French election maps

[homelycooking]

Here is Yvelines '07, per request of big bad fab.



Next: Somme '02.

[big bad fab]

I really like the Rambouillet forest which is of a fine darker blue

And Trappes isn't an island of hot red any longer now, as many communes around the N12 are more and more on the left (helped by some "bobo" votes also...)

[homelycooking]

Hashemite, you may need to wait another day for Somme '02. I'm pouring all my available time into it as it is. (but it looks amazing!) EDIT: done.

[homelycooking]

Here is Somme '02, per request of Hashemite.

Blue: Chirac
Red: Jospin
Green: Saint-Josse
Purple: Le Pen
Orange: Hue (two communes in the far west of Somme) or Laguiller (the rest)
Yellow: Lepage (tied in two communes) or Bayrou (won one commune, tied in three others) or Madelin (won one commune, tied in one other)

Next: Dordogne '07, after I give my hand a rest

[Hash]

Great work, as usual, on that. Saint-Josse and CPNT has always had strong support in the Somme estuary, which has a bunch of hunters and le gibier d'eau. Saint-Josse even topped the poll in the two constituencies covering the estuary.

[homelycooking]

Great maps homelycooking! If you get the chance please could you do Dordogne 2007 by departement? I ask as this is a part of France I'm very familiar with.

Here it is.

[homelycooking]

Here's one to hold you over while I do Pas de Calais/Nord '02.

Haute-Vienne '02 (Yellow: Bayrou)

[Serenity Now]

Great maps homelycooking! If you get the chance please could you do Dordogne 2007 by departement? I ask as this is a part of France I'm very familiar with.

Here it is.

Lovely, thanks very much!

[big bad fab]

Here's one to hold you over while I do Pas de Calais/Nord '02.

Haute-Vienne '02 (Yellow: Bayrou)

One example of the epic fail of Jospin.
Sure, Chirac is Corrézien but, wait, this is Haute-Vienne and this is the 2002 PCF...

[Hash]

just a random fyi: I've found stuff on 1927-1936 constituencies and I'm currently doing a 1936 map. I just don't have data on the boundaries in Marseille, Lyon and Lille (and Bordeaux, but it isn't so hard to work out); so unless anybody has information on infra-communal constituencies there I'll only have squares representing those areas.

And since my source also has constituencies for 1875-1877 or so, I'll also make a map of the 1877 elections soon-ish.

[Hash]

I'm not sure how much attention this will spark, but I'm happy of what I've managed to do with this; and while I'm quite certain accuracy is not 100% it's as close as one can get to making a decent map of the 1936 election. France is a third-world crappy country when it comes to storing old election results, and the Third Republic is obviously not the regime which had clear-cut party lines and alliances. My source for the main bulk of the data is the National Assembly's online database, which stores profiles for all French parliamentarians since 1789 and often includes a brief biography of each taken from some old dictionaries of MPs which will more likely than not mention which constituency they represented. Constituency data comes from Alain Lancelot's Atlas des circonscriptions electorales en France depuis 1875, an old stale book which is great and which I managed to find at OttawaU's library. Constituency map comes from Salmon's website, which has those poorly edited and ugly maps of old constituencies. The main downfall here is that the Atlas does not have maps of infra urban constituencies in Lyon, Marseille and Lille (and Bordeaux, but it has only 4-5 so it's not that tough there).



The black line next to key indicates parties officially in the FP, though not all deputies for those parties supported the FP (especially the Radicals). A few of those are also parliamentary groups (USR, Gauche ind, IAP, GDRI, ARGRI, Agrarians) whose MPs were members of teeny parties or were indies. Most Non-inscrits tended to be righties, but there were a number of leftie NIs and I've tried to denote their partisan affiliation with a small square representing the party they were closest to. Brief notes on groups/parties follow:

PUP: 1930 splitoff of the PCF, largely, with some small SFIO factions in as well. I don't know for sure, but it might be Trotskyst.
USR: Parliamentary group for 3 parties to the right of the SFIO, the largest of which was the old perennial Republican Socialists. It also included other small neosocialist outfits. Marcel Déat was a member of the USR after winning a by-election in 1939 (he had been defeated by a Communist in Paris in 1936).
Frontiste: small fringe left-wing party with 2 mps. Its MP in Seine-et-Oise, Gaston Bergery, was a left-wing RadSoc (a "radical-Bolshevik") who later became a hardcore collabo. Its MP in Meurthe-et-Moselle, George Izard, became a resistant.
PRCP: Parti radical-socialiste Camille Pelletan, a left-wing splitoff of the RadSocs. Founded in 1934 by the left opposed to participation in the Doumergue cabinet. And, no, Camille Pelletan wasn't a member, the name is a reference to Pelletan who was left-wing Radical early in the century.
PJR: Christian left/social Christian party which supported the FP. Post-war, some joined the MRP and others later joined the PSU.
Gauche indépendante: parliamentary group including various pro-FP independents and small fringe one-man outfits

IAP: Indépendants d'action populaire, the name given this time to the Alsace-Lorraine regionalist grouping composed largely of folks from the UPR (Alsatian centre-right regionalists) and the URL (Moselle regionalists). Though largely from the right, the IAP also included a fair number of Alsatian Commies who tended to have been expelled from the PCF for their regionalism.
GDRI: Gauche démocratique et radicale indépendante, group of various power-hungry whores moderate heroes and centre-rightists which included a lot of independent Radicals (aka, right-wing Radicals)
PDP: Christian democratic party, predecessor of the MPR but probably to the MRP's right
ARGRI: Alliance des républicains de gauche et des radicaux indépendants, centre-right group linked to the AD. Flandin attempted to make the ARGRI the unique group of the AD and independent Rads, but he failed. The ARGRI did not include all AD mps (others in the GDRI, Gauche ind, IR) and not all ARGRI MPs were from the AD.
FR: For here, I've grouped all right-wingers from the RIAS, FR, IURN and IR groups under the "FR" label though not all of those coloured as FR were members of the FR (some might have been AD, or other things). The RIAS was the most "left-wing" in that it opposed the FR's shift to the right. The IRs were the most "right-wing" and a lot later joined a PSF group in 1938.
Agrarian: a few agrarian MPs, largely right-wing corporatist-populist rural deputies. Linked, I think, to the RIAS group.

The highlight of this map is Cannes voting Communist.

Depending on time and the availability of non-ambiguous guides, I am tempted to do a map of 1877.

[rob in cal]

Niki, great job on the 1936 map.  Have you found anything about any of the by-elections held up till the outbreak of the war?  I've often wondered how France would have voted in 1939 or 1940 had war not broken out.  I do believe that Daladier had pushed thru legislation for proportional representation for the next election (passed in the summer of 1939) so Radicals would no longer depend on votes from either the left or the right for their seats. 

[Хahar 🤔]

Niki, great job on the 1936 map.  Have you found anything about any of the by-elections held up till the outbreak of the war?  I've often wondered how France would have voted in 1939 or 1940 had war not broken out.  I do believe that Daladier had pushed thru legislation for proportional representation for the next election (passed in the summer of 1939) so Radicals would no longer depend on votes from either the left or the right for their seats. 

France used proportional representation now and again. I believe the 1919 election had a form of PR.

[Hash]

Niki, great job on the 1936 map.  Have you found anything about any of the by-elections held up till the outbreak of the war? 

There were various by-elections, and most seem to have been held by the incumbent party (though I think the PCF picked up a few seats). Doriot lost his seat to the PCF in a by-election, and Marcel Deat won in Angouleme in 1939. There is no list, but a bit of searching (a lot, actually) on the AssNat's site and you could be able to make some sort of list.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Wow, that's really impressive ! Congratulations for your work.

Many interesting things. Looks like Provence, Savoie and outer IdF were all left-wing strongholds at the time : considering how they vote today... Conversely, the northwest from Normandie to Vendée was solidly right-wing, of course. And what's up with all those radicals in Champagne ? Also, look at how much constituencies Paris had at the time : it probably made up for a far higher share of the population at the time. Same could be said for the East and the North, for obvious reasons.

Random funny thing : an enclaved constituency in Loiret !

[big bad fab]

Congrats for this GREAT map.
Indeed, I have never seen it. For 1936, just Paris ! So, a brand new work !!!

Nothing especially unpredictable, really. All the trends Antonio noted are already known.

Sure, Antonio is right, Champagne and rural areas of the great East may be a bit surprising, but beware of what kind of Radicals were elected there.... (the same for Cantal)
And there may have been the effect of pacifism in these eastern and northern areas, greatly affected by WWI fightings.

Troyes and Rambouillet constituencies are probably funny surprises.
But maybe the right supported the PUP there ?

BTW, the PUP was more something between the Russian SR and Marcel Rigout... No Trotskyist, but a mix between internationalist pacifism and popular and very local French communism...
Doriot was once affiliated, but that's not revealing (or it was but only for some months).

Current constituencies of Bayrou and Lassalle were interesting at that time...

And as for the PDP, yeah, it was mostly slightly to the right of MRP.
MRP is PDP with Resistance spirit in it.

(last year, when I've told you about a surprise I wanted to make to you, Hash, that was, mainly, this book, but, well, the person responsible for the library in my institution hasn't had enough time to make researches and I dropped it. Glad you've eventually been able to find it)

(there is also a book by Bernard Gaudillère, Atlas des circonscriptions électorales françaises, Droz, 1995, which is available at Chapitre, a French bookseller who has old books; currently available, but a bit expensive... and I don't even know what it includes
http://www.amazon.fr/Atlas-historique-circonscriptions-%C3%A9lectorales-fran%C3%A7aises/dp/2600000658/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1294839754&sr=8-3 )

[Hash]

The dominant patterns on the 1936 map seems to be religious practice. Pretty much all right-wing constituencies have above average religious practice, and left-wing constituencies of various shades pretty much all have lower religious practice. I was reading just yesterday something by Goguel where he mentions that Champagne realigned on the right starting with the first 1946 constitutional referendum, which makes a bit of sense. I don't know about landowning patterns there, but I suspect that it was small farmers + low religious practice which makes some perfect ground for Radicals. Before then, he insinuated that the right's base was basically on the fringes of the country (Alsace, Lorraine, Bretagne, inner west, Atlantic coast, Normandie, Euskadi, Flanders).

One thing which surprised me were the two Rads in Cornouaille around Cap-Sizun and Bro Bigouden. Probably some right-wing notable, although I recall Siegfried saying Cornouaille was not as conservative as Leon.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Fascinating and excellent work

[Hash]

Posting these maps on a French forum (the only one not overrun by MPF/FN/PS-PCF hacks), a person was nice enough to contact me with information concerning a) the boundaries in urban areas of the 1927/1936 constituencies and b) results by canton of the 1978 election.

With his permission, I permit myself to repost his maps. You'll note that they're based on my big cantonal base map

[Hash]

And his big, fascinating and excellently-done work showing results of the 1978 election by cantons...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

So Lille in 1978 didn't vote all that differently to how it voted in 1936.

Actually it's fascinating to see the extent of change in rural areas (in both directions) and contrast it with the basic stability in industrial and urban districts.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Very interesting.

Wow, this map looks a lot "cleaner" than expected.

[Hash]

So, I've started looking at the results of the 1995 and 2007 runoffs in various places of interest to show the transitions between both elections, which had similar runoff results.

As always, I'll start with Gandrange
2007: UMP 50.2, PS 49.8
1995: PS 58.3, RPR 41.7

Freyming-Merlebach:
2007: UMP 55.6, PS 44.4
1995: PS 55, RPR 45

Saint-Amand-les-Eaux:
2007: PS 51.9, UMP 48.1
1995: PS 54.9, RPR 45.1 (the PCF was the first party, Hue won 20.2%)

Grenoble:
2007: PS 58.1, UMP 41.9
1995: PS 52.4, RPR 47.7

La Mure:
2007: PS 52.3, UMP 47.7
1995: PS 54.1, RPR 45.9

Rennes:
2007: PS 62.7, UMP 37.3
1995: PS 56.9, RPR 43.1

Saint-Gregoire:
2007: UMP 53.3, PS 46.7
1995: RPR 54.1, PS 45.9

Saint-Malo
2007: UMP 52.2, PS 47.8
1995: RPR 54.2, PS 45.8

Montaigu:
2007: UMP 55.3, PS 44.7
1995: RPR 60.9, PS 39.1 (a favourite son... was first with 24.7%)

I'll make a list of interesting working-class areas next to look up the results there. Then I'll look at filthy rich places. Then I'll look at poor suburbs like the Red Belt. Then I'll look at major cities.

[Antonio the Sixth]

As always, I'll start with Gandrange
2007: UMP 50.2, PS 49.8

ROFLMAO

Waiting to see the 2012 results, though.

[Hash]

As always, I'll start with Gandrange
2007: UMP 50.2, PS 49.8

ROFLMAO

Waiting to see the 2012 results, though.

2010 results, were, for reminder: PS 55.76, FN 23.83, UMP 20.41. In the first round, the UMP polled 12.81% and third place.

Gandrange is a perfect example of a declining, very white and conservative working-class area which had been rather solidly left-wing in the past, voted FN in 2002 and where Sarkozy had an "exceptional" appeal in 2007. I like to track it as an microcosm of the general declining white conservative working-class vote, though perhaps it isn't a perfect indicator it's a good one.