“Critics will not be lacking in the face of the scope and ambition of the work of Cagé and Piketty”

2023-09-06 08:00:03

This History of political conflict [Seuil, 864 pages, 27 euros, à paraître le 8 septembre] has a good chance of immediately becoming a reference, by its breadth, by its empirical richness, by its thesis and by its limits, which is the characteristic of real scientific work. We change division in relation to too many essays that leave a taste of Canada Dry, written too quickly, without concern for dialogues with the social sciences, with a tendency to twist the data when they do not please, or even to leave them under the carpet. Unquestionably, Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty have been nourished by the great works of history and sociohistory, geography, sociology and political science.

Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty deliver an unprecedented vision of French political history

Their book is above all an empirical book, which is based on a database of electoral results since the Revolution, compiled for the first time and coupled with several other statistical sources in order to densify the analysis. With these tools, the authors highlight the extent of the changes that French society has experienced in terms of inequalities, education, employment, places of residence, electoral participation and votes since 1789.

This book is also a stimulating thesis, which will be much discussed in the future. The political conflict in question revolves around two dimensions: one, geographical, between rural and urban France, and the other, social, on inequalities and their evolution. For the authors, and this is an important result, social inequalities continue to work the votes, including in 2022, with a Macron vote which flies away in the richest municipalities and makes it one of the most « bourgeois » in history, while the left has its worst scores in these same municipalities.

Second result: the geographical divide can disturb the logic of votes on inequalities, to the detriment of the poorest. Schematically, the less favored in towns and in the countryside vote separately, and this dispersion ultimately benefits the well-to-do categories. This happened in particular under the Second Republic and in the first decades of the Third: the villages preferred the right because of a left and a Republic considered too favorable to the cities. Through historical analysis, the authors identify that these periods also correspond to moments of political tripartition – left, center, right –, while the moments of left-right bipolar confrontation are both periods when the vote is the more linked to inequalities and where these are decreasing, in particular thanks to the adoption of redistributive policies (income taxes, social security, etc.).

You have 61.46% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.