“This book makes the territorial variable one of the matrices of political behavior”

2023-09-06 08:30:06

A strange country is this political France, which the economists Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty have seized upon at the end of an analysis which runs from the French Revolution to the present day and embraces hundreds of polls, with an avowed predilection for legislative, presidential and referendums. If a “great book” is judged by its ability to decipher processes that escape us and/or are routines (voting is one of them), then A history of political conflict [Seuil, 27 euros, à paraître le 8 septembre] has everything to be. In 864 pages in which statistics, graphs and maps are scattered in support of a scientific demonstration, the authors take the reader on a story that stirs wide: electoral mobilizations, partisan offers and political enterprises are sifted through a reflection that affirms how, beyond the foam of the days, socio-economic structures, and social classes in the first place, have a hard life – a “orchestration without a conductor” to paraphrase Bourdieu (The Practical SenseMidnight, 1980).

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To say the book is ambitious is an understatement. It aims to reinterpret more than two centuries of political conflict through electoral conflict. Mobilizing classic indicators (income, heritage, level of education, etc.) while resorting to an unprecedented quadripartite typology (villages, towns, suburbs, metropolises) whose virtuoso crossings offer to objectify “geosocial” classes, Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty deliver another history of democracy where crises attest to the weight of social sedimentation. The book shakes up certainties. Contrary to the diagnosis on “Archipelization” of French society, which takes space as a given in itself, it makes the territorial variable one of the matrices of political behavior.

In addition to the usual reading which indexes the construction of the democratic order on the confrontation of two then three “regimes of truth” (the Republic, the Church, the Revolution – in its communist sense), it undertakes a new chronology based on configurations dominated by political antagonisms driven by class interests and the partisan capacities to translate them: the bipartition (left-right) of the years 1910-1992, the tripartition (left-center-right) of the years 1848- 1910 and its resurgence since the 1990s thus invite us to rethink the tempo of modernity.

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