Abstract EN:

In France, the proclamation of the Second Republic and the institution of universal suffrage in the mid nineteenth century led to the eruption on the political scene of an electoral body composed of some 75% of rural dwellers. The votes of an overpopulated agricultural world in crisis were suddenly much sought after. How are the people's elected representatives at the assembly going to come to terms with this new political force? What will be the importance of rural and in particular agricultural issues in the work of the assembly? What have these 750 representatives done for agriculture between May 1849 and December 1851? 52 parliamentary initiatives dealing with 22 different agricultural questions, 32 commissions, endless debates but only four laws voted through of which only one is really innovative: a pretty poor legislative showing for this assembly elected by a large majority of rural dwellers. Political right-left bipolarization, opposition between intransigent liberals and interventionists, town-country antagonisms, cultural dashes between the intellectuals of "the bar" and elected self-made autodidacts, rivalries between partisans of the Elyse and its opponents; such were the many factors which contributed to the ineffectiveness of this assembly. No wonder, then that this legislative should have laid the foundations for a certain anti-parliamentary from which Napoléon the third was to be the first benefit. A political experience whose lesson the Republicans were to draw upon in making the Third Republic on of rural dwellers.