Acceso usuarios
Olivier Ihl
Analyzing electoral violence involves refuting a tenacious form of idealism. This large-scale study seeks to show that the conventions of voting were not formed against or outside of violence, but within it, using material elements thereof for their construction and justification. The episodic violence that occurred on the very first day of French electoral democracy, April 23, 1848, sheds some light on the history of political violence. Henceforth, electoral politics was no longer to be a struggle, but a competition. Understanding how the rules of the electoral game wrought that transition reveals the human dimension of this history – a history that cannot be considered separately from the nature of the State and the social interrelations between these competitors.
