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TO SURVIVE DE GAULLE


17


66 percent of the MRP voters, and 52 percent of the Independents.78
Similarly, on the eve of the second ballot of the December, 1965, presi-
dential election, de Gaulle apparently had the support of some 14 percent
of the Communist, Socialist, and Radical voters combined, and some 71
percent of MRP and Independent voters (despite Jean Lecanuefs advice
to his supporters to vote for Mitterand).79 On the basis of survey data and
election returns, François Goguel estimates that three million voters who
had voted regularly for Communists, Socialists, or Radicals under the
Fourth Republic voted for de Gaulle in the first ballot of the December,
1965, elections/" Clearly the center of balance of the extended electorate
is right of center; yet Gaullism retains some appeal for discontented voters
on the Left.

In an old and relatively slow-changing country like France, where much
is to be learned by studying traditional regional voting patterns, one needs
only to view a map of recent voting results to note that Gaullism’s unique-
ness lies in its alliance between those bastions of rural traditionalism of the
East (Alsace-Lorraine) and the West (Normandy, Brittany, and the Ven-
dée) on the one hand, and the economically dynamic regions of Northern
France, where the tradition tends to be Leftist, on the other/1 Apart from
scattered strongholds, the Massif Central and the South offer strong re-
sistance to the Gaullist wave, perhaps, as François Goguel has suggested,
not simply because the South is economically backward (it is not consistently
so), but also because it is the bearer of an older, more fiercely individual-
istic, more ideological, and consistently Leftist political culture/2 Nonethe-
less, the UNR and the UDR have done considerably better in the Midi
than did the RPF in 1951. On the first ballot of the legislative elections of
June, 1968, Gaullist candidates won at least thirty percent of the vote
in all but three of France’s ninety-five departments. The combination of
rural support in the West with urban support in the North gives the Gaullist
electorate very close to a normal distribution between urban and rural
voters, with the extended electorate slightly more rural than the restricted
electorate/2

The Gaullist electorate, it appears, includes a broad cross-section of the
French population. It differs from that cross-section
and usually only
moderately — in that it contains a larger than average proportion of older
people, women, devout Catholics, retired people, businessmen, former MRP
and Independent voters, and people from the West, East, and North. In
all respects considered, we have found the extended Gaullist electorate to
be more distinctive — and probably more conservative
than the restrict-
ed electorate/1 When de Gaulle himself docs battle with the parties, his
strongest opposition now is from the Left, thus drawing conservatives into
the Gaullist camp in order to prevent a revival of the dreaded Popular



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