Okay, prepare for a
lot of France in the coming weeks. I was on holiday in Paris (staying with
@Redolegna) all this week, and the day before yesterday we paid a visit to the Archives of the National Assembly, whose surprisingly small record room holds, among many other things, a (nearly) complete archive of electoral statistics going back as far as 1848. I was able to take home digital reproductions of all elections held under the Fourth Republic, as well as the 1936 elections (the last held under the Third Republic) and the very odd Algerian results from 1958 (the first elections held under the Fifth Republic). I also got to copy all of the maps (over 600 pages' worth of them) in Bernard Gaudillère's maginificent atlas of French legislative constituencies, which goes back as far as 1815. Provided I can find party affiliations of members, this means I will theoretically be able to map all those elections, albeit without majority shading.
So to start us off, here's a relatively easy one: the territorial losses sustained by France after the Hundred Days.
The original Frankfurt Proposals issued by the Sixth Coalition called for Napoleon to be recognised as ruler of a France whose territories stopped at the Pyrenees in the south, the Alps in the east and the Rhine in the north, the "natural borders" established under the First Republic. Napoleon rejected these terms, believing he could still win the war, and when he was finally defeated in 1814, the terms were much harsher. Louis XVIII was restored as King of France and Navarre, and while much of the Napoleonic government apparatus was kept in place, the territory of France was reduced to essentially its pre-revolutionary extent. However, Louis' attempts to rule with a light, non-alienating hand, as well as Napoleon's great deal of freedom in his Elban exile, backfired when the former Emperor was able to return to Paris and restore the Empire, ruling for another hundred days and waging a campaign that ended in his defeat at Waterloo.
This time, the gloves well and truly came off. Louis was restored again, but this time Napoleon would be put on a boat to the remote British colony of Saint Helena, and Coalition troops would occupy France to make sure no one tried any funny business (and collect a large indemnity). A few more border regions were also detached, leaving France with more or less its modern border in the north and the border that would hold until 1860 in the southeast.
The departments that lost territory are coloured on the map, with the areas lost in a lighter colour:
- In red, the department of Mont-Blanc, ceded in its entirety (20 cantons) to the Kingdom of Sardinia.
- In orange, the department of Bas-Rhin, which ceded four and a half cantons to Bavaria.
- In yellow, the department of the Moselle, which ceded four cantons to Prussia.
- In green, the department of the Ardennes, which ceded eight cantons to the Netherlands.
- In blue, the department of Nord, which ceded three cantons to the Netherlands.
The atlas includes the constituencies that elected the Chamber of Representatives during the Hundred Days (basically the arrondissements, except in a few places), which is how I found these external borders, and I may go on to map the elections. That's not really my primary focus at the moment though - that's on the Fourth Republic.