History of Political Conflict: How Economy and Geography Shape the Political Field

Elia Stebach reviews Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty’s A History of Political Conflict: Elections and Social Inequalities in France, 1789-2022 (Belknap Press – Harvard University Press, 2025, 848 p. Translated by Steven Rendall). Recent decades have witnessed the unravelling of France’s bipolar politics, once among the most entrenched in the world. The old duopoly, pitting socialists and communists against liberals and Gaullist conservatives, has fractured under the rise of the far right. Since the 2022 parliamentary elections, three blocs (left and green parties, Macron’s ruling coalition, and the radical right) have commanded roughly equal shares of the electorate. In their A History of Political Conflict, Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty trace the roots of France’s departure from bipolarity. Drawing on a remarkable digitization effort that recovered archival voting records, candidates’ affiliations, and socioeconomic data back to 1789 across France’s 36,000 communes, they argue that the bi- or tripartite character of the electoral landscape results from the relative weight of two determinants of voting behavior: socioeconomic status and geography. The novelty of the data used, combined with the breadth of an inquiry spanning over two centuries and the whole national territory, places the authors in methodologically pioneering territory. Gone are post-electoral surveys, too recent for such a long-run analysis, and qualitative studies alike. The authors are upfront about their limited engagement with existing research: their work aims to open a new methodological front. Commendably, all digitized and processed data has been made publicly available. Mapping two centuries of voting behavior The first quarter of the book is devoted to testing the authors’ approach and analytical categories through a geo-economic sociology of France since 1789. Their findings are broadly consistent with historical consensus: socioeconomic and territorial inequalities declined steadily throughout the 20th century before reversing modestly; rural territories experienced significant relative demographic decline, particularly after WWII; Catholicism lost much of its social weight from the mid-twentieth century onward. Source: Cagé and Piketty (p. 105) Such a quantitative approach has its limits. Because the socioeconomic data used are administrative in origin, they miss the once-considerable weight of informal economy in rural France, which may introduce marginal bias into findings on the wealth distribution of communes. The spatial classification system, where each commune is assigned a fixed category (metropolis, suburb, town, or village) for the entire period, sits uneasily with the spatial expansion of urban areas since the 19th century. Yet the broad sociopolitical trends the book identifies are robust enough to survive these limitations. Cagé and Piketty’s focus on electoral poles risks overlooking non-voters and those who cast blank or invalid ballots. The book’s second quarter turns to this gap and shows that voting has grown increasingly segregated along socio-economic and spatial lines in recent decades. This pattern holds for both voter registration, which is not automatic in France, and turnout, though the two follow different logics. On registration, the share of citizens missing from the electoral rolls has held remarkably steady over the past two centuries, at around 10%. Village enrolment has […]