La politique au camping : analyse comparée des rapports au politique des classes populaires en France et au Québec

Abstract Donald Trump’s unforeseen victory in the U.S’s 2016 presidential campaign. The unexpected Brexit in the U.K. the same year. The disappearance of the two governing political parties in France at the 2017 elections. The electoral success of a third party, the Coalition Avenir Québec, during the provincial elections in 2018 in Quebec. On both sides of the Atlantic, unpredicted electoral results and a large reshuffling of partisan scenes are upsetting political, media and academic analyses. These phenomena are sometimes summed up as part of the “rise of populism”. Some works single out the “people” and their habit of being seduced, sometimes of being fooled, by “populist” leaders. The (jumbled) causes – built through statistical explications – are usually found with the “losers of the globalization”, the popular social classes or with ordinary people of rural regions. The observation of a political world turned upside down by the more dominated margins of society is usually brought up with the paradox of poor people voting against their supposed interests.  In France, these reflections are part of the larger debate concerning the voting habits of the popular classes in the context of the slow demise of the right-left divide as the main political reference. On the contrary, in Quebec, the partisan sphere is seen as being more and more polarized around this divide, as the question of sovereignty loses its significance. At the same time, the notion of popular social classes is not as centrally used by analysts in Quebec. Comparing these two cases allows this research to shed – a qualitative – light on the popular classes’ relations to politics and political sides in France and in Quebec.  This work is based on an ethnographic fieldwork in two lower class campgrounds in Pas-de-Calais (in France) and in the south of the “ region of Québec ”. It is a study, from the bottom-up and in a comparative perspective, of the representations and political attitudes of seasonal campers in a leisurely context. My analysis is based on around fifty interviews and a set of ethnographic observation made during two summer seasons in two campgrounds and in other spaces of leisure.  In my analysis of the research participants, ordinary representations of the political parties and of the social significance of voting underlines a suspicious distance from the political realm that is common to socially comparable groups. Voting habits appear to give ambiguous political information that is often difficult to interpret. Far from the erudite patterns of understanding the political game, my work emphasizes common secular tools used by popular classes in France and in Quebec. When such tools, like the use of clues or of rumors for instance, are observed on site, they illustrate the plurality of the participants’ understanding of and relationship to the political. The political attitudes of the popular classes are very loosely connected to the issues of the political realm and are usually rooted in personal experiences. They thus need to be studied in a larger perspective. These relationships to the political are better understood when they are connected to the participants’ relationship to the State and to their own mobilization of identities which allows them to situate themselves socially. My work therefore underscores the divergences and effects of diverse social and spatial trajectories on the social representations and world visions that the popular social classes muster in these two distinct national spaces.  My work consequently aims at shedding a different light on the reshuffling of the partisan scenes in France and in Quebec by orienting the debate towards the ordinary relationships of the popular classes to the political. This thesis points at a political sociology of popular classes in Quebec. It also takes a stand in the debates on the shift to the right of these lower classes and on the “rise of populism” in France and in Quebec. This stand is rooted in a methodological contribution to the ethnography of the political.

Keyphrases: France, Québec, Popular classes, Campsite, Political ethnography, Comparison, Right-left cleavage, Quebec