French election maps

[Antonio the Sixth]

Maybe; I would argue that America's party system is slowly or rapidly becoming more like the current French tripolar system, but keeping on to the 2 party labels of D and R.

Currently France has a well defined Left, Center, and Right.

America has a very small Left (Squad/Progressives), fairly large Center (dominated by Democrats and a few Republicans like Murkowski, Meijer, Cheney, and Collins), and a robust, but alienating Right.

What is the comparative size of these voter blocs in 2010s-2020s France?

From last year's presidential election:

Here's another map - one I've been meaning to make since I saw the final results. I noticed you could break the electorate up in to three broad ideological blocs of almost equal size. Of course those categorizations are eminently contestable, but I think they still reveal some interesting things.

Left (Arthaud-Poutou-Mélenchon-Roussel-Hidalgo-Jadot): 31.95%
Liberal Right (Macron-Pécresse): 32.62%
Nationalist Right (Dupont-Aignan-Le Pen-Zemmour): 32.29%

That leaves out the unclassifiable Lassalle's 3.13%, but otherwise splits French voters into almost perfect thirds.

So, what does this 3-way divide look like mapped out? I finally took the time to find out:


For France, a genuinely shocking degree of geographic bias. The far-right bloc came out ahead in a solid majority of departments, and if France had an "Electoral College" it would be solidly ahead of it too. It of course wins overwhelmingly in the traditionally right-wing Mediterranean France, and in France's vast postindustrial Northeast, but also in large swathes of the country that don't have such a strong political identity, like the Centre region and even much of the traditionally left-wing Southwest. This is only partially explained by the nationalist bloc's weakness in IdF: even if you look at the non-IdF continental France only, the bloc only wins with a plurality of 34.66%, not that far from the liberals' 31.88%.

However, it is clear that the nationalist bloc is much weaker across France's globalized metropoles, and Departments anchored by one such tends to be strongholds for either the left or liberal bloc. On the liberal side, the Grand Ouest also really stands out as its last redoubt, along with the traditionally posh West side of IdF. Other areas of support includes also upscale areas like Haute-Savoie and Rhône, as well as a little redoubt of what might have once been Hollande Country in the Massif Central and Bayrou Country in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. As well as the expats and Pacific territories, where support for continued unionism with France usually translates into support for the center-right establishment.

As for the left, it (and this really cannot be stressed enough) dominated Ile-de-France, winning 39.99% in the region. Also in most non-Pacific DTOMs, where Mélenchon's scores were pretty staggering. Aside from that, its areas of support in non-Idf continental France tend to be anchored around metropoles like Nantes, Bordeaux, Toulouse and Grenoble. A few redoubts of rural leftism survived, like Ariège, Lot, Haute-Vienne and Hautes-Alpes, but those are just the remnants of once-vast swathes of leftist support across the South.

[Sir John Johns]

SEINE 1945 (Constituent Assembly election)

I have found the results detailed at commune level for various elections held in the former Seine département (covering Paris and its inner suburbs) in the Bulletin officiel de la Ville de Paris digitized on Gallica.

Beginning with the October 1945 election of deputies to the (first) Constituent Assembly. For electoral purposes, Seine was then divided into six constituencies (circonscriptions) widely referred to as ‘sectors’ (secteurs) in the contemporary press.

* Seine-1 was comprising Paris’ Left Bank: 5th, 6th, 7th, 13th, 14th and 15th arrondissements
* Seine-2 was comprising the western part of Paris’ Right Bank: 1st, 2nd, 8th, 9th, 16th, 17th and 18th arrondissements
* Seine-3 was comprising the eastern part of Paris’ Right Bank: 3rd, 4th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 19th and 20th arrondissements.
* Seine-4 was covering the southern part of banlieue with cantons of Charenton-le-Pont, Ivry-sur-Seine, Nogent-sur-Marne, Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, Sceaux, Vanves and Villejuif.
* Seine-5 was covering the northwestern part of banlieue with cantons of Asnières, Boulogne-Billancourt, Clichy, Colombes, Courbevoie, Levallois-Perret, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Puteaux and Saint-Ouen
* Seine-6 was covering the northeastern part of banlieue with cantons of Aubervilliers, Montreuil, Noisy-le-Sec, Pantin, Saint-Denis and Vincennes, the major part of which would be transferred to the Seine-Saint-Denis département when the Seine département was split in 1968.


Main political forces participating into these elections were:

- Popular Republican Movement (MRP)

- French Communist Party (PCF)

- French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO) in alliance with the center-left Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance (UDSR). In Seine-1, the small, left-wing christian, Young Republic (JR) was included in the SFIO-UDSR alliance.

- Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party (PRRRS), the old Radical Party tainted by its association with the ill-fated Third Republic and drifting to the right

- So-called ‘moderates’, an unofficial label batching the lists connected to the old Republican Federation and Democratic Alliance as well as the newly founded Patriotic Republican Union which would subsequently formally organized as the Republican Party of Liberty (PRL). These political forces were calling themselves ‘moderates’ in the Paris municipal council, in spite of generally advocating very right-wing stances. The ‘moderate’ lists were running under different names according to the constituency and their political make-up may varied from one constituency to another one: ‘Liberty List’ in Seine-1 led by Édouard Frédéric-Dupont (a central figure of the Parisian right whose career spanned six decades and who served in parliament, with some interruptions, between 1936 and 1993); ‘National Democratic Republican Union’ led by Joseph Denais in Seine-2 and Lucien Besset in Seine-3; ‘Republican Entente’ led by Pierre Guérard in Seine-4; ‘Democratic Action Against Right- and Left-Wing Fascisms’ led by Edmond Barrachin in Seine-5; ‘Republican Concentration’ led by Pierre Ruhlmann in Seine-6).

Minor lists:

- the mandatory right-wing dissident lists, especially in Paris (‘Social Action Republican List Against Fascism and Communism’ in Seine-1; ‘Republican Concentration’, ‘National Reconstruction’ and the clearly far-right ‘Anticommunist French Unity’ in Seine-2; ‘Independent Radicals and Democratic Alliance’ in Seine-4).

- the Social Republican Party of French Reconciliation (PRSRF), successor to La Rocque’s interwar French Social Party which had failed to agree with other right-wing forces in Seine-2, Seine-3, Seine-5 and Seine-6

- the Internationalist Communist Party (PCI), the most important Trotskyist group of the period (until it rapidly began to split on a quasi-yearly basis) which was running only in Seine-1

- royalists, running a list in only two constituencies, Seine-1 and Seine-2.

- an UDSR dissident list, running in Seine-3

- a ‘Socialist List Independent From All Parties’, running in Seine-4.

- the ‘Federist Movement’ (Mouvement fédériste), a pacifist and federalist movement led by Joseph Archer, an eccentric scientific inventor who, after having elaborated innovative gun barrels during WWI, decided in 1928 it was time to bring peace in the world with the establishment of a European currency (‘Europa’) backed by gold, steal, copper and agricultural products like wheat, wine or meat. The currency was nevertheless only used in the commune of Haute-Loire where Archer had been elected a mayor. In 1935, after Philibert Besson, one of Archer’s friends as well as a fellow follower of federist theories, had been deprived of his parliamentary seat because of troubles with justice and his own very bizarre personality, Archer managed to be elected a deputy for Haute-Loire in the by-election. Only to be heavily defeated few months later in his attempt to get reelected during the regular legislative elections. Archer had a pretty pathetic end: a 1952 article of Le Monde is reporting the then-69-year-old scientific-turn-politician had managed to escape the psychiatric hospital he had been institutionalized in by his own family; he was nonetheless caught and bring back to the psychiatric hospital, and spent the remaining of his life trying to convince courts to let him go out.

The ‘Mouvement fédériste’ ran only lists in the Parisian constituencies (Seine-1, Seine-2 and Seine-3) with Archer being the top candidate in Seine-1.

- Something called ‘Human Miseries and Rights List’, running in Seine-1. I don’t want to know.

Département results:

PCF 34.1%
MRP 28.1%
SFIO/UDSR 21.4%
Moderates 7.5%
Radical Party 2.9%
right-wing dissidents 2.2%
PRSRF 1.7%
UDSR dissidents 0.7%
royalists 0.5%
PCI 0.3%
others/joke lists 0.3%

Most-voted list by communes/Parisian arrondissements:



Not much surprise, the PCF was ahead in working-class/popular banlieues, even surpassing the 50% of valid votes in fifteen communes, notably Bobigny (59.2%, its best result), Drancy (58.7%), Aubervilliers (57.8%), Saint-Denis (56.5%), Gennevilliers (55.3%), Villejuif (54.9%), Ivry-sur-Seine (54.8%) and Saint-Ouen (50.5%). The PCF also placed ahead in the eastern arrondissements of Paris, receiving its best results in the twentieth (39.7%), thirteenth (39.2%) and nineteenth (38.6%). The famous ceinture rouge (red belt) at one of its largest extent, if not its largest extent.

Map showing the share of the residing labor force which was categorized as ouvrier (worker) in the 1954 census:



The MRP received its best results in the bourgeois communes in the banlieue like Saint-Mandé (47.2%, its best result), Vincennes (44.7%), Bourg-la-Reine (40.6%) and placed ahead in Neuilly-sur-Seine (35.6%) in spite of the competition from the moderate list which receives here 27.3% of the valid votes. The MRP also came ahead in the western part of Paris, receiving notably 37.4% in the sixth arrondissement, 34.6% in the sixteenth arrondissement (against 22.1% for the moderates) or 34.0% in the seventh arrondissement.

The SFIO-UDSR only placed ahead in a single commune, Sceaux (35.7% of the valid votes), whose mayor, Édouard Depreux, was the top candidate on the socialist list.


PCF map:



MRP map:



SFIO/USDR map:



Moderates map:



Radicals map:

[Sir John Johns]

SEINE 1946

Constitutional Referendum, 5 May 1946

Nationwide, the new constitution, which was supported by left-wing parties (PCF, SFIO) but criticized by the MRP and opposed by De Gaulle, was rejected with 52.8% of valid votes against.

In Seine, the results were very close with a difference of only 3,383 votes between rejection and support for the constitution.

Yes 49.9%
No 50.1%



(numbers are from a scanned La Croix newspaper)

Best commune for the ‘yes’ was Drancy (76.5%); best commune for the ‘no’ was Paris’ eight arrondissement (78.7%), followed by Paris’ sixteenth arrondissement (78.2%) and Neuilly-sur-Seine (75.6%).


Election of the second Constituent Assembly, 2 June 1946

Compared to the October 1945 election, the right was better organized, having consolidated behind the newly created Republican Party of Liberty (PRL) and facing no dissident list, a fact maybe explained by the shortness of the campaign which took place less than a month after the defeat in a referendum of the constitutional project. Meanwhile an alliance, has been built around the Radical Party, the Rally of Republican Lefts (RGR), behind what was pretty clearly a center-right platform. The RGR list in Seine-5 was led by a young and ambitious politician who had previously never run for election, defended then Catholic schools and opposed communism and state intervention in the economy. The name of that man: François Mitterrand.

Don’t know what happened to the Federist Movement, it will not run candidates in Seine until the 1951 legislative elections.

Results in Seine département (again split into six constituencies, even if this time this was pretty much the same lists facing each other) were:

PCF 33.3%
MRP 23.8%
SFIO 19.3%
PRL 14.6%
RGR 7.2%

Map of the most-voted list:



The main changes compared to October 1945 are:

- the collapse of the MRP vote in the most bourgeois areas, a collapse that mostly benefited to the PRL and the RGR, two options more palatable to right-wing voters: -14.4 percentage point in Saint-Mandé; -14.0 percentage point in Vincennes; -11.0 percentage point in Paris-8; -10.2 percentage point in Paris-16; -7.9 percentage point in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Neuilly-sur-Seine where François Mitterrand overperformed, being the second best commune for his list (never imagined I would write this) with 9.2%; his was L’Île-Saint-Denis with 14.0%, I don’t know why.

- the erosion of the SFIO vote, more pronounced in eastern Paris (-5.5 pp in Paris-10; -4.1pp in Paris-19; -3.5pp in Paris-2; -3.2pp in Paris-3; -3.1pp in Paris 20), in the working-class communes dominated by the PCF (-5.4pp in Clichy; -3.8pp in Champigny-sur-Marne; -3.7pp in Pantin; -3.6pp in Bobigny) as well as in Paris-17 (-4.4pp).

PCF map, pretty much similar to the October 1945 one:



MRP map:



SFIO map:



PRL map:



RGR map (yeah, hardly the map of a left-wing list):

[Sir John Johns]

Economists Thomas Piketty and Julia Cagé are releasing these days a book titled Une histoire du conflit politique: Élections et inégalités sociales en France 1789-2022 (A History of Political Conflict: Elections and Social Inequalities in France 1789-2022) which is intending to summarize French electoral history since 1789 and explaining electoral patterns thanks to a lot of economic and social indicators. The book and its conclusions are already harshly attacked by political scientists for notably being over-simplistic, offering hardly new theories to explain electoral behaviors and for neglecting most of recent political science research.

What is interesting us here is however that the Piketty-Cagé couple has used an army of ‘collaborators’ (research assistants) to collect the historical election results at département level and scan the procès-verbaux (election returns) of all presidential and legislative elections since 1848 at commune level as well as a disturbing selection of referendums (the 1793 and 1795 farcical referendums, which is just huh?, 1946, 1992 and 2005 but not the very relevant politically speaking 1870 plebiscite, October 1962 referendum or 1969 referendum). Social and economic indicators provided by the INSEE (but not going as far in time than 1960 for most) are also included in the database that has been compiled under the direction of the two economists.

A website has been created to map the electoral results and socio-economic indicators with also a section where the full results by commune, socio-economic indicators and scans of election returns can be freely downloaded (in dta and csv files for the first ones, in jpg for the scans).

This is a very cool work, which is finally addressing the ineptitude of the Interior Ministry to get detailed election results older than 1992 online. Sadly, it has been used to draw some disputable conclusions by two star intellectuals acting outside of their own sphere.

Also, I have already noticed a few problems:

* The charts, maps and tables are based on present-day communes, ignoring the communes which have been abolished. For example, you have the combined results for present-day Cherbourg-Octeville and not the distinct results for the two communes of Cherbourg and Octeville (which merged in 2000). So you have to use directly the procès-verbaux scans to have the full results with the former communes, a bit of a problem especially when you go back furthest in time.

* The electoral graphs in the ‘how your commune has voted since two centuries’ section are totally useless because the way they have constituted their political aggregates (left/center-left/center/center-right/right) is absurdly wrong. Judging by the graph for the whole Metropolitan France presented for comparison, the ‘right’ in the presidential election has been Tixier-Vignancour in 1965, Pompidou in 1969, Le Pen in 1974, Chirac, Debré and Garaud in 1981 and Le Pen and minor candidates like Villiers (but only in 1995 it seems), Dupont-Aignan Mégret and Zemmour for the subsequent elections. Also Bayrou is ‘center’ in 2002 and 2012 but not in 2007 when he was ‘center-right’. Doesn’t sounds like a serious job here. I don’t even want to know what they did with the legislative results.

However, there are cool graphs about average income, home ownership, average age, share of foreign nationals and share of employees and workers.

* For the legislative results tab I have download and see (1945), they are using the labels of the Interior Ministry with the consequence that if there are several ‘divers-droite’ lists, it will be their combined result and not their individual results which will be provided.

* Results for overseas and French Algeria aren't provided.

* The scans are bundled into excessively voluminous zipped files (10 Go or even more!) and you have to download the entirety of the scans for the entire France without the possibility to download only the département or even the region that is interesting you.

That said, this is a formidable database for results of French past elections. Thankfully, I have invest into a new computer and have now fiber-optic Internet so I'm able to exploit this now available data. I have already began working on maps of the 1965 presidential election.

[Sir John Johns]

First maps of the 1965 presidential election even if that one was planned from some time ago, using again the results provided by the Bulletin municipal officiel de la Ville de Paris.

SEINE

First round



Charles de Gaulle 41.8%
François Mitterrand 35.7%
Jean Lecanuet 14.5%
Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour 4.8%
Pierre Marcilhacy 1.9%
Marcel Barbu 1.4%

null/blank 0.9%



De Gaulle placed ahead in every arrondissement of Paris, his best one being Paris-1 (46.8%) and his worst one Paris-13 (40.5% against 39.1% for Mitterrand). He got his best results in the département the rather well-off communes of the southeast quarter (49.1% in Rungis, 48.8% in Saint-Mandé, 48.0% in Nogent-sur-Marne, 46.9% in Vincennes and in Le Perreux-sur-Marne; his five best communes) while being hurt by the performances of Lecanuet and Tixier-Vignancour in the super-bourgeois sectors of western Paris-Neuilly (46.6% in Paris-8 against 26.1% for Lecanuet and 8.4% for Tixier-Vignancour; 45.4% in Paris-16 against 27.5% for Lecanuet and 8.5% for Tixier-Vignancour; 46.4% in Neuilly-sur-Seine against 27.9% for Lecanuet and 7.3% for Tixier-Vignancour).

His worst results are in the workers/low-income banlieue communes of the ceinture rouge like Saint-Denis (33.6%), Aubervilliers (33.5%), Drancy (33.9%), Saint-Ouen (33.9%), Bobigny (32.6%), Vitry-sur-Seine (35.5%), Ivry-sur-Seine (29.9%), Villejuif (33.7%), Malakoff (33.4%) and Gennevilliers (28.2%, its worst commune).



Mitterrand is pretty much the opposite, receiving over 50% of the vote in 17 communes, notably 60% in Gennevilliers, 57.9% in Ivry-sur-Seine, 54.6% in Drancy, 54.1% in Aubervilliers and Bobigny, 53.4% in Saint-Denis, 52.7% in Saint-Ouen and 50.7% in Vitry-sur-Seine. Meanwhile he received under 20% of the vote in four communes/arrondissements: Paris-7 (17.2%), Paris-8 (15.6%), Paris-16 (15.3%) and Neuilly-sur-Seine (14.9%, his worst commune this time).



Vote for Lecanuet is more bourgeois than the De Gaulle vote and is heavily concentrated in the beaux quartiers of Western Paris: he received over 25% of the votes in the exact same four communes/arrondissements Mitterrand had received under 20% with 27.9% in Neuilly-sur-Seine (Lecanuet’s best commune), 27.5% in Paris-16, 26.1% in Paris-8 and 25.9% in Paris-7. He received under 10% of the vote in most of the ceinture rouge communes with his worst communes being Drancy (6.5%), Gennevilliers (6.3%) and Villetaneuse (6.3%). Also while De Gaulle could surpassed Mitterrand (41.9% against 40.1%) in Champigny-sur-Marne, a PCF-ruled rather working-class suburb with pockets of extreme poverty (the infamous Plateau-de-Champigny slum, then the largest one in France, overwhelmingly populated by Portuguese migrants), Lecanuet received there only 11.2% of the vote, 3 percent point below his département average.



The vote for Tixier-Vignancour is even more concentrated in the posh areas of western Paris, peaking at 8.5% in Paris-16, 8.4% in Paris-8, 7.7% in Paris-7, 7.3% in Paris-6 and Neuilly-sur-Seine. The far-right candidate also received good results in rather wealthy communes of the Petite Couronne like Thiais (7.3%), Bourg-la-Reine (6.8%), Saint-Mandé (6.7%), Créteil (6.1%), Sceaux (6.0%), Antony (5.8%) or Nogent-sur-Marne (5.6%). In contrast, he underperformed in the low-income/working-class inner suburbs with 3.1% in Saint-Denis, 3.2% in Montreuil, 2.7% in Aubervilliers, 2.6% in Gennevilliers or 2.4% in Drancy.

Second round



Charles de Gaulle 52.5%
François Mitterrand 47.5%

null/blank 2.8%

Mitterrand’s best commune was Gennevilliers (67.2%) while De Gaulle’s best commune was Neuilly-sur-Seine (68.2%). Mongénéral received over 60% of the vote in 11 communes/arrondissements, notably Saint-Mandé (64.9%), Nogent-sur-Marne (60.3%) and Bourg-la-Reine (60.3%) and placed ahead in all Parisian arrondissements but Paris-13 which went to Mitterrand by the closest margin at the département level (50.1%/49.9%; a difference of 162 votes). Mitterrand received over 60% in 13 communes, notably Ivry-sur-Seine (66.2%), Aubervilliers (62.5%), Drancy (61.7%) and Saint-Denis (61.3%).

The map of the distribution of the null/blank votes is very funny. There had been a noticeable increase in the percent of null/blank votes between both rounds in the wealthiest parts of Seine, presumably largely driven by Tixier-Vignancour voters unwilling to choose between the ‘socialo-communiste’ candidate and the man the far-right had attempted to assassinate several times for having abandoned French Algeria (Tixier-Vignancour himself had endorsed Mitterrand in the runoff).



Hence, Neuilly-sur-Seine went for being the commune with the lowest share of spoiled ballots (0.6%) to the one with the third highest share of spoiled ballots (5.5%). Share of blank and null votes increased in similar proportions in Paris-16 (from 0.6% to 5.6%), in Paris-7 (from 0.6% to 5.6%), in Paris-8 (from 0.6% to 5.0%), in Paris-6 (from 0.7% to 4.9%) or in Sceaux (from 1.1% to 4.8%). Meanwhile La Courneuve went for being the commune with the largest share of spoiled ballots (1.5%) in the first round to the rank of twenty-fourth commune (out of 100) with the lowest share of spoiled ballots (1.9%).

[Estrella]

Amazing stuff!

Can you tell us something about the divides within left and right? Like, what would make a typical inhabitant of the 16th vote for RGR instead of PRL, or a worker in the 13th choose SFIO instead of PCF?

[Sir John Johns]

BOUCHES-DU-RHÔNE

1965 presidential again, using this time the data compiled for Une histoire du conflit politique. Élections et inégalités sociales en France, 1789-2022.

First round

François Mitterrand 39.3%
Charles de Gaulle 35.7%
Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour 12.4%
Jean Lecanuet 9.6%
Pierre Marcilhacy 1.6%
Marcel Barbu 1.3%

null/blank 1.0%





De Gaulle came first in the two most populated communes: Marseille (results by arrondissement aren’t provided) where he received 38.1% of the votes against 37.5% for Mitterrand, 12.4% for Tixier-Vignancour and 9.3% for Lecanuet; and Aix-en-Provence, where he received 34.2% of the votes (below his département average) against 28.4% for Mitterrand, 19.0% for Tixier-Vignancour and 14.4% for Lecanuet. De Gaulle received his strongest results in the sparsely populated northeastern part of the département around Montagne Sainte-Victoire as well as in the small communes in the periphery of Aix-en-Provence and Marseille like Cabriès (49.1%), Allauch (45.7%) or Plan-de-Cuques (43.6%). De Gaulle also received a strong result in places like the seaside resort of Carry-le-Rouet (43.6%), where famous contemporary actor Fernandel owned then a villa, and the historical village of Les Baux-de-Provence (39.5%). De Gaulle finally placed also ahead in Salon-de-Provence (34.5% against 29.4% for Mitterrand) and in the northwestern part of the département, in the communes bordering the Rhône river.



Mitterrand placed ahead in the whole western part of the département and received there some of his best results in the industrialized area around the heavily polluted Étang de Berre (fishing was prohibited in 1957): 71.6% in Port-de-Bouc (Mitterrand’s best commune), a communist stronghold where Robert Hue was still able to poll first in 2002 and the site of shipyards which closed in 1966, few months after the election; 61.7% in Berre-l’Étang, home to important petrochemical industries; 58.5% in the industrial harbor of Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhône; 52.7% in Fos-sur-Mer and 61.8% in Saint-Mitre-les-Remparts, two places which experienced pollution problems as early as the 1830s (thanks to soda ash factories) and saw in the late 1960s the construction of an industrial harbor and a steel factory which fostered a rapid demographic growth; 54.5% in Saint-Chamas, the site of a hydroelectric plant which was started operations the following year. Mitterrand also scored strong results in Arles (49.4%), Martigues (48.0%), in the rail hub of Miramas (52.6%) and results above his département average in Istres (42.5%), Vitrolles (44.2%) and Marignane (39.6%).

In the eastern part of the Bouches-du-Rhône, Mitterrand overperformed in La Ciotat (44.8%), the site of important shipyard, as well as in the small communes around Gardanne and along the Arc River upper valley which were then home to a declining/defunct coal mining industry: 50.6% in Gardanne itself; 64.4% in Gréasque (Mitterrand’s second-best commune) where coal mines had closed in 1960; 62.7% in Trets, home to coal mining until 1935; 59.1% in Saint-Savournin; 63.1% in Cadolive; 59.3% in La Bouilladisse.

Conversely, Mitterrand didn’t do well in Salon-de-Provence (29.4%), in Aix-en-Provence (28.4%), in Carry-le-Rouet (27.7%) and in Baux-de-Provence (21.5%).



Tixier-Vignancour came ahead in a single commune, Maillane (31.6%), but scored impressive results in Roquefort-la-Bédoule (24.9%) where many Pieds-Noirs had been relocated after Algeria’s independence; in Marignane (22.9%) also home to an important Pied-Noir community; in La Roque-d’Anthéron (24.4%), maybe due to the presence of a camp de forestage where harki families were housed and employed to forestry operations under harsh conditions. The far-right candidate also received a score above his département average in Aix-en-Provence (19.0%), Cassis (14.8%) and Aubagne (13.7%) while under-performing in Martigues (9.8%), Istres (9.4%), Berre-l’Étang (5.4%) and receiving his worst result in the Provence coal-mining area (5.7% in Gardanne, 5.0% in Trets, 2.4% in Cadolive and 2.2% in Saint-Savournin, his two worst communes).



Lecanuet’s support is mostly to be found in the small communes of the rural hinterland, where agriculture (viticulture, olive groves, vegetable crops) was the main activity, as well as in the Aix-en-Provence (14.4%) - where due notably to the presence of several universities ‘cadres and intermediary professions’ constituted then 29.3% of the working population (the highest rate in Bouches-du-Rhône) and where 7.3% of the population over 25 were higher-education graduates (against 3.5% in Marseille, 3.6% in Martigues and 2.6% in Arles). Lecanuet also over-performed in the seaside resorts of Carry-le-Rouet (14.0%) and Cassis (12.8%). Meanwhile, he received his worst performances in Port-de-Bouc (3.2%), in Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhône (4.2%), in the PCF-ruled mining commune of La Bouilladisse (4.0%) and in the working-class Marseille suburb of Septème-les-Vallons (4.6%).

Second round

François Mitterrand 56.5%
Charles de Gaulle 43.5%

null/blank 3.3%



De Gaulle was defeated in the vast majority of the communes of the département, coming ahead in only 15 out of 119 communes with the most populated commune he won being Allauch (9,271 inhabitant) with 50.6% of the votes. Mitterrand managed to come ahead in all the major cities of the département, receiving 53.3% of the votes in Aix-en-Provence, 54.1% in Marseille, 58.3% in Istres, 61.1% in Martigues, 62.7% in La Ciotat, 64.2% in Miramas, 65.8% in Arles, 71.3% in Berre-l’Étang and over 80% in four communes including Saint-Mitre-les-Remparts (80.5%; where De Gaulle actually lost votes between both rounds) and Port-de-Bouc (82.8%).

[Sir John Johns]

Amazing stuff!

Can you tell us something about the divides within left and right? Like, what would make a typical inhabitant of the 16th vote for RGR instead of PRL, or a worker in the 13th choose SFIO instead of PCF?

Not entirely sure. I’m honestly not that knowledgeable about French voting patterns, especially from that period. The general view would be however that the PRL voter would be more of a practicing Catholic and a businessman or shopkeeper while the RGR voter would be more secular (or Protestant) and a professional. Meanwhile, the SFIO voter would be more of a public servant or an employee while the PCF voter would be more of a worker.

This may be over a bit too much an oversimplification but when comparing the results of June 1946 elections for the SFIO and the ones of the PCF lists, the socialists are outran by communists in all communes but two (Sceaux and Paris-8) and the communes where they polled under the département average advantage for the PCF list (a 13.9 percent point in favor of the PCF list) are all located in the less working-class parts of the département (1.1 percent point in favor of the PCF in Paris-16; 3.1 percent point in Saint-Mandé; 5.1 percent point in Nogent-sur-Marne; 11.5 percent point in Asnières; 12.7 percent point in Boulogne-Billancourt) while it is largely outpaced in communes like Vitry-sur-Seine (27.7 percent point), Nanterre (28.1 percent point), Saint-Denis (38.0 percent point) or Aubervilliers (a 40.4 percent point-led for the PCF list over the SFIO list). The only arrondissements where the PCF led the SFIO by a figure above its département average are Paris 11 (17.3 pp), Paris-19 (18.1 pp), Paris-20 (18.5 pp) and Paris-13 (20.0 pp).

In the PRL vs. RGR ‘contest’, the RGR polled above the PRL in only ten communes, all located in banlieue and falling generally under the ‘neither posh neither working-class category’ (bar Drancy). But the PRL is leading the RGR by a figure above its département average in only 18 communes, confirming its support is heavily concentrated in a few places while the RGR one is more evenly distributed. Such places are too be found in the more affluent parts of the département: Bourg-la-Reine (a 9.9 pp led), Nogent-sur-Marne (11.9 pp), Saint-Mandé (19.4 pp), Neuilly-sur-Seine (a 26.6 pp led) and in the western arrondissements of Paris with the largest led being in Paris-8 (41.8% for the PRL against 10.1% for the RGR).

The mentioned cleavages may be also reflected by the social/professional background of the top candidates of each list during the 1946 elections of a Constituent Assembly.

PCF top candidates:

* Seine-1: André Marty, a former boilermaker in the French Navy who became a leading figure in the 1919 Black Sea Mutiny before serving as a Komintern-appointed general inspector in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

* Seine-2: Marcel Cachin, a Brittany-born professor of philosophy and director of L’Humanité communist newspaper who was additionally a Breton cultural activist and served as an organizer in the important Breton diaspora in Paris (many Bretons moved to Parisian region to be employed in low-skilled jobs like navvies or maids), even organizing in Pont-l’Abbé (Finistère) in 1938 a Communist-sponsored folkloric festival during which people in Bigouden folk costumes sang The International in Breton. Relatedly, a PCF politician of Breton origin, Jules Trémel, had organized a ‘laïc’ pardon since 1933 in Saint-Denis as a way to challenge Catholic influence among Breton diaspora, seemingly with good results as he was constantly elected a municipal councilor in Saint-Denis from 1925 until his death in 1964.

* Seine-3: Florimond Bonte, a schoolteacher-turn-surveyor hailing from Tourcoing (Nord) who became one of the main managers of the French communist press; anecdoctally, also a composer of musette waltz.

* Seine-4: Maurice Thorez, the general-secretary of the PCF from 1930 until his death in 1964; started as a miner, later a laborer and a painter in construction sector.

* Seine-5: Étienne Fajon, a former schoolteacher.

* Seine-6: Jacques Duclos, a former pastry cook.

SFIO top candidates:

* Seine-1: Paul Rivet, an ethnologist specialized in South American indigenous populations (there is an avenue in Quito named after him), a university professor and the founder and director of the Musée de l’Homme; had served as the president of the Watchfulness Committee of Intellectual Antifascists (1934-39), an organization that largely foreran the Popular Front, and became part of the Réseau du Musée de l’Homme, a resistance network organized around Parisian intellectuals which was active as early as October 1940.

* Seine-2: Daniel Mayer, the son of a Jewish small trader and a schoolteacher of Alsatian Jewish origin who had himself worked as a salesman and second-hand dealer before joining Le Populaire socialist newspaper as a journalist; like Rivet, very active in the Human Rights’ League.

* Seine-3: André Le Troquer, a lawyer at the Paris’ bar.

* Seine-4: Édouard Depreux, a lawyer at the Paris’ bar, specialized in the defense of anti-colonial activists like Messali Hadj.

* Seine-5: Albert Gazier, an employee at a bookshop and later at the social security fund, who then served as the general-secretary of the Parisian Region’s employees’ chamber and as a member of the CGT union’s national bureau.

* Seine-6: Gérard Jaquet, a full-time SFIO party official who came from a middle-class background (deputy general-secretary of the SFIO at 30) and had been active in the socialist student movement in the late 1930s.

PRL top candidates:

* Seine-1: Louis Rollin, an attorney at the Paris court of appeal who had served several times as a minister during the Third Republic and as a deputy specialized in economic matters and commercial property rights.

* Seine-2: Joseph Denais, a lawyer at the Paris’ bar who contributed to many right-wing newspapers during the Third Republic (including the antisemitic La Libre Parole whom he was a co-director) and as a parliamentary served as a member and later a president of the supervisory committee of the Deposits and Consignment Funds (a state-owned investment bank).

* Seine-3: Charles Schauffler, the former director of various businesses then the owner and manager of a wholesale trading company.

* Seine-4: Michel Peytel, a military officer graduated from the Saint-Cyr military school.

* Seine-5: Edmond Barrachin, the scion of an industrial family from Ardennes; once married to the daughter of Maurice de Forest, the Paris-born adoptive son of a German banker – De Forest’s life is quite something, having been a motor racing driver, a socialite and an art collector, a Liberal MP for West Ham and a Liechtenstein diplomat.

* Seine-6: Jean Bertaud, a director and inspector at the SNCF public railway company.

RGR top candidates:

* Seine-1: Vincent de Moro-Giafferri, a high-profile lawyer of Corsican origin who achieved celebrity as a the lawyer of the infamous serial killer Henri-Désiré Landru (one of the first heavily publicized trial in France) and of Herschel Grynszpan (the assassin of a diplomat at the German embassy in Paris, the act which was used by the Nazi regime as a pretext for the Kristallnacht); also unsuccessfully attempted to become the counsel of Dimitrov in the trial of the Reichstag fire and participated as a judge in company with other high-profile European lawyers in the counter-trial of the Reichstag fire organized in London by German exiles to sentence the Nazis and Göring for the crime.

* Seine-2: Paul Bastid, the scion of a dynasty of parliamentarians from Cantal and a professor of philosophy and public law at the Paris Faculty of Law as well as a former president of the general council of Cantal.

* Seine-3: Pierre Bourdan, a UDSR member who was a journalist and a director of the Havas Agency in London, an anchor of the Free French famous Les Français parlent aux Français radio broadcast on the BBC and a war reporter during the Liberation of France.

* Seine-4: Madeleine Finidori-Dubler, a female employee for the Post Office who wrote books and articles of the Corsican press; active in the Corsican community in Parisian region and came from the left wing of the SFIO.

* Seine-5: François Mitterrand, the son of a bourgeois family of Charente and a lawyer by training; worked in the administration of the General Commission for War Prisoners in the Vichy regime and as a general-secretary for prisoners in the French Committee of Liberation National constituted in the wake of the liberation of Paris.

* Seine-6: Alfred Secqueville, the president of the Radical Party’s Seine federation residing in Courbevoie; can’t find anything about his background, he may be the same that the Alfred Secqueville who founded a short-lived automobile company (Secqueville-Hoyau) in 1919 whose headquarters was in Gennevilliers, not far away from Courbevoie.

Of course, there are other factors in play besides socioeconomic and religious factors, like maybe the regional origin of the numerous provincial migrants (I have mentioned Bretons and Corsicans, but uring the interwar period the Auvergne-born Pierre Laval managed to entrench his rule over Aubervilliers – the commune he was the mayor between 1923 and 1942 – thanks to his clientele networks among the Auvergnat bougnats, enabling him to be elected and reelected mayor of the commune by wide margins in 1923, 1925, 1929 and 1935 in spite of his shift from socialism towards moderate conservatism). I’m not aware of works on that question however.

Also, important in the post-war context, unlike the RGR, the PRL was advocating a policy of ‘reconciliation’ i.e. indulgence with collaborators by fear that the épuration would divided too much the society and paved the way for Communists taking over power but also because many of its members had an ambiguous role during the war (similar to Mitterrand actually), having supported Pétain (at least in the first stages of his government) and having been members of then totally discredited far-right or nationalist movements before having joined a bit late the Resistance (for the ones who hadn’t be collaborators until the Liberation) and because a majority of French big business had not much problems working with the German occupant.

Kind of similar divide in the left between the SFIO which was the only French party to seriously attempt purging its collaborators members (in first place, the general-secretary between 1920 and 1940, Paul Faure) and whose all six aforementioned candidates had joined early the Resistance and, well, the Communist Party, whose role in the first stage of the war had been particularly controversial to say the least (Thorez had been sentenced for desertion for fleeing to Moscow at the beginning of the war and was only enabled to return in France in November 1944, once De Gaulle had overturned his conviction).

[Sir John Johns]

RHÔNE

First round

Charles de Gaulle 37.9%
François Mitterrand 31.0%
Jean Lecanuet 21.1%
Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour 6.6%
Pierre Marcilhacy 1.9%
Marcel Barbu 1.5%

Blank/null 0.8%



Not very familiar with the electoral patterns of Rhône. De Gaulle placed ahead in all arrondissements of Lyon but the eighth one (where he received 35.9% against 40.0% for Mitterrand) and in relatively important urban centers like Villefranche-sur-Saône (37.3% against 35.6% for Mitterrand), Neuville-sur-Saône (43.3% against 30.1% for Mitterrand), Belleville (39.0% against 30.4% for Mitterrand), Thizy (36.1% against 28.7% for Mitterrand) or Tarare, a small industrial (textile) center of 12,000 inhabitants (where he received 41.5% of the vote against 24.5% for Lecanuet and 23.7% for Mitterrand). He also came ahead communes of the banlieue of Lyon like the affluent Écully (36.6% against 28.1% for Lecanuet and 24.7% for Mitterrand) and Saint-Didier-au-Mont-d’Or (38.9% against 27.1% for Mitterrand and 25.3% for Lecanuet), Caluire-et-Cuire (40.3% against 25.3% for Mitterrand) or Bron (38.1% against 35.2% for Mitterrand) as well in most of the rural part of the département, bar the Monts-du-Lyonnais (the hilly southwest part of the département) and part of Beaujolais.

The Monts-du-Lyonnais seems like a very right-wing region as, not only Lecanuet placed ahead in a good number of communes there but Tixier-Vignancour also broke there the 10% bar in a dozen of communes. Mitterrand placed ahead in a dozen of communes of Beaujolais, apparently due to the presence of vigneronnage, some sort of sharecropping system used there for viticulture. Nevertheless, Beaujolais has never be a territory particularly favorable to socialism and communism.

The best results of Mitterrand are to be found in the working-class banlieues of Lyon (54.5% in Vénissieux; 48.5% in Vaulx-en-Velin; 48.1% in Saint-Fons; 45.5% in Pierre-Bénite; 43.9% in Oullins; 39.3% in Villeurbanne) and the small industrial center of Givors (56.8% in this PCF stronghold and Mitterrand’s best commune). Mitterrand also placed first, but with a more modest result in the small industrial area (production of cheap cloth for popular consumers made by small/tiny family businesses) around Thizy (33.1% in Bourg-de-Thizy), an area then hit hard by the crisis in the textile sector.



(yeah, De Gaulle's map is a bit indecipherable)










Second round

Charles de Gaulle 53.4%
François Mitterrand 46.6%

Blank/null 4.0%



De Gaulle placed ahead in the vast majority of the communes, winning all Lyon arrondissements but Lyon-8 (54.1% for Mitterrand) and Lyon-9 (53.2% for Mitterrand) and places like Neuville-sur-Saône (56.6%), Belleville (53.9%) and Tarare (57.9%). He received his best results in the most rural parts of the département, especially the Monts-du-Lyonnais.

On the other hand, Mitterrand managed to come ahead in Villefranche-sur-Saône with 50.04% of the votes (with a difference of nine votes!) and in Bron (50.6%) while receiving 68.0% in Vénissieux (his best commune), 62.4% in Vaulx-en-Velin, 57.6% in Pierre-Bénite, 56.3% in Oullins, 53.2% in Villeurbanne and 67.0% in Givors. Also won three communes in the Thizy area.

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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.

[JimJamUK]

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).

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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.

[Sir John Johns]

1870 Plebiscite in Seine



Yes 42.9% (33.3% of all registered voters)
No 57.1% (44.3% of all registered voters)

Nulls: 2.9% (2.3% of all registered voters)
Turnout: 79.8%

With Bouches-du-Rhône, Seine was the only French département to give the victory to the ‘no’.



The ‘no’ placed first in fourteen Parisian arrondissements and is strongly correlated with the distribution of the working-class population. See this map of the social distribution of the population by arrondissements (based on the 1872 census) where ‘workers and day laborers’ are shown in blue, ‘employees’ in green and ‘non-employees’ in orange.



The strongest arrondissements for the ‘no’ were Paris-20 (77.6%), Paris-18 (72.6%), Paris-11 (71.9%) and Paris-19 (70.2%) while its weakest were Paris-07 (35.0%) and Paris-08 (27.8%), the latter being the arrondissement with the highest share of ‘non-employees’.

Outside of Paris itself, the ‘no’ received its best performance in Puteaux, then a heavily-industrialized commune where a meeting hold a week before election day by opponents to Napoléon III attracted some 4,000 persons (there were 2,225 registered voters in Puteaux). The ‘no’ received a strong support in most of the communes neighboring Paris, with notably 54.6% in Boulogne, 60.7% in Levallois-Perret, 69.4% in Clichy, 67.4% in Saint-Ouen, 71.6% in Saint-Denis (second largest commune in term of registered voters outside of Paris with 4,500 registered voters), 64.4% in Pantin, 60.1% in Montreuil, 55.1% in Ivry-sur-Seine or 57.2% in Charenton-le-Pont. It placed also slightly ahead in the more bourgeois Vincennes (51.7%) and Neuilly-sur-Seine (50.6% with a 28-vote lead over the ‘yes’), a score due at least to some extent by legitimist voters opposed to the liberalizing measures put to plebiscite.



Meanwhile, the ‘yes’ prevailed in Aubervilliers (53.4%) - even though then already an industrial commune - in Issy (63.8%), in Montrouge (54.6%) and in Saint-Mandé (53.0%) as well as in the less urbanized part of the département, receiving some of its strongest results in communes which will be the next century communist strongholds but were then at best big villages judging by the low number of registered voters (remember, universal male suffrage had been introduced in 1848): 72.9% in Nanterre (978 registered voters), 83.5% in Drancy (149 registered voters), 92.0% in Bobigny (209 registered voters), 87.9% in Gennevilliers (468 registered voters), 68.0% in Bondy (388 registered voters) or 79.6% in Villetaneuse (98 registered voters). Best commune for the ‘yes’ was Rungis (84 registered voters) with 97.4%.



While the campaign in favor of null votes was mostly the fact of socialist and radical groups, the map suggested that at least in Seine spoiled ballots were rather cast by bourgeois and rural voters, maybe legitimists and orleanists.

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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%).