French Public Opinion and the Algerian War: A Research Note

Abstract

Historical writing of the kind which asserts that Most, some or few of the French believed, thought or supported X, Y, or Z has often been based on a highly selective reading of the press, sometimes on the perceptions of a handful of well-educated contemporary observers, sometimes on guesswork. Several well-known studies of public opinion in nineteenth-century France have relied on the reports to the government in Paris of the prefects and the procureurs-generaux.l Few historians of twentieth-century France have made use of the studies of the professional opinion samplers, despite the wealth of data that they have collected. Jean Stoetzel, for many years a professor at the Sorbonne, established the Institut fransais d'Opinion publique (IFOP), the first survey research organization in France, in 1938, two years after George Gallup founded in the United States the Opinion Research Corporation. IFOP, which published in 1939 the results of its first survey, on attitudes toward the Munich crisis (of which no historian, so far as I am aware, has yet made use), remains a private organization, but in recent years it has conducted a number of studies for the French government on such diverse questions as educational reform and the liberalization of the laws on abortion. Scholars are permitted access to the raw data on which IFOP's surveys are based; inquiries may be made to the headquarters of the organization, 20, rue d'Aumale, Paris 9e. American students of France are fortunate to have in their midst the Roper Public Opinion Research Center. Established at Williams College in 1946, the Roper Center has in its collection, on