FRENCH RELIGIOUS GEOGRAPHY AND POLITICAL CHANGES SINCE THE 2010s: VOTE HYPOTHESIS BASED ON FOURQUET-LEBRAS 2014 REPORT

Blandine Chelini-Pont (1, 2)

1 GSRL - Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités
2 LID2MS - Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Droit des Médias et Mutations Sociales

.From the beginning of the 20th century to François Mitterrand’s presidential elections, French political geography seems to have opposed Catholic territories and de-Christianized territories. This correlation – territories of high Catholic practice and right-wing voter turnout- was blurred from the 1980s, largely because Catholic faith practices collapsed, and Catholic membership sharply declined. A new religious map has emerged: the non-affiliated (people declaring themselves as non-religious) have significantly increased since the 1970s, reaching 40%. This population is present across the whole territory, with some large areas where they are the majority, in formerly social-republican or communist enclaves. The Muslim population, coming since the sixties and even before from the late French colonial Empire, rose from statistical non-existence to a relatively large size (estimated between 5 to 11%). Muslims are concentrated in non-Catholic or less Catholic territories. Other religions, which cumulate 4% to 5% of the population, are differently distributed. With such a religious change, added to the deep secularization process of the Catholic French population, it seems obviously difficult to find the same correspondence between religious geography and French political orientations, as it was still possible during the 1970s. The aim of this small presentation, using the very stimulating research done by Jérôme FOURQUET and Hervé LE BRAS in 2014, will be to measure how far – according to their new maps- electoral geography retain a memory of the French religious-political past and whether they show us some current level of correlation between recent votes and present religions in France.

Mots clés: ELECTORAL GEOGRAPHY; FRANCE; RELIGIONS; POLITICAL PARTIES

Domaines: Religions; Sciences de l'Homme et Société

Blandine Chelini-Pont. FRENCH RELIGIOUS GEOGRAPHY AND POLITICAL CHANGES SINCE THE 2010s: VOTE HYPOTHESIS BASED ON FOURQUET-LEBRAS 2014 REPORT. 2019. ⟨hal-02374247⟩