Welcome to the website unehistoireduconflitpolitique.fr!

A History of Political Conflict is based on a unique effort to digitize electoral and socioeconomic data spanning more than two centuries. All data collected at the level of the approximately 36,000 municipalities of France are available online with open access on this site, which includes hundreds of interactive maps, graphs, and tables. Enjoy exploring the data!

The data is entirely at your disposal,

just remember to cite the source!

Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty (2023): A History of Political Conflict. Elections and Social Inequalities in France, 1789–2022, Paris, Le Seuil.

A few words about the authors

Julia Cagé is a professor at Sciences Po Paris. Thomas Piketty is a research director at EHESS and professor at the Paris School of Economics. This is their first co-authored book.

You can contact us at the following address:
[email protected]
Feel free to send us all your comments and feedback!

Acknowledgments

Many people supported us in this research, especially in building the electoral and socioeconomic database on which this study is based (the data are available online and can be freely accessed at unehistoireduconflitpolitique.fr). We are especially grateful to Alena Lapatniova, Tatyana Shukan, and Maria Emanovskaya for their invaluable work collecting electoral reports at the National Archives; and to all the marvelous teams at the National Archives who welcomed us in recent years and without which this study could not have been carried out. For their essential contributions to data entry, many thanks to Éloïse Alluyn, Thomas Carrié, Lorenzo Catalano, Inès Cliquot de Mentque, Guillaume Guinard, Marwa Kheddouci, Sacha Martinelle, Antoine Richard, and Claire de Rosamel, as well as Jean-Laurent Cadorel, Jeanne Dorlencourt, Romain Morgavi, Eva Salavera, Alexandre Verlet, and of course Hardish Bindra.

By providing us with sources they had already digitized, or their expertise on this or that particular point, many of our colleagues were of enormous help. We are especially indebted to Serge Aberdam, who gave us access to valuable data on the referenda of 1793 and 1795, which he had digitized on the basis of electoral registers in the revolutionary period, and who so kindly shared his enthusiasm and knowledge about this founding moment. We also want to thank Guillaume Blanc, Carles Boix, Florian Bonnet, Pierre-Henri Bono, Paul Brandily-Snyers, Charlotte Cavaille, Hyppolite d’Albis, Thomas Corpet, Abel François, Pauline Grosjean, Saumitra Jha, Jean Lacroix, Miren Lafourcade, Eric Monnet, Etienne Pasteau, Gilles Postel-Vinay, Aurélie Sotura, Frédéric Salmon, Nicolas Sauger, Mara Squicciarini, and Timothy Tackett. Special thanks to Caroline Piketty for helping us navigate the complex transfers of electoral reports to the national and departmental archives.

Mapping data is not always easy; thank you to Agathe Denis for her invaluable help with Python (and her unshakable patience), and more generally to all the doctoral students and young researchers (including Edgard Dewitte, Moritz Hengel, Felipe Lauritzen, Élisa Mougin, Olivia Tsoutsoplidi) whose daily energy supported this project. Thanks to Lucas Chancel, Amory Gethin, Rowaida Moshrif, Clara Martinez-Toledano, and all members of the World Inequality Lab for the irreplaceable intellectual environment. Without the amazing teams at WeDoData, the site unehistoireduconflitpolitique.fr would not exist; thanks to Karen Bastien for once again agreeing to work with us, and to Brice Terdjman, Clément Thorez, and Mattia Longhin of Appunto for their fantastic work.

A large-scale digitization project of historical archives could not have happened without substantial public funding. We particularly thank the European Research Council (under ERC Grants 856455 and 948516), as well as the François-Simiand Center for Economic and Social History and the World Inequality Lab. Of course, we are also deeply grateful to the academic institutions to which we belong—EHESS, the Paris School of Economics, and Sciences Po Paris—and especially to those who made it possible to carry out this work and supported its practical organization (including Cathy Bernard, Pilar Calvo, Loïc Da Costa, and Diane Gabeloteau).

And of course, many thanks to all the teams at Le Seuil for their continued trust and unwavering support in this large-scale project, especially Séverine Nikel and Vassili Sztil for their invaluable assistance.

This book is also a personal and family adventure. Without her big sisters and grandparents, our little Piana might have sometimes found her parents a little too absorbed in their research. Thank you to her for making a big splash! She’ll find out soon enough what her parents were doing at that time, and in the meantime, will continue to make us the happiest of lovers.