French legislative election, 1919

French legislative election, 1919

← 1914 16 and 30 November 1919 1924 →
All 613 seats to the Chamber of Deputies
Majority party Minority party Third party   Leader Georges Clemenceau Édouard Herriot Ludovic-Oscar Frossard Party Independent Radicals PRRRS SFIO Alliance National Bloc Leader's seat Var Rhône Seine (lost) Seats won 412 86 68 Seat change new party 109 34 Popular vote 4,353,025 1,420,381 1,728,663 Percentage 53.42% 17.43% 21.22%
Composition of the Chamber of Deputies
Prime Minister before election Georges Clemenceau Independent Elected Prime Minister Alexandre Millerand Independent

Georges Clemenceau
Independent

Alexandre Millerand
Independent

The 1919 legislative election, the first election held after World War I, was held on 16 and 30 November 1919.

It resulted in a decisive victory for the right-wing Bloc National.

Proportional representation by department replaced the two-round system by arrondissements in use since 1889. However, a provision of the system allowed a party to win all the seats in a certain constituency if it had won over 50% of all votes cast.

The formation of electoral lists needed to take into account of three factors: on one hand, the tendency of the opinion to think that the Union sacrée needed to be prolonged in peacetime in order to solve the new problems of France of the post-war period; on the other hand, the refusal of the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO), then in crisis, to discuss the question of the Bolshevism. To preserve their unity, the Socialists decided in April 1919 not to conclude any agreement ahead of the legislative elections. This decision isolated the radicals, forced to give up a new alliance of the left, and allowed an aggressive campaign of the right and centre directed against the SFIO, accused of Bolshevism; finally, the persistence of partisan divisions within the right. The monarchists of Action française were isolated, but the nationalists, the Catholics, and the "progressives" (who are in fact the moderate republicans from the pre-war period) brought together the moderate republicans of the center-right, gathered in several small organizations, all members of Democratic Alliance, but rejected any possibility of an agreement with the radicals. The radicals were found stuck between the SFIO which hesitated between radicalization and the status quo, and a right more than ever anti-leftist.