Voting is now a well-regulated gesture. The voter enters the polling station in his district, chooses one or more ballot papers in the name of the candidates and goes to the voting booth to slip, in complete privacy, the one of his choice into the envelope provided for this purpose before deposit in the ballot box and sign out. In this procedure, there is an apparently innocuous element which has long met with fierce opposition from a majority of parliamentarians.
Finally established by the law of July 29, 1913, the proposal for a voting booth appeared for the first time in the Senate in 1880 and was presented, without success, more than ten times before being instituted. However, among our European neighbors, voting booths were already widespread at that time. England put them in place in 1872, quickly followed by the canton of Neuchâtel in Switzerland and the Netherlands in 1896, reminds us in its edition of December 13, 1901 the newspaper Lantern on the occasion of yet another presentation of this device to the chamber. But devil! Why, in France, so much fear and doubt for such a small thing?
Proponents of the voting booth saw it as a bulwark against electoral pressure. It was not uncommon, in fact, in 19th century France to see factory workers going to vote under the supervision of the foreman or parishioners executing after mass, under the gaze of the person who holds the keys to paradise. “The case of the Schneiders [famille d’industriel de la ville du Creusot comptant des députés sur plusieurs générations]distributing ballot papers to workers, is significant of many businessmen’s elections where the boundary between the traditional customer relationship and employer pressure on employment proves to be porous”, notes the sociologist Philippe Hamman.
The historian Michel Offerlé, is astonished: “What is striking in the elections at Le Creusot is the absence of testimonies. In 1869, as in 1876 or 1889, there is no one to speak: self-restraint or acceptance? However, the appearance of several hundred voices of opposition led to more than a hundred dismissals after the 1869 elections”. Consequently, the voting booth combined with the envelopes seems to be the ideal tool to overcome these pressures which, without being generalized, nevertheless prove to be recurrent.
The reports of the parliamentary debates of the time offer us motivations of rare bad faith to avoid its establishment, such as reports Alain Garrigouin The secret of the voting booth. “Why, after fifty years of constant exercise of the electoral right, do you invent […] all that Chinese stuff? asked MP Charles Ferry in 1898. Charles de Boury is worried “that a large number of voters will be disturbed by their unaccustomed use of such a piece of furniture”. There are also fears of “traffic jams”, “contagious diseases”, envelopes torn by “fingers hardened by work” in justification of this opposition. The analysis of the vote of April 1, 1898, where 265 deputies voted against the use of the voting booth and the envelope (216 for), is quite revealing of a controversy which bears more on a mode of electoral domination than on a simple procedure. While 100% of the 26 deputies from working-class and peasant backgrounds voted in favor, more than 75% of the 180 deputies classified as industrialists, bankers and landowners opposed it.
A first on all fours
When finally 15 years later, these devices were adopted, it was with delight that the press reported on its first use during the by-election in Ivry. The newspaper of November 10, 1913 reads it in an article entitled “The mysteries of the voting booth” and surtitled “political experimentation”. “We saw a brave agent, disturbed by such a device, hesitate on the way he would enter, put down his kepi, then slip very ceremoniously under the curtain of chandelier”. And to continue his story with an abbot who crossed himself in front of such “devilry” and an “old worker, despising the present time [qui] protested, then, having said, left, refusing to submit to what he called “antics”.
That being said, the voting booths were generalized and all French voters discovered them a handful of months later, during the legislative elections of April 1914.