The political system of a complex society is subtle and elusive. Beneath the structure and order of governmental institutions and political parties there is a fuzzy region of indirectness, ill-definition, and informality. We may think of this shadowy area beneath the surface as the milieu intern (Bernard 1957)?the internal environment of the system which acts as the last bastion of regulation before the system yields to adaptation and change, or death. It is here, in this little studied region of a political system, that we may find what Dimen-Schein (1978:377) calls intermediate like groups and neighborhoods which help to reduce the monolithic power of the state over the individual. These informal structures of everyday life coexist with the formal of government and politics. Although they may be only recently emergent in those Western societies dominated by a centralist model of government, they have always existed?indeed, they predate formal struc? tures?in Alpine societies, traditionally localist in their political ideology. This paper is about the clash between centralist and localist models of political organization in a Swiss mountain commune. It documents the breakdown of a self-regulating cultural system as it teeters on the threshold of change, between the informal processes of localism and the formal of centralism. Bagnes is a large, multivillage commune which replicates the cultural diversity of the Swiss nation-state. The outsider sees the commune as a single political, geographic, religious, and linguistic unit. The commune is perceived by its own citizens, however, as a pluralist society in miniature?unotre republique bagnardev (our Bagnard republic). In the native cognitive mapping, the commune is divided into five regions, differentiated ecologically and culturally. Its twelve villages are further discriminated linguistically by phonemic contrasts barely audible to an outsider. Villagers have a strong sense of campanilismo, the identification with one's own bell tower that has been described for Italian villages (Silverman 1975:16). In many ways, then, these villages of Bagnes are like Dimen-Schein's (1978) ethnic groups and neighborhoods. They have a distinct cognitive reality within the commune but no formal recognition on the outside. And, as we shall see, they constitute the internal environment of the commune insofar as they ensure the continuing identity of the political system. The informal power of the villages is balanced against the formal authority of the official political apparatus of government and party in a small-scale replica of the Swiss federalist system. Like the 25 cantons ofthe Swiss state, the villages of Bagnes have voluntarily surrendered some of their autonomy to the commune in order to benefit from the advantages of scale. Integration of these semiautono-