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Landholding Inequality and the Consolidation of Democracy: Evidence from Nineteenth-Century France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2023

Adrien Montalbo
Adrien Montalbo*
Affiliation:
Post-doctoral Researcher, IESEG School of Management, Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 9221 - LEM - Lille Economie Management, F-59000 Lille, France.
*
E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

In this article, I investigate the effect of landholding inequalities on the democratization process in nineteenth-century France. I focus on the 1849 election, which followed the establishment of the Second Republic (1848–1851), and on the first six elections of the Third Republic (1870–1940), which took place between 1876 and 1893. I find that stronger landholding inequalities were associated to a lower support for the Republicans, and therefore constituted a threat to the consolidation of democracy. I provide evidence that large landowners resisted the establishment of democracy by influencing the electoral behavior of economically dependent agricultural workers.

Type
Article
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 83 , Issue 1 , March 2023 , pp. 203 - 241
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic History Association

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Thomas Baudin, Tat-Kei Lai, Simone Moriconi, Juan S. Muñoz, and participants to the 2021 Royal Economic Society Annual Conference, the 2021 Economics and Business History Society Conference, the 69th Congress of the French Economic Association, the Western Economic Association International 96th Annual Conference, the 33rd Annual European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy Conference, and the 7th Annual Meeting of the Danish Society for Economic and Social History for their very helpful comments. A very special thanks to Frédéric Salmon, who accepted to share his data on the electoral outcomes of the 1849 election.

References

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