French election maps

[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).

[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).

[Sir John Johns]

SEINE 1945 (Constituent Assembly election)

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

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

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


Main political forces participating into these elections were:

- Popular Republican Movement (MRP)

- French Communist Party (PCF)

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

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

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

Minor lists:

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

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

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

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

- an UDSR dissident list, running in Seine-3

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

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

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

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

Département results:

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

Most-voted list by communes/Parisian arrondissements:



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

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



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

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


PCF map:



MRP map:



SFIO/USDR map:



Moderates map:



Radicals map:

[Sir John Johns]

SEINE 1946

Constitutional Referendum, 5 May 1946

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

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

Yes 49.9%
No 50.1%



(numbers are from a scanned La Croix newspaper)

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


Election of the second Constituent Assembly, 2 June 1946

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

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

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

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

Map of the most-voted list:



The main changes compared to October 1945 are:

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

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

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



MRP map:



SFIO map:



PRL map:



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

[Sir John Johns]

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

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

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

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

Also, I have already noticed a few problems:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Sir John Johns]

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

SEINE

First round



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

null/blank 0.9%



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

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



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



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



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

Second round



Charles de Gaulle 52.5%
François Mitterrand 47.5%

null/blank 2.8%

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

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



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

[Sir John Johns]

BOUCHES-DU-RHÔNE

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

First round

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

null/blank 1.0%





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



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

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

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



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



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

Second round

François Mitterrand 56.5%
Charles de Gaulle 43.5%

null/blank 3.3%



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

[Sir John Johns]

Amazing stuff!

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

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

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

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

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

PCF top candidates:

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

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

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

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

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

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

SFIO top candidates:

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

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

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

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

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

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

PRL top candidates:

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

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

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

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

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

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

RGR top candidates:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Sir John Johns]

RHÔNE

First round

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

Blank/null 0.8%



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

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

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



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










Second round

Charles de Gaulle 53.4%
François Mitterrand 46.6%

Blank/null 4.0%



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

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

[Sir John Johns]

1870 Plebiscite in Seine



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

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

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



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



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

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



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



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