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In France in the mid-1980s, the values of order and authority are strongly approved by both the urban and the rural population. These responses are particularly common at the bottom of the social hierarchy and among the old and the poorly educated. However, this desire for order and authority, also recorded for about 20 years in the working class, has recently registered a great variation within occupational groups, according to age. Is age not the vehicle of new cleavages which are beginning to overtake occupational divisions ? Another question remains : that of the limits of an interpretation of attitudes based on morphological characteristics.

The monuments to the First World War dead reproduce an identifying symbolism which designates the municipality as a pole of collective identity located between the individual and the nation. This identifying configuration is consistent with the national-republican ideology, which emphasizes the municipality so as to reject any other reference possibly threatening to the Nation-State. However, the identifying dimension of the municipality is not limited to this ideological subtlety. Historically, the communal space has indeed been the seat of a communalization which founded collective identity. In producing this space already largely patterned by the Church, the spatial inscription of institutions devoted to national integration played a substantial role, particularly at the beginning of the Third'-Republic. The construction of collective identity in France thus applied to both local and national identity.

Based on interviews with Grenoble members of the RPR, who had joined the party during the period of « cohabitation » (1986-1988), the study describes the political commitment itinerary of these neophytes so as to understand the complex dynamic of the process of party mobilization in the Jacques Chirac breeding grounds. Starting from political dispositions structured by family socialization, a network of interactive influences, nourished by personal experiences and affiliation or reference groups determines party involvement, at a propitious moment. Party mobilization and militant activity interconnect within a local, relatively specific political project.

In 1956, French socialists remained wary of the changes in progress in the USSR, but for the first time since the scission of Tours, the SFIO sent an official delegation on a visit to the Soviet Communist Party. The delegation's judgements on the USSR were apparently balanced, but in fact not. critical enough. The French socialists considered themselves on the same side of the class dividing line as the Bolsheviks. They reaffirmed the distinction between the 1917 revolution, considered globally positive and to be defended, from its later Stalinist turn. Their relative misunderstanding of Bolshevik totalitarianism seems based on a reading shaped by. the traditional French Marxist doctrine and by an analysis of the USSR done essentially in terms of social classes. . . .

Significance of workers' votes in the department of Cher (1848-1914) Studied over more than a half century, universal suffrage as practiced by different categories of workers in the department of Cher makes it possible to identify the major stages and associations of this essential element of politicization. The process is also related to the rise of workers' consciousness, perhaps even of working class consciousness which, in a way, it prepared and favored. The study of the various types of elections, of the conditions in which they were carried out, the analysis of the local, group and social stakes, real or as perceived by the voters, blur the arithmetic clarity of the results. They allow useful corrections to the many conclusions that can be drawn from these results, from the point of view of political analysis as well as for a better understanding of social facts.