Socialism in Provence, 1871-1914 by Judt Tony.;

Author:Judt, Tony.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2011-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

8

Feuds and personalities

All studies of political behaviour are bedevilled by a psephological variant of the Uncertainty Principle. Even where the investigator is in a position to ask of the voter the reasons for his or her choice, the response can at best only approximate to an accurate account of what motivated a particular choice in a given situation. The supposition that people make political choices on the basis of rational (and conscious) criteria remains far from proven. Nor should the investigator assume that the voter shares the specialist’s interest in politics and political behaviour. Few questionnaires have been devised which are capable of taking account of political allegiance based on tradition, ignorance, passing sentiments, sudden impulses, etc. And there remains always the uneasy sense that the voter who bases his choice on irrational, self-serving or thoroughly empirical considerations may actually have a more accurate perception of the nature of politics than has the historian or political scientist, with his concern to identify doctrines, programmes, ideological distinctions.

These matters are sufficiently complicated for the political behaviour of the modern urban electorate in countries such as England where ideological factors in politics are fewer in number, or at least where they are much blurred. The problem of accounting for political choice in regions of acute doctrinal conflict, such as Latin Europe, is somewhat more complex. Even harder to assess, of course, is the political behaviour of men in pre-industrial or largely agricultural societies, where the chasm between local interest and national politics may be assumed to be all the greater.

One view of the matter is that in practice political ideas, divisions which seem so distinct and significant in the city, are of little real consequence in the life of the peasant. The latter has his own concerns, his own local squabbles, his own interests, which rarely if ever meet those of the politicians who are appealing for his vote. Where, for reasons of their own, urban politicians introduce the countryman or villager into the polis through the granting of universal manhood suffrage, they are in effect superimposing their own concerns on those of the rural community, which remain unchanged thereby for many years to come. Thus, it follows, we can only truly grasp the bases of rural political life by ignoring the formal ideological divisions which emerge in village voting and by seeking behind them the true, apolitical issues which move the village voter; issues of a traditional nature (local feuds, family conflicts), of an economic nature (common lands, disputes between competing artisans, etc.), or of a personal nature (support for a prominent local personality, whatever his political colour). It is the argument of this book that, while these matters were clearly of real importance to the peasantry of Provence, they did not prevent a large number of men from making political choices which appear substantially to have been responses to contemporary stimuli, among which political propaganda and ideology were a far from negligible element. In practice, it seems, local and national politics

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