The Role of Local and Municipal Political Space in the Consolidation of the Third Republic
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Third Republic, local politics, municipal space, elected officials, parties, republican requirement, political culture, France, Bruno Dumons, Gilles Pollet
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Abstract
This document explores the significance of local and municipal political space in the consolidation of the Third Republic, highlighting the importance of elected officials, parties, and the republican requirement in shaping the political culture of France. The research program proposed by Bruno Dumons and Gilles Pollet emphasizes the need to analyze the local space in its historical context, rather than isolating it from long-term dynamics that have shaped the political history of France.
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[...] It is well to constitute a an object of research fertile around the local public policies carried out under the Third Republic, of organizations that they assumed. The deployment of these policies, which even belong to a 'certain anteriority' on the state policies that they inspired, in a way that may be counterintuitive for the researcher, assumed the emergence of administrators, of aedilitarian aristocracy » (builder), innovative, long before the official establishment of the Territorial Public Function, which could only act within the framework of a governance itself to be studied. [...]
[...] 'Municipalism' becomes a strategic path for political alternatives, as it was once by a 'municipal socialism' cited by Dumons and Pollet. In the 2019 municipal elections, various 'citizen' lists will present themselves in the major French cities. We can thus hypothesize the reactivation of a buried municipalist tradition, which Dumons and Pollet in a certain way called on us to revisit. The French Republic has experienced intense sequences, which remain at the heart of its myths, such as the 'revolutionary Parisian commune' and its sections supporting the Jacobins. [...]
[...] It is the elected officials who create the constant link between Paris and the territory, notably through the vector of the accumulation of mandates. The idea that a political career needs a local foundation is forged under the Third Republic. The fief was the refuge of the less fortunate political periods for the elected officials. As was the case for Pierre Mendès-France with Louviers, between the third and fourth Republics6. Dumons and Pollet thus establish the link between a parliamentary nature regime, such as the third and fourth republics, and a type of political/national consolidation based on elected officials. [...]
[...] Political spaces and municipal governments in Third Republic France. Insights into the sociogenesis of the contemporary state - Bruno Dumons, Gilles Pollet (2001) - What is the epistemological interest of Dumons and Pollet's work through this article? For a republican genealogy of the current power of the local prism The epistemological interest of Dumons and Pollet's work, through the article 'Political spaces and municipal governments in Third Republic France. Insights into the sociogenesis of the contemporary state' DOI: https://doi.org/10.3406/polix.2001.1136 https://www.persee.fr/doc/polix_0295-2319_2001_num_14_53_1136 In their article (see ref. [...]
[...] With the Law of Chapelier, very early on, the French Revolution asserts its distrust and its will to weaken anything that could stand in the way of the State, the law, emanating from the general will, and the citizen. This necessity would inscribe itself in the difficulty of making a Nation in a country that is anthropologically plural, as Paul Valéry already pointed out.5, and where unity could only be realized at the price of a unifying political voluntarism. The only recognized community in France was the community of citizens. (from which the almost pejorative character of the word community in France, and the consensus against 'communitarianism'. What place can 'the commune» in this scheme? [...]
