Elections and political modernization: the case of municipal elections under the July Monarchy.

Summary Too often ignored, the municipal elections established under the July Monarchy mobilized a much larger electorate than the legislative level - almost three million voters - and called to the polls voters who were sometimes very modest in rural areas. These elections do not allow for the learning of a political modernity consisting in an individual, free and considered vote, intervening within the framework of pluralist debates. A deepening of the notion of "political archaism" of the countryside leads to the rehabilitation of the scheme of a free voter and to insist on the inadmissibility of political pluralism within communities that refuse any principle of division. In addition, the idea of an apprenticeship in politics presupposes the progressive diffusion of political modernity from the cities to the countryside. But cities are an uncertain cradle of political modernity: if partisan pluralism is certainly present there, it is poorly accepted, and conceived as temporary. It does not appear to be necessary for a democratic life, because politics is not itself thought of as a sphere of the permanent institution of the social based on a fundamentally individualistic principle. The adoption of an anthropological approach to political modernization, consisting in studying the social conceptions at the basis of the observed practices, thus leads to reject the idea of a progressive learning of political modernity linked to a corollary evolution of social practices and conceptions. The result of a set of uncontrolled, chaotic, even inadmissible interactions - in relation to the conceptions of the time - between individual wills, governmental projects and social conceptions, modernization resides more...