old hotbeds of the old (now decrepit) French 'moderate' right, producing a disproportionate number of prominent right-wing politicians, like Valérie Pécresse, Gérard Larcher, Nicolas Sarkozy and more infamous crooks like the Balkany and Ceccaldi-Raynauld family mafias. To a lesser extent, and much more unnoticed in popular imagination, the (formerly) agricultural periphery of the region, like in the Seine-et-Marne, have also been traditionally conservative, although the far-right has definitely supplanted the 'mainstream' right in the more remote, peripheral and downtrodden 'unattractive' outer suburbia (what some political journos in the early 2010s called the 'périurbain subi' or 'suffered'/'forced' suburbia).

The 1974 map has a much bluer Paris than today, but a much redder Essonne and Yvelines than one is accustomed to, as well as a stronger left in old small industrial centres in the Seine-et-Marne (the left vote there is now much more concentrated in low-income immigrant-heavy places like Montereau-Fault-Yonne). 1974 comes on the heels of rapid suburban growth outside the old Petite Couronne, in the early days of the new towns around the region and at the end of the post-war period of industrial growth (the dying days of the old heavy industries). Since then, socioeconomic inequalities have gotten even deeper: wealthy areas have gotten more wealthy, low-income/working-class towns have largely gotten even poorer and accumulated social problems.

I'm not sure if this makes much sense, and I'm sure I'm forgetting several things. I feel like socioeconomic patterns go a long way to explaining the general gist of voting patterns in IDF (definitely more so than in other French regions), although there's always more to it than that, so I've focused mostly on that.

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'PACA' in 1974



Mitterrand won the Bouches-du-Rhône (56.4%), Var (50.1%) and Alpes-de-Haute-Provence (53.5%) while Giscard won the Alpes-Maritimes (53.6%), Hautes-Alpes (51.8%) and Vaucluse (52.5%). Seven years later, the Var was the only department to switch to Giscard, obviously presaging its future evolution to the (hard-)right.

Mitterrand won 56% in Marseille (no results by arrondissement, unfortunately) as well as Avignon (52%) but Giscard won in Nice (53%) and Toulon (51%).