French election maps

[Hash]

I've written (and read) a lot about the working-class vote in France and I don't feel like repeating all that, but there are a few things worth keeping in mind, very quickly:

Workers who do vote are pretty heavily for the FN nowadays. The important part of the sentence is italicized. Abstention is highest among workers, and reaches heights in second-order elections, like the 2015 regional elections when nearly 60% of workers did not turn out. Even if Panzergirl does extremely well with workers next month, overall turnout will be below average. This is an important point which too few people fully realize.

The "old PCF voters supporting Le Pen" is a bullshit lazy myth invented by some morons which has been debunked by basically all academic literature on the subject. The correlation between the PCF's decline and FN's rise in the 1980s is spurious, and the FN as it grew in the 1980s attracted very few former PCF voters.

I feel as if Nonna Mayer is still the one who hit it right on the head with the idea of the niniste (neither left nor right) FN blue-collar supporter: a disillusioned, apathetic and embittered working-class person who does not recognize him-herself in 'old' left-right terms and rejects these terms. More often than not, this kind of FN voter may have had left-wing parents, but him-herself no longer identifies with the left in any way. The niniste element is very well reflected by exit polls which ask for the respondent's ideology on a left-right scale, with the FN placing far ahead with nini voters but polling at most 10% with those who self-identify as left-wing. There is, to be sure, a small base of left-wing voters, presumably more blue-collar than average, who vote FN, but it is small in comparison to the niniste element.

It is worth keeping in mind that the working-class voter in 2017 isn't the same as the working-class voter in the 1980s. The oldest (say, 65), working-class voter came of age in the late 1960s or early 1970s, while even one in his 50s would have been socialized in the mid 1980s. The limited data available suggests a pretty important age divide within the working-class vote when it comes to the FN: it does best with younger and middle-aged voters, while the oldest working-class appear to have remained more loyal to the left, although many retired workers are also voting FN in large numbers now.

Always worth keeping in mind that the class cleavage was always weaker in France than in many other European countries, particularly Scandinavia. The working-class vote was never close to being homogeneous. It wasn't in the past, it isn't today.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Always worth keeping in mind that the class cleavage was always weaker in France than in many other European countries

Yes, this is actually the main thing to remember. There are quite a few countries in Europe where if you placed a well informed individual in a random town they could probably work out its voting patterns with something like a 95% certainty. France was never like that...

[Hash]

An interesting map from 2002, for Christiane Taubira, at the time candidate of the PRG, perhaps most famous for being black and from the DOM-TOMs (namely French Guiana). She won 2.3% nationally, but benefited from a massive favourite-daughter vote in Guiana (53%) but also in the two French Caribbean territories of Guadeloupe (37%) and Martinique (28%). Her performance in metro France is very interesting as well:



In very broad terms, she had a clearly urban electorate in most of metro France, particularly in the greater Paris region. She performed relatively well (about 3%) in middle-class educated left-wing areas, as her pattern of support in the city of Lyon shows quite well. She also did relatively well in some old Radical areas in the southwest, like the Lot, Tarn-et-Garonne or Hautes-Pyrénées. However, the most important aspect of her support in metro France was her strong support among the Antillean population, which is predominantly concentrated in the Paris region, in the departments of Seine-Saint-Denis, Val-d'Oise and Val-de-Marne, which happened to be her three best departments in France besides Haute-Corse. Her best results came from low-income banlieues with the largest Antillean/black populations, like Bobigny (10%), Stains (8.3%), Sarcelles (8.5%), Garges-lès-Gonesse (8.7%), Créteil (7.2%), Évry (7.5%), Grigny (7.9%), Saint-Denis (7.8%) and so forth. This can be seen, to a much lesser extent, around Lyon where she also did well in low-income Vaulx-en-Velin and Vénissieux, which I presume have a small Antillean population. Her poor results in the quartiers nord of Marseille suggest she had little appeal to North African immigrants.

In Corsica, she wasn't supported by Émile Zuccarelli, at the time deputy/mayor of Bastia, who supported Chevènement, but she was supported by Zuccarelli's enemies, Paul Giacobbi (deputy/mayor of Venaco) and François Vendasi (senator/mayor of Furiani). Corsica being Corsica, she therefore won 21% in Venaco and 25% in Furiani; she also won first place, in one case with 65% (!), in various tiny villages in the mountains of Haute-Corse, which is hilarious. On the other hand, she got just 2.5% in Bastia.

[parochial boy]

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.

Also, one thing I have wondered about is how the hell Hollande managed to win in Cantal and Haute-Loire in 2012? I mean, you can say secularisation, but even so, there doesn't seem to be much, demographically speaking, that would give such traditionally right wing areas any reason to vote Hollande. Maybe Cantal being close enough to Correze to have a home-boy knock on, but I can't see that stretching as far as Haute-Loire

[Hash]

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.

[parochial boy]

Brilliant thanks! From a purely biased local perspective I think it is quite interesting that the 74 has become a relatively weak department for the FN, when Le Pen won there in 2002. Even the deindustrialisimg towns in the arve valley arent too strong for Le Pen, as even these have benefited from the knock on effect of Greater geneva.

Could the same néoruraux effect also be behind the same bans of greeen strength that seems to run from Haites-Alpes througt to Aveyron? The various versions of EELV seem to regularly pick up random xommunes down that way

[Zanas]

Yeah, Western Hautes-Alpes, Northwestern Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Drôme, Ardèche and Southwestern Isère are really good matches for semi-alternative green-ish or neo-left-ish candidates or alliances. Lots of neo-rurals growing organic crops, vines, or livestock there.

[parochial boy]

Sorry for more questions, on an old map, but I was going through the old posts in this fascinating thread and, this one caught my attention

Saint-Malo (2007):

Is there any explanation for the left wing vote in Paramé? That is one of the last places in Brittany I would expect to vote for the PS

[parochial boy]

So, I've done a few maps comparing the 2002 and 2017 elections, as they're superficially quite similar - with the FN making the second round, and the radical/far left scoring well in both elections. So I wanted to have a little look at how things have moved on since 2002.

The first map is taking the FN's second round result and comparing the swing towards the Le Pens, nationally the FN improved its score by 16.1%, so anything in Green swung by less, and grey swung by more:


The second map is a comparison of the first round scores of the FN against the joint far left (Hue, Besancenot, Laguiller and Gluckstein). Nationally, the FN (and I've excluded Megret's results here) exceeded the far left by 16.9% to 13.8%, so it's close enough that you can get a picture of the Commies v the fascists by department.



The last map follows on from that, in comparing Le Pen 2017 vs Mélenchon, Poutou and Arthaud combined. Le Pen got 21.3% to the combined radical left's 21.3%, so almost identical for comparing where in the country prefers the Commies or the Fascists.



Comparing the three maps, you get a pretty good picture I think of how the far left and far right have moved on in 15 years - in particular the way the far right has gained in the North East and gone backwards in big urban areas (especially Paris). A couple of other things stood out to me though - the fact the FN haven't progressed (as) much in PACA but also in the Garonne valley in comparison to other areas. Also, the Centre and Northern Burgundy have really swung hard right, not that surprising for such a rural and sparsely populated area (it's the heart of the "diagonale du vide" after all).

[Antonio the Sixth]

Yeah, you really see in these maps the rise of the "France périphérique".

[parochial boy]

Yeah, you really see in these maps the rise of the "France périphérique".

The fact that Rhòne is now a left wing department. It's just... wrong...

[Geoffrey Howe]

Bump to post a map I recently created of Charente Maritime in the first round of the 1995 presidential.

Pink - Jospin
Blue - Chirac
Turquoise - Balladur
Grey - Le Pen
Red - Hue
Purple - de Villiers



You can see the Socialist strength in La Rochelle (it would be great to get some more detailed results for the city itself - I have them for 2017 and it's interesting) and its suburbs/exurbs. You also have Socialist strength in much of the countryside near the border with the Charente; the towns up this stretch - Jonzac, Pons, Saintes, St Jean d'Angély, Matha are good for the left too.

The right's strength is on the islands where it is still strong (all communes went for Fillon), and not particularly surprising; though Île de Ré was probably considerably less touristy/Parisian than it is now because the bridge had only just been built. The right was very strong, as it traditionally is, along the Gironde; from La Tremblade down to the border with the 33. In a word, resort/seaside towns, and Royan has always been a rightwing city (61% Sarkozy). It's interesting to note that in the more urban parts of this stretch (Royan, Vaux, Meschers) the traditional right has held up well, voting as they did for Fillon; in the more rural parts to the south much of this vote has gone to Le Pen.

Finally, there is the rural stretch between Rochefort and Royan (also the A837 corridor between Rochefort and Saintes) which is traditionally good for the right and I really don't know why. Saint-Porchaire, Saint-Savinien, Beurlay - these places all voted over 55%, sometimes over 60% Chirac in the second round; over 70% in the case of Pont l'Abbé.


In general the right was split more than the left, so this map overstates the strength of the latter; you have quite a few Jospin first round communes giving Chirac over his national score in the second round. Not visible here is that de Villiers did well in the north by the Vendée border (no surprise) and along the Gironde south of Royan.

[Sir John Johns]

Tapping into the collection of old local newspapers digitized by the National Library of France, I have managed to reconstitute results (probable errors though) by canton for the départements of Finistère, Morbihan and Côtes-d’Armor (then Côtes-du-Nord) for the 1848 presidential election. I wanted to add also Ille-et-Vilaine but I only found results for Cavaignac, Bonaparte and total cast votes with the sum of Cavaignac and Bonaparte votes exceeding the total votes in several cantons and results for Hédé canton missing, so rather unusable. Share of votes I used to make the maps are slightly inflated as I have only full results for Cavaignac, Bonaparte, Ledru-Rollin and Lamartine and didn’t include the votes for Raspail, Changarnier, Bedeau and unspecified ‘diverse’, which are very incomplete but nonetheless negligible, in the sum of valid votes.

Have do my best to draw the limits of 1848 cantons (discovered that one of the commune of my Finistère canton was then a Morbihan exclave!), but some errors possible, especially with cantons splitting urban communes (Dinan, Saint-Brieuc, Brest, Lorient, Vannes). I disregarded the 166 votes cast in rade de Brest (Brest seafront) as well as the few votes cast by military in distinct polling stations.

As you may know, Finistère and Morbihan stood out of rest of France for being the only départements to give Cavaignac a majority of votes with Var and Bouches-du-Rhône. And the map of most-voted candidate by canton is very interesting because Cavaignac, the republican candidate, ironically received his best results in some of the most clerical and monarchist parts of the region (notably Léon) with Morbihan (certainly not a stronghold of republicans) being its best département nationwide with 59.8% of the votes.







This academic article (in French) provides some explanations for that paradox, at least for Finistère and Morbihan, which mostly lies in the fact that the universal (male) vote was then largely ‘directed’ by social elites (Catholic clergy, nobility and notables like the conseillers généraux elected several months before) as the population remained mostly illiterate when the name of the candidate must have been written in advance on the ballot (hence, notables organized distribution of pre-written ballots).

Part of the Catholic hierarchy in Finistère and Morbihan actually rallied the newly established republic in the hope of some social reforms (while still of course being very scared of radical popular uprising similar to the June 1848 Paris riots brutally crushed by Cavaignac), notably the bishop of Vannes and, even more, the bishop of Quimper, Joseph-Marie Gravery, who had been elected a deputy to the 1848 National Constituent Assembly and endorsed Cavaignac (who had bestowed him the Legion of Honor few weeks before the election). Also a deputy to the Constituent Assembly, Jean-Paul Daniélou, a priest from Guer and a former secretary to Chateaubriand (prominent royalist and famous writer), actively campaigned in favor of Cavaignac, explaining why its canton gave its best result (71.7%) to Cavaignac in Eastern Morbihan.

One the other way, in Morbihan, the local aristocracy refused for a large part to chose between the nephew of the guy who ordered the execution of the Duke of Enghien and imprisoned Pope Pius VII and the son of a Jacobin member of the Convention who voted for sending Louis XVI to the guillotine (also the brother of a late republican agitator close to Louis Blanc and Ledru-Rollin) leading to an important abstention that mostly favored the candidacy of Cavaignac.

I don’t really know for the Côtes-du-Nord, especially eastern Trégor which went to Bonaparte by large margins (over 85%).

Ledru-Rollin got his best results in coastal cities like Lorient (17.5% in Plœmeur canton, 12.2% in Lorient canton), Brest (7.8% in Brest-III; 6.5% in Brest-I; 3.1% in Brest-II), and Morlaix (5.0%) but also, more unexpectedly, in Ploërmel (5.8%), Sarzeau (4.2%) and in Broons (4.0%). He performed very well around the Morbihan Gulf which is probably explained by royalist voters didn’t bothering going to vote hence artificially inflating his vote.



A map of the vote for that poor Lamartine would be useless but, interestingly, he seems to over-perform in coastal areas, notably the cities of Brest (21.1% in the aforementioned rade de Brest, by far his best result in Finistère; 2.8% in Brest-I and 1.6% in Brest-III) and Morlaix (1.7%), but also in Ploubalay canton (1.6%) and Pont-l’Abbé canton (1.0%; don’t laugh this is three times his national share of vote).

[Estrella]

A work of art from AJRElectionMaps on Deviantart.

A question to people who know more than me: what happened here? I mean, I know what happened, but what explains which places resisted the Gaullist wave? It's also very interesting how non-Gaullist forces (the left, but also MRP) led in many constituencies in the first round, but were defeated by everyone consolidating behind Gaullists in the second round, even though the threshold for getting into runoff was IIRC only 5%.

[CumbrianLefty]

Over 20% of the second round vote for the PCF - and just 10 seats. That remains an incredible result.

[Sir John Johns]

My attempt to map the 1924 legislative election in Finistère accompanied by a four-post-long elaboration (yeah, I surpassed myself) on parties, candidates and results with a bit of socio-economic background thrown here and there to try explaining things when it isn’t just pure pedantry. But the world really needs to know about Georges Le Bail and Daniel Le Flanchec.

The results are coming from copies of Le Courrier du Finistère, a French-Breton bilingual weekly, more specifically from issues published in May 1924 and April 1928 (some numbers from the 1924 editions are barely decipherable but thankfully they were republished at the occasion of the 1928 legislative elections).

While most elections under the Third Republic were held using the scrutin d’arrondissement (deputies being elected in a two-round system in single-member constituencies corresponding to arrondissements or arrondissements being split into several parts) which isn’t easy to make maps on departmental level due to parties not running in all constituencies, parties running in alliance with another party in one constituency but not in another one and I don’t even speak about dissident candidacies, the legislative elections in 1919 and 1924 were held under a different system. I’m not sure to have understand everything about it but under that system deputies are elected in multi-member constituencies corresponding to départements and using a fake proportional representation that prevented a runoff (apparently still technically possible, but this didn’t happened in Finistère). Voters weren’t voting for lists but for candidates with panachage being allowed (even if results between different candidates on the lists didn’t differed that much and even if it appeared that panachage wasn’t the most common practice) with the most-voted candidates on most-voted lists being elected using a quotient. While in 1919, incomplete lists were authorized (there were only five names on the socialist list in Finistère), this was no longer the case in 1924 and each list had the exact same number of candidates than seats to be filled in the département (eleven in the case of Finistère).

As Le Courrier du Finistère is only providing the average number of votes obtained by the candidates on each list, the results are here calculated by dividing the average vote obtained by a list by the sum of the average votes obtained by all lists. As a consequence, this isn’t 100% accurate in particular in relation with average result being rounded by the newspaper but as there is no source indicating the results obtained by each 55 candidates in the 298 communes of Finistère…

Also, I guess, it is worth recalling that women couldn’t then voted in French elections nor members of the armed forces.

Anyway, very short description of the lists (I elaborate further below):

* Liste d’Union républicaine (Republican Union list): the Christian Democratic forerunner of the PDP with a (very moderate) pro-labor stance + the conservative republicans of the Republican Federation (FR) with a strong agrarian coloration + a business lobby.

* Liste républicaine d’Action économique et sociale (Economic and Social Action Republican list): a half-joke list set up by dissidents of the Union républicaine but stealing voters to the following list.

* Liste de Concentration républicaine (Republican Concentration list): the anticlerical bourgeois center-left Radical Party + the Left Republicans, a center-right republican, laïc and liberal party opposed at the same time to the most clerical/crypto-monarchist elements of the Union républicaine list and to the socialists on the following list.

* Liste du Parti socialiste (Socialist Party’s list): the socialist SFIO which had then moved towards reformist positions but was still divided about government participation as a potential partner of the Radical Party.

* Liste du Bloc ouvrier et paysan (Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc list): the list presented by the young Communist Party (PC-SFIC), by then undergoing a Bolshevization process and advocating revolutionary positions.


Results at département level were (change compared to 1919 in brackets):

Liste d’Union républicaine 43.5% (+0.2%)   6 deputies (no change)
Liste de Concentration républicaine 29.5% (-6.1%)  3 deputies (no change)
Liste du Parti socialiste 20.7% (-0.4%)   2 deputies (no change)
Liste républicaine d’Action économique et sociale 3.3% (new)
Liste du Bloc ouvrier et paysan 3.0% (new)

Unlike what happened at the national level, the right-wing list stabilized its results compared to 1919 while the list made up by the Radical Party and the Left Republicans suffered a setback even more notable when you consider that one of its reelected candidates had been elected on the right-wing list in 1919 and had only switched sides in 1923. The SFIO list stabilized its result compared to 1919 in spite of the split of the Communist Party which failed to achieve electoral breakthrough, at least on departmental level. The Economic and Social Action list was, quite predictably, a complete waste of votes, hurting mostly the Radical-led list; none of its candidates would subsequently achieved electoral success (above local level) and its instigator would even lost his seat of general councilor the following year.

[Sir John Johns]

Before elaborating on results, a way too long presentation of the five lists.

Republican Union list

It was the successor of the Republican and Democratic List of National Union which had obtained 43.3% of the votes and six out of eleven seats in 1919. It was a right-wing list made up by various conservative, Catholic, agrarian and business groups that were supportive of the ruling Bloc national, the right-wing coalition born out of the historical majority obtained by the French right in November 1919 (the famous Chambre bleu horizon which included many newly elected deputies and war veterans). The Bloc national government was led since January 1922 by Raymond Poincaré, the holder of the presidency of the Council of ministries, who by then was increasingly unpopular due to the Ruhr occupation quagmire and the double décime (a 20% increase of all taxes passed two months before the election to address the monetary and budgetary crisis combined with the rising of the maximum marginal rate of income tax from 50% to 90%, its highest rate in French history).

In its ‘profession of faith’, the Republican Union list is indicating being an electoral alliance between three different organizations:

* the Liberal and Progressive Republicans (or similar sounding names that are sometimes changing inside the same political propaganda text), a local affiliate or ally of the Republican Federation (FR), a conservative and (economically) liberal national party bringing together Catholics, nationalists and pro-business republicans. Four candidates are representing it on the list:

- Vincent Inizan [inc.], a wealthy farmer and an author in various agricultural newspapers who had served since 1919 as a deputy and since 1900 as the mayor of Kernouës, a rural commune of 650 inhabitants (population numbers are all from 1921 census) located in Léon, the northwestern part of the département and a famous conservative and clerical, quasi-theocratic, political stronghold. The descendant of juloded (well-off farmers who made a fortune in the production and commerce of linen canvas and enjoyed a great deal of social and political influence in Léon), Inizan was also the president of an equine society and one of the creators of the breeding book of the Breton draft horse.

As a deputy and a member of the agriculture commission, he had been one of the main organizers of the relocation of some 300 peasant families from Brittany to Southwest France as a way to provide workforce in depopulated areas but also to prevent social tensions, land disputes and the resultant challenge of traditional society in Léon (Finistère was the only French département whose population increased in 1919 and had one of the highest birth rate in France). The relocation was supervised by the Catholic Church and the Office Central de Landerneau, a powerful agricultural cooperative established in 1911. Federating numerous local farmers’ unions and mutual insurances, the Office Central de Landerneau was at the hands of wealthy farmers, often of aristocratic background.

- Jean-Louis Henry, a farmer and the president of the Beekeeping Union of Brittany who was serving since 1919 as the mayor of Lennon, a small rural commune of 1,500 inhabitants located in the arrondissement of Châteaulin (center of Finistère).

- Jacques Quéinnec, a notary by profession, serving since 1922 as a councilor of arrondissement for Pont-l’Abbé canton, in Pays bigouden (southwest part of Finistère). He had been decorated with the War Cross for his service during WWI, something which really mattered at that time.

- Mathurin Thomas, the mayor of Plougastel-Daoulas since 1913 and the president of the agricultural union in this commune of 7,000 inhabitants which was back then already a major producer of strawberries for both domestic and export (British) markets. Thomas also presided a local mutual insurance and was the vice-president of the federation of agricultural unions in Finistère.


* the Federation of Democratic Republicans of Finistère (FRDF), a Catholic political organization strongly influenced by the Church’s Social Teaching and dominated by former members of Le Sillon, a Christian democratic and social movement which had ended up being condemned by the pope in 1910 for its too much progressive views. The condemnation of Le Sillon by the Holy See is a fact that the local radical newspapers never missed to recall in the weeks before election as they were actually more busy attacking the ‘silloniste’ part of the rival list than the ‘liberal’ one. The FRDF was strongly associated with the L’Ouest-Éclair, a regional newspaper founded by the ‘democratic abbot’ Félix Trochu which was sympathetic to the plight of the impoverished rural and urban lower classes and reasonably critical of the Church hierarchy and the aristocratic class. Of course, he warned about the dangers of socialism and politics based on class struggle.

The two main of the leaders of the FRDF, Pierre Trémintin and Paul Simon, both appearing on the Republican Union list would played an important role in the foundation of the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) in November 1924. The first relevant christian-democrat party in France, the PDP is the forerunner of the post-WWII MRP.

Four candidates of the FRDF appeared on the Republican Union list:

- Paul Simon [inc.], holding the top spot on the list, was a lawyer registered at the bar of Brest, the largest city of Finistère (74,000 inhabitants in 1921) with a large working class population due to the presence of a major naval base combined with an arsenal and a military shipyard (Arsenal de Brest). After having been elected a municipal councilor in Brest in 1912, Simon became the following year, at only 26, a deputy when elected in a by-election. He had been reelected in 1914 and 1919 and would served in the National Assembly until 1940. One of the 80 parliamentarians who refused in July 1940 to give full powers to Pétain, he would joined the Resistance and became a MRP senator after the Liberation. He was additionally the founder of a local weekly newspaper, Le Démocrate.

- Victor Balanant [inc.], the son of a carpenter, became himself a worker in the Arsenal where, according to the description made by Le Petit Breton (the newspaper in which he regularly wrote), ‘he led there for several years a stanch and difficult fight, opposing to collectivist and revolutionary class struggle theories a robust democratic doctrine of social progress in accordance with order and collaboration between classes’. After having served in the army during WWI and being decorated with the Legion of Honor, Balanant had been elected a deputy in 1919, at 31. He would joined the Resistance during WWII and died in 1944 for the liberation of France.

- Jean Jadé, a lawyer in Brest and a WWI veteran decorated with the War Cross and the Legion of Honor, was elected a deputy in 1919, at 29, and became in the National Assembly’s a member of the commission for social insurances and provision. In 1922, he had been also elected a general councilor for the canton of Pont-Croix, in Cap Sizun (southwest Finistère).

- Pierre Trémintin, the president of the FRDF and a lawyer registered at the bar of Quimper, had served as a general councilor for Plouescat canton since 1904 and as the mayor of Plouescat, his birthplace, since 1912. A commune of 3,500 inhabitants, Plouescat is located in the so-called Ceinture dorée (‘Golden Belt’), an economically vibrant (especially compared to other rural parts of Finistère) major production area of vegetables (onions, cauliflowers, artichokes) destined for domestic market as well as for export market (England and Wales where the so-called Johnnies went yearly to sell door to door the onions produced in Roscoff area). A candidate on the 1919 right-wing list, Trémintin had failed to get elected a deputy but was successful in 1924. His subsequent career mirrored the one of Simon: reelected a deputy until 1940, he voted against giving full powers to Pétain and served as a MRP senator after WWII.


* The Federation of Industrial and Commercial Groups of Finistère, an obvious lobby for major economic interests, was represented by three candidates on the Republican Union list:

- Auguste Arthur, a commodity broker and the president of the chamber of commerce of Morlaix, a city of 14,000 inhabitants and an important administrative (sub-prefecture) and economic center in Trégor (northeastern Finistère). Morlaix was notably the seat of one of the largest tobacco factory in France, the state-owned Manufacture des tabacs which employed mostly women workers.

- Louis Rivière, a member of the chamber of commerce of Quimper and an industrialist in Quimperlé, a sub-prefecture of 9,000 inhabitants located in the southeastern part of Finistère, where he co-owned the Savary-Rivière factories specialized in the production of agricultural equipment.

- Louis Coïc, a wholesale wine merchant in Carhaix, a small town of 4,000 inhabitants located in the hilly center-eastern part of Finistère, on the boundary with Morbihan, that had been an important railway junction since the 1890s. The only of the three nominees of the Federation of Industrial and Commercial Groups with an actual political experience, Coïc had served as a municipal councilor in Carhaix while also chairing the Association of Veterans of his canton. Having lost a leg during the Great War, Coïc had been awarded the War Cross.


The most-voted candidate was Inizan who, while holding only the second spot on the list, outpaced the top candidate, Paul Simon, who was also elected, as well as the three other nominees of the FRDF. The sixth and last seat went to Henry who, holding only the tenth spot on the list, managed to receive more votes than Arthur (appearing fifth spot). Arthur, who was also outpaced by Trémintin (sixth spot). Both Henry and Trémintin were elected due to having a highest average vote than candidates ranked above on the list. Consequently, none of the three candidates presented by the business lobby got a seat of deputy. Possibly relevant was the fact that Inizan and Henry (but also Thomas who, placed at the last spot on the list, was still the second less-voted candidate) were pictured wearing the Breton hat on photos published to illustrate the Republican Union’s profession of faith published in conservative-friendly newspaper making them more ‘authentic’ than the big industrialists.



Economic and Social Action Republican list

This list was set up at the last minute by Henri Février, the right-wing general councilor for the canton of Châteaulin since 1919. The seat of the said canton, located in central Finistère, was a small sub-prefecture of 4,000 inhabitant as well as an important transport operating as both a river port on the Nantes-Brest canal (whose activity was then shrinking, few years before the complete end of river transport in its waters) and a railway junction. A wine and alcohol merchant by profession as well as the president of an equine society, Février was disappointed to not have been selected on the Republican Union list and consequently decided to set up his own list. Registered at the last moment, it faced several problems notably, if the Le Finistère newspaper is to be believed, a candidate changing his mind after the registration of the list and trying to get his name removed, to no avail. By the way, Le Finistère is also hilariously writing that the importance of Février is ‘inversely proportional to his corpulence’ (I guess he was morbidly obese, then).

The list of Février’ presented itself as supportive of the Poincaré government while also hypocritically denouncing in its electoral propaganda the ‘petty infighting of factions and persons’ and ‘the old parties, more concerned about the interested conquest of power than national reconstruction’. It also focused its demands on the defense of the interests of families and veterans.

The composition of the list was mostly a collection of has-been, freaks and nobodies, labeled as a ‘yellow list’ by radical newspapers and largely gnored by the catholic press.

In addition of Février (holding the #3 spot), candidates of some relevance included:

- Gabriel Miossec (#1 spot), an industrialist and a former center-right deputy for Châteaulin between 1900 and 1906. He succeeded in that office to his own father, Yves-Gabriel Miossec, a deputy in 1898-1900 who had been previously a councilor of arrondissement for the canton of Châteaulin. Nevertheless, by 1924 Miossec had been out of politics for almost twenty years and had moved to Audierne, a port of 4,000 inhabitants in Cap Sizun and a major center of sardine fishery and cannery.

- François-Louis Guillou, a wine merchant and a farmer who served as the mayor of Guiclan, a rural commune of 3,000 inhabitants in eastern Léon, since 1919 after a first term in 1902-03. Guillou was also serving as a general councilor for Taulé canton since 1919.

- Jean de Saisy de Kerampuil, an aristocrat and an industrialist residing in Riec-sur-Bélon, a coastal commune of 4,500 inhabitants in the arrondissement of Quimperlé (southeastern Finistère) and already a famous center of oyster production. The father of Saisy was a deputy for Finistère and the mayor of Plouguer (a commune now merged with Carhaix) in the late nineteenth century while his uncle used to serve as a senator for the département of Côtes-du-Nord (present-day Côtes-d’Armor). Saisy was very involved in the Breton regionalist movement and enjoyed ties with ‘Druidic’ associations, giving in 1926 the direction of his Breton Consortium company to François Jaffrennou, a druid, a bard and an advocate of Breton language renewal. The following year, Saisy would organized a pan-Celtic cultural festival in Riec with delegates from Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, Manx and *check notes* Occitania and Flanders. The main motivation of Saisy was apparently to conclude contracts with investors from the British Isles to revive his faltering kaolin production business. This didn’t work and Saisy went bankrupt the following year and had to leave his castle after having unsuccessfully barricaded in it to oppose his expulsion.

- Léopold Maissin, a former councilor of arrondissement for the canton of Landerneau as well as a former radical mayor of Le Relecq-Kerhuon (his son succeeded him in both offices). Le Relecq-Kerhuon is an industrialized suburb of Brest where was located the state-owned Moulin-Blanc powder mill. Maissin used to be the director of the Moulin-Blanc until 1911 when removed in the wake of a nationwide scandal over the explosion of two battleships in Toulon. The deadly explosions were blamed on faulty powder produced in Finistère and Maissin got involved in a nasty dispute with Albert Louppe, the director of the Pont-de-Buis powder mill (then located in the commune of Quimerc’h, arrondissement of Châteaulin) who was also the mayor of Quimerc’h. Both men, who were hence also political rivals, accused each other of being responsible of the explosions. The scandal was ‘resolved’ by the removal of both men from the direction of their respective powder mill but, while the affair broke Maissin’s political career, it didn’t prevented Louppe of becoming shortly thereafter the president of the general council of Finistère, a deputy and, by 1924, a senator.

- Joseph Pellé, a former municipal councilor in Brest.

The list is completed with the president of an association of large families, a French navy captain, a man presented as both a merchant and a war invalid, the ‘socialist’ president of the bakery union of South Finistère who tried to withdraw his name from the list after he learned that de Saisy was on it and finally, holding the last spot, a miller of Châteaulin named Joseph Février I strongly suspected being a relative of Henri.

The most voted candidate of the list was Guillou (with a rather large advance of 247 votes over the second most-voted candidate). Février would be defeated the following year in his reelection bid for his seat of general councilor.

[Sir John Johns]

Republican Concentration list

Running under the same name than in 1919 (when it won 35.6% of the votes and three seats), the Republican Concentration list was made up by a center-left to center-right alliance between two political groups:

* The Radical-Socialist, Radical and Republican Party, generally referred to as the Radical Party, a bourgeois center-left to center party (even if more and more pushed to the right by the growing Marxist parties in the 1920s) which advocated republican and laïc (sometimes bordering excessive anticlericalism) positions while defending in economic matters liberal to reformist orientations and the defense of private ownership. The party of notables by excellence, part of most governments of the Third Republic, its political orientation has been quite accurately described by the saying: Radicals are like radish, red on the outside, white in the inside and always close to ‘the butter plate’ (l’assiette au beurre, a colloquial term referring to pork barrel).

The Radical Party received six spots on the list:

- Georges Le Bail [inc.], the top candidate and the local leader of the Radical Party, was a lawyer and a large landowner from Plozévet, a commune in Pays Bigouden of 4,600 inhabitants and the home turf of the Le Bail family that hold there the office of mayor without interruption from 1878 to 1952. Georges Le Bail had been elected a councilor for the canton of Plogastel-Saint-Germain in 1895 before succeeding his father as mayor of Plozévet in 1898. Constantly reelected in both offices, he however fought a harsh battle to keep his seat of general councilor in 1920, when facing the right-wing farmer-turned-canned-food-industrialist Jean Hénaff (of the Pâté Hénaff fame) who was himself hailing from Pouldreuzic, a commune of 2,300 inhabitants neighboring Plozévet. Indeed, the election opposing both men was nullified and repeated no less than four times in two years over allegations of vote-buying and intimidation of voters. Le Bail finally prevailed in 1922 but would be defeated by Hénaff in 1925.

Additionally to his local offices, Le Bail was serving as a deputy since 1902 (reelected in 1906, 1910, 1914 and 1919) and managed to get his own son being elected a deputy in another constituency of Finistère in 1914. Said son died in 1918 but another son would also served as a deputy of Finistère between 1932 and 1940, elected in the constituency previously held by Le Bail, Sr. A staunch anticlerical but married to a devout Catholic and the daughter of an architect specialized in the restoration of religious buildings, Le Bail had voted in favor of the separation of church and state, one of the few Breton deputies to do so. He also aggressively promoted public and secular education in his commune which later became a case study for its exceptionally high proportion of natives with a higher education degree.

In spite of his aversion to collectivism, Le Bail advocated the constitution of a list with the SFIO but his efforts were sabotaged by the Left Republicans.

- Jules Le Louédec, a lawyer who was part of the justice ministerial staff in the 1880s and had already served as a radical deputy between 1909 and 1914. A general councilor for the canton of Quimperlé since 1901, he served as mayor of that town since 1919 after a first term in 1904-08. He additionally was the president of the agriculture society of the arrondissement.

- Henri Croissant, a merchant and a farmer decorated with the War Cross who had been elected the mayor of Scaër, a large rural commune of 6,500 inhabitants in the arrondissement of Quimperlé. In spite of being remote from major urban centers, Scaër was the seat of the Cascadec paper mills, owned by the Bolloré familly and reported to have employed some 700 workers in 1930. In conjunction with the Odet paper mills of Ergué-Gabéric (near Quimper) also owned by the Bolloré family, it provided in the interwar period most of the rolling paper consumed in the United States at a time when France was the world largest producer of such commodity. Croissant additionally served as a councilor of arrondissement for Scaër canton since 1919 and as the vice president of the Equine Society of Southern Finistère.

- Yves Le Febvre, then serving as a justice of peace in Plouescat, was a writer and the editor of La Pensée bretonne, a literary magazine advocating strong anticlerical views as well as pushing for the abandonment of the Breton language in favor of French language. Six months after the election, Le Febvre would published La Terre des prêtres (‘The Land of the Priests’), an anticlerical novel depicting the almighty power exerted by the fanatical and moral bankrupt clergy in Léon. Its publication triggered protests and lawsuits against Le Febvre on behalf of Catholic priests from Léon who felt insulted. Before joining the Radical Party in 1911, Le Febvre, who was born into a bourgeois family of Morlaix, had started a political career as a pro-Alfred Dreyfus activist and as the member of a succession of socialist parties: the French Worker Party (POF), the Socialist Party of France (PsdF) and finally the SFIO. He was a candidate of that party for an unsuccessful bid for deputy in 1906 before being a socialist municipal councilor in Morlaix in 1908.

- Yves Le Morvan, a wine merchant and a WWI veteran decorated with the Legion of Honor, was serving since 1919 as a councilor of arrondissement for Saint-Pol-de-Léon canton and as the president of the Morlaix arrondissement council. Since 1920, he was additionally elected the first mayor of Santec, a maritime commune of 2,000 inhabitant created from territories taken to Roscoff and Saint-Pol-de-Léon.

- Paul Cloarec, a navy officer decorated with the Legion of Honor who was serving since 1919 as the mayor of Ploujean, a Breton-speaking rural commune of 3,000 inhabitants neighboring Morlaix (Ploujean would be incorporated into Morlaix in 1960). Cloarec was himself the son of a former mayor of Morlaix as well as the brother of the former Émile Cloarec, once a mayor of Ploujean and a left republican deputy from Finistère (1901-14).


* The Left Republicans, a term referring to the members of what was then officially called the Democratic and Social Republican Party (PRDS), a moderate, republican, liberal and pro-business center-right loosely organized party generally remembered under its subsequent name, the Democratic Alliance (AD).

The leader of the PRDS at national level was then Poincaré but the local branch in Finistère appeared to be slightly less right-wing and less open to collaborate with the Catholic and reactionary organizations, questioning the actual commitment of their members to the Republic. While initially supportive of the Bloc national, the Finistère branch of the PRDS had became uncomfortable with the policies of the right-wing coalition in the areas of religion (continuation of the concordat in Alsace-Moselle, even if all deputies from Finistère bar Le Bail and the two socialist ones had voted in November 1920 in favor of the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with the Holy See), finances (double décime) and, especially it seems, foreign affairs (hard line against Germany and the January 1923 occupation of the Ruhr to get ‘guarantees’ for the payment of the war indemnities) as the local party had among its ranks friends of sympathizers of Aristide Briand, the leader of the center-left Republican-Socialist Party (PSR) and a rival of Poincaré, who was advocating improved relations with Germany.

In April 1924, the local PRDS leader, the deputy Maurice Bouilloux-Lafont, who had already took his distances with the Poincaré government, maneuvered to prevent the inclusion of his party on the Republican Union list after he had failed to sideline the openly clerical elements to appear on it. Instead, Bouilloux-Lafont brokered a renewal of the 1919 Republican Concentration alliance with the Radicals but, at the same time, opposed and sabotaged the efforts of Le Bail to add the SFIO on the Radical Party-PRDS list. Bouilloux-Lafont’s shenanigans were successful and he obtained what he wanted: a republican, laïc, moderate and – in name only – left-wing list excluding both clericalist fake republicans and socialist covert revolutionaries. But the political positioning of the Republican Concentration list was then particularly ambiguous and unclear as it included at the same time former allies of Poincaré allergic to socialists while still open to integrate a center-right government and radicals favorable to a Cartel des gauches government with the SFIO, the PSR and other left-wing parties.

After the elections, Bouilloux-Lafont would in a first step leave the PRDS caucus (‘Left Republicans’) to seat in the more centrist caucus of the so-called Radical Left (a center-right parliamentary group grossly speaking made up by the right of the Radical Party and the left of the PRDS) and got elected a vice-president of the National Assembly with the votes of left-wing deputies. However, he would later, quite predictably, broke with the new Cartel des gauches government, voted against the suppression of credits to the French embassy to the Holy See, provoked the fall of the Painlevé government in November 1925 and finally welcomed in July 1926 the return of Poincaré at the helm of the government as the head of a broad coalition ranging from the FR to the Radicals and the PRS but explicitly opposed to (and by) the SFIO, spelling the end of the Cartel des gauches.

The five Left Republican candidates appearing on the Republican Concentration list were:

- Maurice Bouilloux-Lafont [inc.], the scion of a family of bankers from Seine-et-Oise and himself a banker who, after his wedding with the heir of a wealthy family of Quimper, had settled in Finistère where he started a political career by firstly being elected the mayor of Bénodet in 1912. A busy seaside resort of 1,300 inhabitants in the arrondissement of Quimper, Bénodet was frequented by the French bourgeois society of the time. In 1914, Bouilloux-Lafont was additionally elected a deputy in 1914 (reelected in 1919 on the Republican Concentration list) and he was also serving as a general councilor for Concarneau canton since 1919. In the National Assembly, he served as the secretary of the house and as the rapporteur for the war budget.

After the fraudulent bankruptcy of the Aéropostale aviation company that ruined the familial bank and tarnished his reputation, Bouilloux-Lafont would lost his seat in 1932 and ended his political career as the minister of state (prime minister) of the principality of Monaco, a seaside resort of a better standing than Bénodet.

- Charles Daniélou [inc.], a politician with an interesting career. Daniélou was the son of a staunch anticlerical and avowed atheist wine merchant who served as the republican mayor of Douarnenez (an important fishing port of 12,200 inhabitants in 1921 as well as a major center of sardine cannery). But, when moving to Paris in the late 1890s to pursue a literary career, the young Daniélou converted there to Catholicism and attended nationalist and anti-Dreyfusard political circles. He notably joined the far-right French Homeland League, becoming its delegate for Western France. Coming back to Finistère in the late 1900s to jump into election politics, Daniélou choose to settle in Locronan, a tiny historical town of 700 inhabitants which has been used as a shot location for dozens of swashbuckler movies (beginning as early as 1921 with an adaption of the Three Musketeers), ignoring Douarnenez, too much left-wing to enable him being elected there; the great-grandfather of Daniélou had been a mayor of Locronan under Napoléon I. Elected a municipal councilor of the town in 1908, Daniélou was elected its mayor in 1912. In the meantime he had been elected in 1910 a deputy to the National Assembly (at only 32) when running on a nationalist platform, but lost his seat four years later.

Due to his experience as a soldier during WWI and his new friendship and association with Aristide Briand (who had found him a job in the foreign ministry as head of the press office), Daniélou rapidly drifted towards center-left positions and tried in 1919 to get nominated on the Republican Concentration list. His name was however vetoed by Le Bail, so it was as a candidate of the right-wing Republican and Democratic List of National Union that Daniélou came back to the Parliament that same year. Serving as a close collaborator of Briand and as a high commissioner for propaganda and French expansion aboard, Daniélou officially joined the PRDS in 1923 and managed to have his name appearing on the Republican Concentration list for the 1924 elections. Like Bouilloux-Lafont, he would seated in the Radical Left caucus after his reelection.

Anecdotally, Daniélou’s son would be a renowned theologian, a cardinal and a member of Académie française who died in 1974 in pretty embarrassing circumstances.

- Yves Guillemot, a physician, was serving as the general councilor for Lanmeur canton, in Trégor (a stronghold of Republicanism), since 1910, and as mayor of Lanmeur (2,100 inhabitant) since 1911. He would later joined the Radical Party and be elected a senator (1927-39) but lost his seat of general councilor in 1934 when defeated by the 25-year-old SFIO candidate and future minister François Tanguy-Prigent as Trégor was increasingly trending further left.

- Victor Le Gorgeu, a physician and one of the main shareholders of the La Dépêche de Brest local daily newspaper. A general councilor for Brest-I canton since 1919, Le Gorgeu would be elected the mayor of Brest in 1929, ending then a seventeen-year-long rule of the SFIO over the city.

- Amédée Belhommet, an engineer and industrialist in Landerneau, a small city of 8,000 inhabitants located 25 kilometers east to Brest with a small industrial tradition (a steam engine factory in the 1820s-1850s and a sizable textile factory active between 1821 and 1895). Belhommet is certainly a relative (the son?) of the namesake politician who served as mayor of Landerneau between 1878 and 1894.


As a demonstration of how ambiguous the political orientation of the Republican Concentration list was, the newspapers supporting it (like Le Bail’s Le Citoyen) were very careful to not directly criticize Poincaré, who remained largely untouchable due to his role of president of the Republic during the Great War. They instead focused their attacks on the FRDF and clericals, portraying them as false friends of Poincaré (the right-wing press did exactly the same thing but when discussing of the Republican Concentration list) and publishing previous declarations of the head of government referring to the clericals as ‘right-wing demagogues’ and ‘supporters of anarchy’. They went as far as pretending that, had Poincaré supported a list in Finistère, it wouldn’t had been the Republican Union one. All of that while, at the same time, trashing the record of the Bloc national on the debt (claiming the internal debt increased from 170 to 273 billions and the external debt from 42 to 154 billions between 1919 and 1924), on the tax increases and on the foreign policy (mentioning that Germany paid only 850 million on the 25 billions in war indemnities, contradicting the ‘Germany will pay’ slogan of the Bloc national).

Also, Le Bail’s newspaper tried to weaponize the figure of Joan of Arc (canonized three years earlier) to attack the Bloc national and pretend the Maid of Orleans would have opposed the right-wing list: ‘the true republicans will have with them the tender Jehanne, daughter of the people, betrayed by the grandees, burned at stake by the Church and Bishop Cauchon. On 11 May, Joan of Arc will give the French people victory’.


The Republican Concentration list got only three candidates elected as deputies: Le Bail (the most-voted candidate), Bouilloux-Lafont and Daniélou. Still, Le Citoyen was celebrating the nationwide victory of the Cartel des gauches by proclaiming that ‘on 11 May, Joan of Arc once again saved France’.

[Sir John Johns]

Socialist Party list

This was the list presented by the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO), a socialist party founded in 1905 by the unification of the two main Marxist and socialist parties in France. By 1919, the SFIO had toned down the revolutionary rhetoric and moved towards more reformist position, especially in Brittany where it tried to appeal to small farmers who made up a large part of the electorate. Tellingly, in its copies from April and May 1924, the local party’s newspaper, Le Cri du peuple, is reproducing a 1909 speech from Jules Guesde in which the Socialist leader drew a distinction between the ‘capitalist ownership’ and the ‘small peasant ownership’ and pledged to only expropriated the former. Le Cri du peuple also published each week the same cartoon depicting the French taxpayer being literally crushed in a press as a way to denounce the high taxes introduced by the Bloc national.

Such political drift had been accelerated by the December 1920 Tours Congress when the majority of the SFIO voted in favor of joining the Lenin-sponsored Communist International and left to found the French Section of the Communist International (PC-SFIC), leaving the right-wing minority of the SFIO in charge of the old party. The question of government participation, as a potential coalition partner of the Radical Party, resurfaced and was hotly debated inside the party; it wasn’t until 1936 and the Popular Front, however, than the SFIO would joined again a government (it had been previously part of national union ministries between 1914 and 1917).

In Finistère, after having been temporarily weakened by the Communist split which took away most of the rank-and members but not many elected officials, the SFIO quickly rebuilt itself around its network of local elected officials in the largest cities, particularly in Brest which was home to the biggest section. The weight of Brest’s section is reflected in the composition of the 1924’s Socialist Party list in which members hailing from the département’s largest city got the lion’s share of the candidacies.

The eleven candidates were:

- Émile Goude [inc.], a former mechanic in the French Navy turned a clerk in the Arsenal of Brest who, after having been elected a municipal councilor in Brest in 1904, became the first socialist deputy in Brittany in 1910 (reelected in 1914 and 1919). Also a general councilor for Brest-II canton, Goude was also the founder and director of Le Cri du peuple socialist weekly newspaper. A partisan of government participation, Goude would later be involved in a pretty nasty dispute with other socialist leaders in Finistère which ended into his expulsion from the ranks of the SFIO in 1929.

- Hippolyte Masson [inc.], an employee in the state-run Post and Telegraphs and a local leader of the postal workers’ union, had been elected a deputy in 1919. Before that, he had been successively a municipal councilor in Brest in 1904, a general councilor for Brest-III canton in 1910 and the second socialist mayor of Brest (after Victor Aubert in 1904-08) from 1912 to 1920. In that post, he displayed pacifist positions in the period preceding the Great War and got fined for it. Masson would be reelected until 1936 and, after having been active in the Resistance, would served as mayor of Morlaix between 1945 and 1947.

- Léon Nardon, an employee in the tax administration, was serving as the mayor of Brest since 1919, after having been elected a municipal councilor of that city the same year. His refusal to authorize a parade of the right-wing Union nationale des combattants (UNC) in the streets of Brest had led to his suspension for a year by the prefect of the département in 1920.

- Fernand Le Goïc, a teacher who had previously served as the first socialist mayor of Douarnenez (1919-21) until he lost his majority in the municipal council due to a series of by-elections and was defeated by the PC-SFIC candidate when the new municipal council proceeded to the election of a new mayor. By 1924, Le Goïc had moved to Brest.

- Guillaume Chatel, a watchmaker in Morlaix and the mayor of this city since 1919 after having served as a municipal councilor since 1912.

- Michel Le Bars, a fisherman who was serving as the SFIO mayor of Audierne since 1908 and as a councilor of arrondissement for Pont-Croix canton.

- Guillaume Messager, a high school professor in Brest where he was serving as the first deputy mayor since 1919.

- Auguste Quiniou, a sailor turned a clerk in the French Navy administration and the chief editor of Le Cri du peuple who was serving since 1919 as a municipal councilor and since 1920 as the third deputy mayor in Brest.

- Pierre Postollec, a retired farmer in Carhaix, serving as a municipal councilor in that commune.

- Guillaume Quérou, a farmer in Plourin (today Plourin-lès-Morlaix), a rural commune neighboring Morlaix which had been historically the seat of small flax scutching industry by then moribund.

- François Le Maigre, a pensioner acting as the secretary of the SFIO section in Rosporden, a small town of 2,400 inhabitants located 11 kilometers northeast of Concarneau which, despite its low population, was already a local minor industrial center (vegetable and fish cannery, shoe-making, distilleries of cider and chouchen mead, and, from the 1930s, production of beeswax, candles and polish).


Goude and Masson were both reelected but no other socialist candidates won a seat of deputy.



Workers’ and Peasants Bloc list

The list presented by the Communist Party-French Section of the Communist International (PC-SFIC) which was founded during the 1920 Tours Congress by a majority of the SFIO delegates who were supportive of Leninism. However, it had rapidly blew membership over forced ‘Bolshevization’, purges and exclusions (mirroring the ones happening in the Soviet mother party), legal proceedings engaged against its members who had engaged into strikes or clandestine activities and disagreements over the political strategy which was decided in Moscow and didn’t take into accounts the French realities. The low point of the PC-SFIC would be reached in the late 1920s with the ‘class against class’ approach which led to rejection of alliance or collaboration with the SFIO, for the sole benefit of the right-wing parties (Le Bail would lost his parliamentary seat in 1928 to a much more conservative candidate due to the Communist candidate being forced to maintain his candidacy in the runoff); by then, the PC-SFIC would have basically turned into a political sect.

As a consequence of internal disagreements and purges, the Finistère PC-SFIC branch, which had rallied a majority of the SFIO section, lost half of its membership between 1920 and 1921 and again halved its membership between 1921 and 1922. As a consequence, it had to terminate in 1922 the publication of the party’s local weekly newspaper, Germinal de Brest to be replaced by the bimonthly La Bretagne communist (a more generic publication covering in the same edition Finistère, Morbihan, Ille-et-Vilaine, Côtes-du-Nord and Mayenne) that the party was also considering in 1924 to terminate due to acute financial problems. The PC-SFIC was also then engaged into a harsh fight with the anarchists to decide of the control of the CGTU union.

In spite of this pretty dire situation, the Communist Party had managed to build a small electoral base in Finistère but would struggled to significantly expand it (the electoral breakthrough would only happened in the 1930s). It happened to have already had at least two mayors in Finistère: in Huelgoat, a commune of 2,000 inhabitants in the Monts-d’Arrée (an area characterized by an early de-Christianization phenomenon, a demographic decline and an important emigration towards the Parisian area or even the United States), the SFIO mayor had joined the Communist Party at the time of its creation only to leave it in 1922; in Douarnenez, the communist candidate, Sébastien Velly, had been elected mayor by the municipal council in July 1921.


Tellingly, the names of the candidates on the list of the Workers’ and Peasants Bloc list weren’t specified in the electoral propaganda and were ranked on the ballot according to the alphabetic order of their surnames. Notable fact: the average age of the candidates was 36.

Candidates were:

- Jean Autret, technically occupying the #1 spot on the list, a worker in the Moulin Blanc powder mill in Le Relecq-Kerhuon and leading there the local CGTU branch.

- Sébastien Velly, an upholsterer who had been court-martialed in 1917 for desertion and was serving as the mayor of Douarnenez since 1921.

- Daniel Le Flanchec, arguably the biggest name of the list, then holding the position of departmental secretary of the party. A very colorful figure with an extraordinary life, Le Flanchec was a one-eyed former sailor who had served during the 1901 China expedition against the Boxers but turned socialist at the end of his service in the French Navy. After a stint in the SFIO and several stays in prison, he was expelled from the socialist party and became involved in the anarchist-syndicalist circles of Brest. Having now anti-police slogans tattooed on both hands, he wrote several articles in L’Anarchie and praised the deeds of the Bonnot Gang (motorized bandits passing as anarchists in the Parisian region). Having returned in the SFIO, Le Flanchec advocated the adhesion to the Communist International and followed the majority during the Tours Congress, becoming a leading member of the Finistère branch of the PC-SFIC.

At the time of the 1924 election, Le Flanchec was a market trader in Lambézellec, a rapidly growing faubourg of Brest (18,800 inhabitants in 1921) dubbed as ‘the most populated rural commune in France’ as it had kept a rural character with only 7% of its population living in an urban-dwelling. Small factories and distilleries were neighboring farms and a former barrack of the commune had been used to house thousands of U.S. soldiers between 1917 and 1919 who, when leaving, abandoned behind them a lot of material that was the object of trafficking (see the infamous Seznec affair – the 1923 mysterious disappearance and presumed murder of a Finistère councilor general reportedly involved in the sale of former U.S. military cars and trucks to the Soviet Union). Previously a local hotbed of anarchism, Lambézellec was governed by a SFIO municipality since 1912.

- Jacques Caugant, an electrician elected in 1919 as a SFIO municipal councilor for Saint-Marc commune, a low-income faubourg of Brest housing notably the workers of the Arsenal with a population of 12,000 inhabitants. Like Lambézellec and the neighboring commune of Saint-Pierre-Quilbignon, Saint-Marc would be merged with Brest in 1945 to constitute the ‘greater Brest’ commune.

- Pierre Camblan, a metal worker in the Arsenal of Brest (where he was the vice-president of the CGTU section) residing in Lambézellec.

- Guillaume Cossec, a fisherman of Douarnenez serving there as a municipal councilor since 1919 (elected firstly as a SFIO candidate).

- Félix Dubessy, a carpenter of Beuzec-Conq and the secretary of the CGTU local branch in that commune of 4,000 inhabitants neighboring Concarneau, the major fishing port and center of fish cannery industry with a population of 6,000 inhabitants. Ruled by a SFIO municipality between 1911 and 1919, Concarneau was experiencing since the 1900s a sharp economic downturn and a noticeable demographic decline (having lost almost 2,000 inhabitants between 1906 and 1921).

- Claude Guivarch, a retired worker on the Arsenal of Brest who was serving as a municipal councilor in Lambézellec since 1912. Oddly enough, Guivarch made a suicide attempt just few days before election day and would died, presumably from injuries, in August 1924.

- Albert Hernot, a carpenter in Landerneau who later emigrated to Paris region and resurfaced in 1937 as a municipal councilor in Athis-Mons (then in Seine-et-Oise, today in Essonne) when then working as a railway employee.

- François Le Brusq, an employee in Brest and then the administrative secretary of the PC-SFIC departmental section.

- Jérôme Quéméré, a WWI veteran working as both a bookseller in Quimper after having been a farmer in Elliant, a rural commune of 4,000 inhabitants located at a dozen of kilometers from Quimper. Quéméré would be subsequently expelled from the PC-SFIC in 1925 over alleged ‘fractionalism’.


The most-voted candidate on the list (which got no elected candidates) was Le Flanchec, who received some 140 votes more than the second most-voted candidate, Velly.

The subsequent political career of Le Flanchec needs to be mentioned. After the brutal death of Velly two months after the election, Le Flanchec moved to Douarnenez where he was elected the new mayor of the city in October 1924, in part helped by his oratory skills, his flamboyant style (using both Breton and French slang in his speeches) and his ability to connect with fishermen and workers of the sardine canneries (the latter being predominantly women as male workers only accomplished welding). The month following Le Flanchec’s election broke out the historical strike in the sardine canneries of Douarnenez when sardine packers who worked in dreadful and dangerous conditions for a poverty wage demanded wage increases. Started by the female sardine packers (penn sardin), the movement was joined by fishermen, encouraged by Le Flanchec and supported by a national fundraising campaign backed by both Communist and Socialist deputies. Lasting for 46 days, the strike concluded with the capitulation of the cannery industrialists, forced to bow to the demands of the strikers after Le Flanchec had barely survived an assassination attempt by strikebreakers in a tavern of Douarnenez. The criminal act totally discredited the employers’ organizations (in stark contrast with how the Communist-led strike had remained within the law, even after the attempted murder on Le Flanchec which could have triggered riots) and cemented the stature of the Communist mayor of Douarnenez as a political martyr. In May 1925, Le Flanchec was triumphantly reelected when heading a list including notably Charles Tillon (a future leader of the Communist Resistance) and Joséphine Pencalet, a widow working as a sardine packer who became the first elected woman in Brittany. While ineligible, Pencalet served for six months in the municipal council until the Council of State nullified her election.

The remaining part of Le Flanchec’s political life was incredibly messy. Le Flanchec was reelected a mayor in a landslide in 1929 and in 1935, in part because his social housing programs, but faced both times, in addition to right-wing opponents, concurrent lists made up by left-wingers and Communist dissidents, disillusioned with the growing authoritarianism and the suspicious enrichment of Le Flanchec.

Having became more and more at odds with the party leadership, Le Flanchec resigned his PC-SFIC membership in April 1936. The following year, when heading a list made up by former communists, radicals and right-wingers and endorsed by the Catholic press and the local industrialists, Le Flanchec was once again reelected mayor of Douarnenez. After a brief stint in the fascist and pro-Hitler French Popular Party (PPF) of Jacques Doriot (a similar figure to Le Flanchec by some aspects: a former leader of the PC-SFIC in the 1920s, the mayor of a working-class city – Saint-Denis – and a ‘political martyr’, for Doriot due to his frequent stays in prison in the 1920s, notably for his opposition to the Rif War on anti-colonialist grounds), Le Flanchec appeared to have came back to vaguely left-wing positions. Still, in February 1940 he re-renamed the street he had himself previously renamed as Louise Michel Street as the Marshal Pétain Street. In June 1940, as Germans were entering Douarnenez, he boldly refused to remove the French flag from the pediment of the Douarnenez town hall as demanded by the new occupation authorities, leading to his immediate removal from office. Arrested in December 1941 for ‘communist propaganda’ after having been denounced by his aristocratic mistress, Le Flanchec perished in March 1944 in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

[Sir John Johns]

Now, trying to explain some results:



Well, obviously the Republican Union list won by colossal margins in Léon, the stronghold of clericalism in Finistère where the recteurs (parish priests), coming from julod families, exerted a considerable influence and were able to even challenge the authority of the Church upper hierarchy and the aristocracy, as illustrated by the 1897 by-election in the third constituency of Brest when the ‘republican’ abbot Hippolyte Garaud defeated the monarchist candidate, a local aristocrat. The right-wing list received, for example, 91.1% of the vote in Plabennec, 84.1% in Plouescat, 75.9% in Ploudalmézeau, 75.7% in Ploudiry, 75.1% in Lannilis and got its highest results in the most rural communes while being weaker in the small towns of Léon: 57.2% in Lesneven, 58.8% in Saint-Pol-de-Léon, 50.2% in Landivisiau. It also received weaker results in the fishing ports of northwest Finistère (58.0% in Roscoff, 57.8% in Porspoder, 48.8% in Lanildut, 54.6% in Le Conquet) and under-performed (by Léon’s standards) in small cities home to some industrial activity like Landerneau (35.2%) and, of course, Brest and its area (20.0% in the city itself with a third place behind the SFIO and the Republican Concentration; a poor 16.0% in Le Relecq-Kerhuon) where, by contrast with the hinterland, especially hostile to left-wing parties, the SFIO placed ahead in Brest (45.8%), in Saint-Marc (51.7%), in Lambézellec (52.9%), in Saint-Pierre-Quilbignon (43.9%) and in Le Relecq-Kerhuon (51.4%). For some reason, possibly linked to the presence of an iodine factory (developing its production from seaweed collected in the surroundings), the Republican Concentration list came ahead in Lampaul-Plouarzel (45.3%) where the Republican Union list placed only third with 21.4% behind the SFIO list and its 28.4%.

The Republican Union list also won in a landslide the islands of the Atlantic Ocean: 81.2% in Ouessant, 80.9% in Molène and 83.1% in Sein.

A traditional republican and laïc area which would moved further left in the following decades (becoming a SFIO and later a PSU stronghold), Trégor was swept by the Republican Concentration list (69.8% in Lanmeur, 62.0% in Plouigneau) except its main city, Morlaix, won by the SFIO with 37.5% against 28.9% for the Republican Union and 22.9% for the Republican Concentration.

Further south, the inner parts of the département, around the small town of Huelgoat, were dominated either by the SFIO either by the Republican Concentration lists. Not a surprise as the area was mostly populated by small and poor peasantry and forestry workers with a tradition of egalitarianism and hostility towards the Catholic Church hierarchy. Also a largely Breton-speaking region, it has been also characterized by an important emigration towards the Parisian region; when coming back home, migrants had often converted to republican, socialist and leftist ideas. Finally, probably having played a role, had been the mining past of the region and the early introduction of private wage-earning employment: the communes of Huelgoat, Locmarien-Berrien and Poullaouen had been the location of several lead and silver mines exploited by private companies from the mid-eighteenth century. Mining reached its apex at the end of the eighteenth century at a time when the Huelgoat mining area was one of the largest in France (1,300 employees in the mines and 400 in related activities for the year 1770) before suffering economic decline and a first closure in the 1860s. The extraction was restarted at a much more modest scale thereafter but proved unsustainable and the last mine was abandoned in 1934. However, extractive activities continued in the area under the form of granite quarrying. Anyway, the SFIO won 64.9% of the vote in Huelgoat (its best commune), 51.2% in Locmaria-Berrien and 35.4% in Poullaouen where it placed second behind the Republican Concentration list which received 40.8% of the vote.

In Carhaix, the SFIO also achieved its fourth-best result with 55.4% of the vote.

The center-western part of Finistère is a bit more complicated to decipher. While the right-wing list triumphed in Plougastel-Daoulas with 70.8% of the vote and placed ahead in Crozon with 39.6% of the vote against 37.0% for the Republican Concentration list, the SFIO placed first in the communes of L’Hôpital-Camfrout (54.6%) and Logonna-Daoulas (40.5%), which were the center of kersantite granite quarrying (an industry employing some 260 workers in 1927) as well as the in communes in the vicinity of the Pont-de-Buis powder mill (Quimerc’h: 40.7%; Saint-Ségal: 39.6%; Port-Launay: 52.0%). Meanwhile the Republican Concentration list placed first in the sub-prefecture of Châteaulin (31.8% against 30.0% for the Republican Union and 28.9% for the SFIO), in the port of Camaret specialized in spiny lobster fishing (40.2%), and in Locronan, the fiefdom of Daniélou (62.3%).

The PC-SFIC came first in Douarnenez with 32.8% ahead of the Republican Union list (30.4%), the SFIO list (19.1%) and the Republican Concentration list (16.2%). It also won the neighboring fishing port of Pouldavid with 31.7% of the votes. These were the only two single communes won by the PC-SFIC. Meanwhile, the hinterland was dominated by the conservative list like in Pouldergat, the commune from which Pouldavid was split from in 1919, where it received 47.9% of the vote against 40.2% for the Republican Concentration, a paltry 8.0% for the SFIO and a meager 2.1% for the PC-SFIC.

In Cap Sizun, the Republican Union list came largely ahead in the northern part of Cap Sizun, where the main economic activity was agriculture. By contrast, in the southern part, where fishery was playing a more important role, the SFIO came ahead in the sardine fishing port/canning center of Audierne (61.5%, its second-best commune) and in Primelin (38.8%), the seat of a sardine fishing port as well as of a recently opened small factory of canned peas. The socialist list placed second behind the Republican Union in Esquibien and Plouhinec with respectively 33.7% and 28.9%.

In Pays Bigouden, the Republican Concentration list won in a landslide Plozévet, the commune of Le Bail, with 70.3% (its best commune overall), sharply contrasting with the neighboring Pouldreuzic when the Republican Union list came largely ahead with 68.9%. Meanwhile, the SFIO placed ahead in the important fishing port/fish canning center of Le Guilvinec (28.7%) - where the PC-SFIC placed second with 25.5% - as well as in the neighboring port of Treffiagat (56.7%). In Penmarc’h, also a fishing port/canning center, the Republican Concentration placed first with 35.1%, ahead of the SFIO (31.9%). In Pont-l’Abbé, the capital of Pays Bigouden, the Republican Union placed first with 30.6%, ahead of the Communist list (27.5%) with the SFIO and the Republican Concentration placing in distant third (19.5%) and fourth (19.3%) positions.

In the city of Quimper, the Republican Concentration list prevailed with 35.3%, followed by the Republican Union (32.6%), the SFIO (24.6%) and the PC-SFIC (5.1%) and came ahead in most communes of the area, notably in Bénodet (69.7%), the stronghold of Bouilloux-Lafont. The SFIO placed first in Ergué-Armel (35.6%), a rather working-class faubourg/suburb of Quimper where a faience manufacture was located, while the Republican Union received the largest share of vote (41.9%) in the more bourgeois suburb of Kerfeunteun.

In the eastern part of the arrondissement of Quimper, the SFIO came ahead in La Forêt-Fouesnant with 41.4% (which was then a fishing port but is now a yacht harbor largely leaning to the right) and in Rosporden with 41.2%. It placed however only second in Concarneau with 29.2%, far behind the conservative list and its 43.2%; however, while the Republican Concentration received 14.9% of the votes, the Communist list got there a strong result with 10.4%. The right dominated in what had been a very left-wing commune thanks to the disastrous administration (1912-18) of the socialist mayor François Campion, who was reportedly more busy picking fights with the police than actually managing the town and ended up being removed by the prefect, as well as demographic and social changes. It would be only in 1935 that the left would recapture the mayorship of Concarneau with the election of the Communist Pierre Guéguin.

In the arrondissement of Quimperlé, the Republican Concentration placed ahead in most communes, including in Quimperlé itself (52.2%). Only the coastal communes around Riec-sur-Bélon (won by the Republican Union with 32.4% of the vote) and Pont-Aven (39.3% for the Republican Union followed by the Socialist list with 36.9%) placed the right-wing list ahead as well as the easternmost canton of Arzano which, historically part of Vannetais and not Cornouaille, had been incorporated to Finistère at the Revolution (or even after in the case of Locunolé detached from Morbihan only in 1857) and tended to be more clerical than the rest of the arrondissement.




The strongholds of the Republican Union coincide more or less with the most Catholic areas (Léon, parts of the Pays Bigouden around Pouldreuzic and the bits of Vannetais incorporated into Finistère) as well as the area around Briec which may had to do with the fact the breeding of draft horses was an important activity there; it was a lucrative one as horse remained then the most valuable animal at a time when Breton farms have stayed largely away from the mechanization process. The right-wing list generally under-performed in the largest cities/towns (20.0% in Brest, 32.6% in Quimper, 28.9% in Morlaix, 29.8% in Quimperlé, 35.2% in Landerneau, 30.0% in Châteaulin), in Trégor (18.2% in Lanmeur; 26.7% in Plouigneau), in Monts-d’Arrée (a meager 13.3% in Huelgoat) and in most southern fishing ports (30.4% in Douarnenez, 19.8% in Audierne, 26.8% in Penmarc’h, 18.6% in Guilvinec, 33.8% in Plobannalec-Lesconil, 25.1% in Camaret) but Concarneau (43.2%).




The strength of the Republican Concentration list is noticeable in Trégor (69.8% in Lanmeur; 62.0% in Plouigneau), in Santec (62.0%) whose mayor was a candidate on the list, for some reason in the area around Châteauneuf-du-Faou (58.6% in the commune itself) as well as in the area surrounding Scaër whose mayor was a candidate on the list (55.1% in Scaër, 55.9% in Trégourez or 57.0% in Kernével, all communes which would have PCF mayors after 1945). The list also received strong results in Bénodet (69.7%), Plozévet (70.3%) and Locronan (62.3%) whose deputies/mayors hold the first spots on the list as well as in the Crozon peninsula and in Le Faou (54.8%) which may possibly be explained by the influence of Albert Louppe, a senator since 1921 also holding the offices of general councilor of Le Faou canton and president of the general council of Finistère (since 1912) after having serving as a deputy for the constituency of Châteaulin.

Conversely, the Republican Concentration didn’t do particularly well in urban areas but Quimper (35.3%) and Quimperlé (52.2%, thanks to the presence of Le Louédec on the list; in 1919, when he didn’t run, the town and the neighboring communes were won by the socialist list, suggesting a strong personal factor), especially in the most working-class ones: 27.7% in Brest and Landerneau, 22.9% in Morlaix, 16.2% in Douarnenez, 14.9% in Concarneau and 10.3% in Le Relecq-Kerhuon (where it was hurt by the dissident right-wing list).




The SFIO received its best results in the center-eastern, interior, part of the département (64.9% in Huelgoat, 55.4% in Carhaix), in the area of Brest (45.8% in the city, 52.9% in Lambézellec, 51.7% in Saint-Marc, 43.9% in Saint-Pierre-Quilbignon) where the Arsenal was a major employer, in Morlaix (37.5%), in the powder production centers (51.4% in Le Relecq-Kerhuon; 40.7% in Quimerc’h), in the quarrying areas around L’Hôpital-Camfrout and Logonna-Daoulas, in the cannery industry centers (41.2% in Rosporden, 36.9% in Pont-Aven) and in the fishing ports that may or not may also comprised cannery factories (61.5% in Audierne, 31.9% in Penmarc’h, 41.4% in La Forêt-Fouesnant, 56.7% in Treffiagat).

The socialist list was more generally strong in the communes of the southern part of the département dominated by fishing activities (28.9% in Plouhinec, 27.0% in Plobannalec-Lesconil) even the ones where the communist competition was strong (28.7% in Guilvinec and 29.2% in Concarneau but an average 19.1% in Douarnenez). It was also competitive in the area of Châteaulin (28.9% in the commune itself, 52.0% in Port-Launay, 31.4% in Saint-Coulitz) where railway transportation and the declining activity of the Nantes-Brest canal played an important economic role (Port-Launay was also a center for the decaying transportation of slates while Saint-Coulitz was home to a hydroelectric plant built in 1887 than enabled Châteaulin to become the first commune in Western France and the fourth one in the country to electrified). It also fared well in the areas located upstream along the canal, where slate quarrying was still a thing (not for long) like Saint-Hernin (38.6%) (where six workers were killed in 1921 in accident taking place in a slate quarry employing around 50 workers), Motreff (25.6%) or Spézet (26.0%). Also strong results in Roscanvel (38.6%) and Landévennec (32.9%), in the Crozon peninsula, probably linked to activities related to the French Navy (Landévennec notably served into a reserve fleet).

In Léon, above average (at least by local standards) results for the SFIO are noticeable in the communes home to iodine factories (28.4% in Lampaul-Plouarzel, 17.6% in Landéda, 16.3% in Le Conquet), a largely insignificant industry that only survived thanks to state subsidies (French army being the main purchaser for the tincture of iodine) or the quarries of the Aber-Ildut (25.3% in Lanildut, 20.2% in Porspoder).

By contrast, the socialist list was weak in the interior part of Léon and the parts of Pays Bigouden/Cap Sizun where fishery wasn’t the main activity.




The dissident right-wing list only over-performed in the three or four areas where it had relatively well-established candidates, the obvious consequent of a favorite son effect: Guiclan (36.2%, its best result) and neighboring communes; Le Relecq-Kerhuon (17.1%) and the neighboring Guipavas (11.6%) proving that Maissin had kept followers in spite of the Toulon explosions controversy; the whole area around Châteaulin (8.0% in the commune itself); Riec-sur-Bélon (8.6%). The list fared poorly in Léon, Pays Bigouden and in the most-populated/working-class communes: 2.7% in Brest, 2.4% in Quimper, 2.0% in Morlaix, 2.3% in Concarneau, 1.5% in Douarnenez…




The communist list’s map is showing a very unequal distribution as it didn’t received a single vote in 71 out of 298 communes. As mentioned it placed first in two communes (Douarnenez and its faubourg of Pouldavid, receiving respectively 32.8% and 31.7% of the votes) while coming second in two other ones (Guilvinec, 25.5%; and Pont-l’Abbé with 27.5% where it beat the SFIO list which received 19.5% of the vote in a traditional left-wing stronghold), all places located on the maritime facade of the Western Cornouaille. There, it also mentioned noticeable results in Plobannalec-Lesconil (11.9%), in Combrit (5.0%) and in Audierne (4.4%). I have saw the hypothesis of Welsh Protestantism influence to partly explain such strong results for the socialist and communist lists in Plobannalec-Lesconil as the port of Lesconil had been the center of a Methodist evangelization effort since the 1880s led by the Welsh pastor William Jenkyn Jones; in any case, not only Protestants were very active in the fight against clericalism in that part of Pays Bigouden but the head of the Protestant Association in Lesconil at the end of the World War II also happened to be the leader of the local branch of the Communist Party.

The communist list also over-performed in Concarneau (10.4%) and the adjacent communes (13.0% in Beuzec-Conq, 5.1% in Lanriec), in the area of Carhaix (6.5% in Plouguer, 4.4% in Plounévézel, 3.2% in Carhaix itself), in Morlaix (8.6%), in Landerneau (8.5%) and in the working-class suburbs of Brest (5.9% in Saint-Marc, 5.2% in Le Relecq-Kerhuon, 3.6% in Lambézellec) and to a small extent in Brest itself (3.8%).

I’m really not sure about the incredible performance of the PC-SFIC in Elliant (14.2%, the party’s sixth best commune) as an anomaly due to the presence of a local candidate on the list (the one who would be expelled several months after) could be discarded: indeed, ten years thereafter, Elliant would be one of the only eight communes and the only rural one in Finistère where an antifascist vigilance committee would be set up in the wake of the 6 February 1934 riots.

That's all folks.

[Sir John Johns]

Ardèche 1945

Numbers are from the 27 October 1945 copy of La Voix du peuple de l’Ardèche, a communist newspaper, and one of the few scanned local newspapers covering the post-war period freely available on the Internet. It is to be found on the website of the Ardèche department archives.

Referendum

Question 1 (about the national assembly elected the same day serving as a constituent assembly). All parties campaigned for the yes.

Yes 94.9%
No 5.1%

Don’t feel the need to make a map of this one.


Question 2 (on a text limiting the scope of the constituent powers of the assembly and organizing the relations between executive and legislative powers on a provisional basis awaiting the draft and approval of a new constitution).
The PCF campaigned for the no.

Yes 61.6%
No 38.4%




Elections for the Constituent Assembly

URA 30.8% 2 seats
PCF 26.8% 1 seat
SFIO 18.4% 1 seat
MRP 16.0%
Radical Party 7.9%

The URA is the ‘Union of Ardéchois Republicans’, which is referred to as the Democratic Republican Union (URD) by the Communist newspaper, the successor of the Republican Federation (FR) of the inter-war period which was gathering together non-Gaullist and non-MRP Catholic and conservative right-wingers. Of its two elected deputies, one (Paul Ribeyre) would seated in the ‘Peasant’ caucus and the other one (Joseph Allauzen) in the Freedom Republican Party (PRL) caucus – they both would become members of the CNIP in the 1950s.














Not very knowledgeable about Ardèche electoral patterns but this map from Al posted in 2009 on this very same thread could provide some indications as well as a map of the distribution of Protestants in 1689 (found here) which sounds like broadly similar to the distribution of the radical vote.

[Sir John Johns]

Maps of the 1848 presidential election in Gard, a département home to the largest protestant community in France (accounting to about one third of the département’s population by then with Protestantism being the majority religion in twelve cantons following a Saint-Jean-du-Gard-Vauvert north-south line). Gard then also experienced a dramatic transition from an economy dominated since the sixteen century by silk industry (textile factories in Nîmes, the main city which gave its name to the denim and silk worm farming in the Cévennes) towards coal exploitation and metallurgy, especially around Alais (present-day Alès) and the neighboring cantons of Génolhac, Saint-Ambroix and Saint-Martin-de-Valgalgues.

Results in Gard were:

Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte 48.4%
Louis-Eugène Cavaignac 36.6%
Alexandre Ledru-Rollin 15.0%

The three cantons of Nîmes are combined into a single one because I can’t find their boundaries (a usual problem for old cantons including intra-urban subdivisions).



Far from the landslide he scored at national level (74.3%), Louis-Napoléon failed to win a majority of the vote in Gard while Cavaignac and especially Ledru-Rollin over-performed their national results (respectively 19.6% and 5.1%).



Napoleon’s nephew placed ahead in the major urban center, Nîmes, receiving 62.3% of the vote in the three combined Nîmes cantons, and got his best result (83.2%) in Marguerittes, a royalist canton. He also received over 50% of the vote in the more Catholic and royalist cantons of the Rhône Valley (53.3% in Pont-Saint-Esprit; 55.1% in Bagnols; 65.6% in Roquemaure; 59.1% in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon) except in Beaucaire where he got only 39.1% of the vote. Such under-performance may possibly be explained by the fact Beaucaire was the seat of an important trade fair (by 1848 in a state of prolonged decline), a kind of place usually not too kind for royalist/conservative sentiments. Results in the protestant areas are very contrasted as he won  strong 73.1% in Anduze (his third best canton) and 66.8% in Lédignan, while generally under-performing elsewhere and receiving only 20.9% in Sommières and 16.0% in Lasalle (his worst canton). In addition to Sommières and Lasalle, Bonaparte placed third in two additional cantons: Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort and Uzès.



I’m not really sure how to explain Cavaignac’s map (the stronghold around Uzès is noticeable but I don’t know the factors behind it) except that he did badly in the Rhône Valley, placing even third behind Ledru-Rollin in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon (12.0%, its worst canton) and Aramon (13.4%). While he did poorly in Nîmes (21.2%), he received 39.7% in Alais, not far behind the 42.2% of Bonaparte. Cavaignac also placed third in Saint-Jean-du-Gard, where he received 22.4% of the vote against 29.3% for Ledru-Rollin and 48.2% for Bonaparte.



Ledru-Rollin received his best result in the Vaunage (cantons of Sommières and Saint-Mamert where he got respectively 30.6% and 29.3% of the votes), a deeply protestant area that had been devastated by the religion wars and was home to Methodist and Quaker communities. Ledru-Rollin’s second best canton was Saint-Jean-du-Gard (29.3%), also a heavily protestant canton. Broadly speaking, the democratic socialist candidate did well in the protestant areas but also in parts of the Rhône Valley (28.9% in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, 28.5% in Aramon and 27.6% in Beaucaire). He comparatively received lower results in the two main industrial centers with 18.1% in Alais and 16.5% in Nîmes’ three cantons. The worst performances of Ledru-Rollin are to be found in the westernmost part of the départment, a remote and rural area where the protestant influence was less pronounced: there, Ledru-Rollin received no votes at all in the cantons of Trèves and Alzon.

[Sir John Johns]

More maps of Gard, this is time for a bit forgotten election, the 1870 plebiscite summoned by Emperor Napoléon III to ratify the evolution of the regime towards political liberalism, including the approval of a senatus-consulte introducing ministerial responsibility to the Legislative Body.

While national results were a triumph for Napoléon III (even when taking into account pressure on the voters and use of all the resources of the state to get the ‘yes’ approved) which then totally despaired republicans as the ‘yes’ accounted for 82.7% of valid votes and 66.8% of all registered voters, in Gard, the results were less favorable to the Empire. Indeed ‘yes’ accounted for 62.2% of valid votes (against 37.8% for the ‘no’) and didn’t obtained the support of a majority of registered voters (48.0% of registered voters against 29.2% for the ‘no’).

Like on the previous maps, the three cantons of Nîmes are combined into a single one while Alais/Alès had been by then divided into two cantons but Le Courrier du Gard is only providing results for the combined two cantons.



On this one the Saint-Jean-du-Gard-Vauvert line is clearly apparent as protestant cantons predominantly voted in favor of the ‘no’, sometimes by large margins with the strongest victories in cantons with a protestant majority being recorded in Vauvert (64.4%) and Sommières (61.1%), i.e. the Vaunage. However the canton that mostly voted in favor of the ‘no’ with 71.7% of the valid votes was Nîmes, the most populated town and the prefecture of the département, which was much more favorable to Napoléon III back in 1848. Also noticeable the victory of the ‘no’ in Beaucaire with 52.0% of the valid votes.

Conversely, the ‘yes’ received its best results in the northeast part of the département, along the Rhône River (86.9% in Pont-Saint-Esprit; 84.8% in Bagnols; 88.8% in Roquemaure), in the westernmost part of the département (with 98.9% in Trèves, its best canton) and in the center-north (90.9% in Saint-Ambroix; 90.2% in Génolhac; and even 94.5% in La Grand-Combe). The results in that latter canton, which was the seat of a coal mining industry, just like in Alais/Alès (63.6%), are indicative of a pretty strong support for the Empire coming from industrial workers that could possibly explained by the ‘paternalist’ policies theorized by Frédéric Le Play (mixing defense of the traditional hierarchy and Catholicism and provision of social and moral support and housing to workers) implemented by Denis Benoist d’Azy, the manager of the Compagnie des mines, fonderies et forges d’Alais, the company exploiting coal extracting in the Alais mining basin. Benoist d’Azy was a Legitimist deputy from Gard between 1849 and 1851 but was then retired from politics (not sure if he was then a supporter of Napoléon III as he had protested the 1851 coup); he would be reelected in Gard after the downfall of the Empire. Alternatively/additionally, this could be explained by the popularity of the Napoléon legacy among workingmen and the efforts displayed by Napoléon III to attract workers’ vote.

Maps of the support for the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’, expressed in percent of the registered voters





The ‘yes’ gathered a majority of registered voters in half of the cantons (19 out of 37 cantons) while receiving the support of a minority of registered voters in the most populated cantons: 46.7% in Alais (9,162 registered voters); 29.4% in Vauvert (6,140 voters) and an abysmal 19.1% in Nîmes (19,241 voters).

By contrast, the ‘no’ garnered a majority of registered voters in only three cantons: Vauvert (53.1%); Sommières (51.0%) and Lédignan (50.4%), while receiving the support of a respectable 48.4% of the registered voters in Nîmes. In Alais, it got the support of barely one fourth of registered voters (26.7%).

[Sir John Johns]

Results of the 1848 presidential election in Allier were:

Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte 68.3%
Alexandre Ledru-Rollin 22.9%
Louis-Eugène Cavaignac 8.8%









A textbook case of early rural socialism (traditionally linked to the practice of sharecropping in the case of Allier) as the six cantons Ledru-Rollin placed ahead have all a number of votes below the average number (2,371) of votes by canton in Allier. The democratic socialist candidate received a majority of the valid votes in four cantons – Jaligny (1,893 votes cast) with 70.6%; Dompierre (1,781 votes cast) with 59.4%; Lurcy-Lévy (2,046 votes cast) with 54.5% and Le Donjon (1,887 votes cast) with 50.7% - and a plurality in two additional ones – Bourbon-l’Archambault (1,979 votes cast) with 47.4% and Cérilly (2,009 votes cast) with 42.8% while receiving a support under his departmental average in the less rural (‘urbanized’ would be quite an exaggeration): 16.4% in Cusset, 21.8% in Moulins-Ouest, 17.4% in Moulins-Est, 11.3% in Montluçon and a pitiful 3.6% in Montamarault (which included the mining commune of Commentry, which elected the first socialist mayor in France in the 1880s).

Support for Ledru-Rollin is concentrated in the northern part of the département, at lower elevations with the Allier Valley (cantons of Moulins-Ouest, Moulins-Est and Neuilly-le-Réal) splitting the socialist-leaning territories into two areas: one in the northeastern part of the département and another one covering northwest Allier but also extending to neighboring Cher (46.7% in Saint-Amand-Montrond, the only canton of Cher won by Ledru-Rollin; 33.0% in Saulzais-le-Potier or 27.8% in Charenton-du-Cher). This were places which started an unrest in December 1851 to oppose the coup of Louis-Napoléon with inhabitants from Le Donjon briefly taking control of the sous-préfecture in neighboring Lapalisse before being brutally repressed by the central government.

Bonaparte’s map is pretty much the reverse one of Ledru-Rollin’s map while I don’t understand the map of Cavaignac vote (yeah, I'm not very knowledgeable about Allier and a bit lazy these days to dig for explanations).

[Kamala's side hoe]

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?