The French Rural Communist Electorate

Abstract

The French Rural Communist Electorate One of the original characteristics of French communism has been its durable strength in some rural areas ever since its foundation at the 1920 Congres de Tours. Over the past six decades, the Communists have found strong support not only in certain urban industrial areas, but in some of the more rural and backward areas of the country as well. The Communist party's implantation in the countryside-both in terms of militants and voters-has been concentrated among a number of departments along the northern and western edge of the Massif Central, and along the Mediterranean littoral. The first time the Communists were up for national office-in 1924-they scored best not in an urban department but in the overwhelmingly rural Lot-et-Garonne (southeast of Bordeaux) where they gathered over 30 percent of the valid votes cast. Seven of the seventeen departments in which support was strongest were predominantly rural. By 1936, the party's strength in rural areas had increased notably. The Communists received over 20 percent of the vote in fifteen departments; in eight of these a higher percentage of the active population worked in agriculture rather than industry, and in three of the party's top bastions over 60 percent of the male work force was engaged in agricultural activities. During the interwar years it is estimated that I5 percent of the party's members belonged to agricultural professions. Why have the Communists done so well (and continued to do so in the i98os during a period of vertiginous electoral decline) in rural departments which hardly correspond, from a sociological perspective, to the image one has of the parti de la classe ouvriere?1