Study guide: Voting in France and the Colonies

📋 Course Outline

1. Voting and Electoral Systems
2. Regimes and Political Leaders
3. Revolutionary, Reformist, and Conservative People
4. Expanding the French Electorate
5. Voting as a Social Process
6. Electoral Behavior and Professional Politics
7. Colonial Voting Before 1914
8. Colonial Citizenship and Suffrage

📅 Key Dates

1. 5 March 1848France organized universal male suffrage for men aged at least 21.
2. 14 July 1865The Sénatus-consulte allowed an Algerian Muslim to acquire French citizenship by relinquishing Muslim personal status.
3. 24 October 1870The Crémieux Decree granted French citizenship to Jews in Algeria.
4. 28 June 1881The indigénat regime was established in Algeria and maintained colonial subordination without granting political equality.
5. 4 February 1919The Jonnart Law introduced individual naturalization in Algeria while leaving Muslim personal status in place.

📖 1. Voting and Electoral Systems

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Vote: A formal procedure that produces a collective choice by counting individual choices.
• Election: A technique for designating rulers that uses a voting procedure.

★ Must-know

📌 Suffrage may be restricted or universal, male or female, censitary or capacitary, and exercised directly or indirectly.

Further detail

• Alternatives to election by vote include:
  • hereditary succession
  • acclamation
  • coups d’état
  • sortition
  • co-optation
  • appointment

📌 The course distinguishes single-member majority voting in two rounds, list proportional voting in one national round, and mixed voting combining proportional representation with a majority bonus.

💡 Memory Hook

Voting selects through individual ballots; succession, appointment, and co-optation select without them.

📖 2. Regimes and Political Leaders

★ Must-know

• The French Second Republic lasted from 1848 to 1852.

• The French Second Empire lasted from 1852 to 1870.

• The French Third Republic lasted from 1870 to 1940.

• The French Fourth Republic lasted from 1946 to 1958.

• The course’s main chronological frame for voting in France is 1848–2002, from Louis-Philippe’s abdication on 24 February 1848 to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s qualification for the second round on 21 April 2002.

Further detail

• The course identifies the principal regimes as the Second Empire, four republics, Vichy from 1940 to 1944, and the Provisional Government from 1944 to 1946.

📖 3. Revolutionary, Reformist, and Conservative People

★ Must-know

📌 The course distinguishes revolutionary, reformist, and conservative conceptions of the people as political forces.

Further detail

• The revolutionary left is associated in the course with the red flag, the Paris Commune of 1871, anarchists including Bakunin and Kropotkin, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Communist International.

• The listed general secretaries are:

  • Maurice Thorez
  • Waldeck Rochet
  • Georges Marchais
  • Robert Hue
  • Marie-George Buffet
  • Pierre Laurent
  • Fabien Roussel

• The course presents Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum as major reformist figures and associates the Popular Front with the period 1936–1938.

• The course links Bonapartism to plebiscites and identifies Gaullism and the Rassemblement du Peuple Français, founded in 1947, as conservative appeals to the people.

• The course associates the Poujadist movement with Pierre Poujade and the years 1953–1958, and the Front National with its creation in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen.

💡 Memory Hook

The revolutionary people challenge authority; the conservative people may invest authority in a strong leader.

📖 4. Expanding the French Electorate

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Socio-history of voting: The historical study of the conditions through which the citizen-elector is produced.

★ Must-know

📌 Universal male suffrage in 1848 did not mean that women could vote; French women gained the right to vote in 1945.

Further detail

• The 1848 reform expanded voting from the local level, where a cited estimate says 33% of French people could vote, to the national level.

• The course describes voter registration and the electoral roll as administrative means of defining the electorate and connecting individuals to political citizenship.

💡 Memory Hook

The 1848 reform extends male suffrage, making the electorate a mass body.

📖 5. Voting as a Social Process

★ Must-know

• Laurent Le Gall describes voting as a social act.

• 🔄 The four moments of voting are:

  1. administrative mobilization
  2. collective political campaigning
  3. individual participation or abstention
  4. explanation of the result

Further detail

• The course describes the 30 September 1848 vote as a staged event in which voters proceeded in a line.

• Before identity cards and standardized electoral procedures, face-to-face recognition could help identify voters in what Laurent Le Gall calls the “society of face-to-face relations.” - La société du vis-à-vis, 1848

📌 Voting regularly is not necessarily the same as engaging in politics, and abstaining does not necessarily mean that a person is politically inactive. - Laurent Le Gall

💡 Memory Hook

Administration → collective campaigning → individual participation → explanation of results.

📖 6. Electoral Behavior and Professional Politics

★ Must-know

• Campaign techniques and sources of influence include:

  • door-to-door canvassing
  • posters
  • speeches
  • printed ballots
  • personal contacts
  • family, employers, clergy, and local notables

• The course identifies 21 April 2002 as a rupture when Jean-Marie Le Pen qualified for the presidential second round after votes were dispersed among candidates.

Further detail

📌 Maurice Duverger’s account associates modernized voting with individualization, while the course contrasts this with communal voting practices in 1848 and notes that individual and communal influences could coexist in 2002.

• The course notes that the 2002 presidential and legislative elections were brought into the same year after the presidential term changed from seven years to five.

• The course describes electoral politics as increasingly professionalized, with new political elites including lawyers, teachers, and university professors, and with electoral programs becoming symbolic political assets.

💡 Memory Hook

A vote may be individually cast yet shaped by collective ties, local notables, and campaigns.

📖 7. Colonial Voting Before 1914

📝 Essential Points

• The course dates voting rights in four Senegalese communes to 1857 and describes a further grant of voting rights in 1871 as conditional on the consent of Indigenous people.

• The course names Louisy Mathieu, a formerly enslaved man, as Victor Schœlcher’s deputy substitute in 1848, and identifies Gaston Gerville-Réache and Hégésippe Jean Légitimus as later Guadeloupean elected representatives.

• Blaise Diagne, identified in the course as a Black French citizen from Gorée, served as a deputy from 10 May 1914 to 1934 and as mayor of Dakar from 1924 to 1934.

💡 Memory Hook

Local voting could coexist with colonial subordination and exclusion from metropolitan citizenship.

📖 8. Colonial Citizenship and Suffrage

★ Must-know

• The Lamine Guèye Law, voted on 25 April and promulgated on 7 May 1946, granted citizenship to inhabitants of French colonies and ended the indigénat code.

• The Algerian statute of 20 September 1947 created two electoral colleges with 60 deputies each, one for French settlers and one for Algerians, despite the populations being described as roughly equal in size.

Further detail

• The Blum–Viollette proposal to naturalize 24 million Algerians failed on 4 March 1938.

• The Brazzaville Conference took place from 30 January to 8 February 1944 and included Charles de Gaulle’s speech on the French Empire.

• An ordinance of 4 March 1944 provided for the naturalization of 65,000 Algerians, including people described as educated or as having participated in the war.

• On 19 March 1946, Guadeloupe, Réunion, Martinique, and French Guiana became French overseas departments.

💡 Memory Hook

Limited reforms → postwar citizenship measures → unresolved inequalities in Algeria.