The Political Construction of an “Electoral Science” in France under the Third Republic: Factors and Actors of a Politico-scientific Hybrid

What is meant by the “science of electoral government” is the ensemble of all legal studies, the speeches, and the positions which, on each side of the French parliamentary chessboard throughout the Third Republic, claim to organize and rationalize the practice of the electoral vote. Too often perceived from a “pragmatic” perspective, the emergence of an electoral science is contemporary to the universalization of suffrage in the middle of the nineteenth century and of the progressive reunification of the conservative political strengths in this mode of devolvement of power. From then on, the debate around the size and the manner of voting often precedes the conflicting views around the “political formulae.” The presented socio-historic inquiry will attempt to analyze the networks of learned exchanges which contributed both outside and inside the parliamentary arena to forging this knowledge which will strongly contribute to an aristocratic orientation of the representative democratic practices.