Итог полностью

Although the social bases of the Poujadist movement are poorly understood, it is clear that it found its first troops and its most faithful supporters in the petite bourgeoisie of provincial craftsmen and small traders, most of them getting on in years and threatened by economic and social transformations. Two inquiries, by the two French opinion poll organizations 1FRES and IFOP, produced similar results, showing that those who sympathized with Coluche’s candidature displayed completely different characteristics. The tendency to approve of Coluche’s candidature varied in inverse proportion to age: it reached its maximum among the youngest (and among these, especially the men), and only a fraction (about a third) of people aged over 65 found it scandalous. In the same way. suppon tended to increase with the size of the town where one lived: it was very small in rural districts and small towns, and reached a maximum in cities and in Paris and its suburbs. Although the categories employed in the two polling institutes are both imprecise and difficult to compare directly, everything seems to suggest that it was workers and employees, and also intellectuals and artists, who declared themselves most clearly in favour of this anomic candidate, whereas he was most vigorously rejected by captains of industry and commerce. This is easily understood if we realize that the votes thus diverted came principally from the left (more from the Socialist Party than from the Communist Party) and also from ecologists and abstainers. The proportion of people questioned who, had Coluche not been standing, would have voted for right-wing parties was small, and

these votes would have tended to go back to the Socialist Party in particular (the proportion of those who would have chosen abstention is of course very high in all categories). The fact that ihe proportion of Coluche supporters was clearly higher among men than among women allows us Io suppose that this choice was the expression of an active abstention ism, something very different from the simple indifference linked to the incompetence due to low status.

Thus the professionals, politicians and journalists, tried to refuse to this ‘troublemaker’ a right of entry which the non-professionals granted him overwhelmingly (two thirds of them were favourable to the principle of his standing). This is doubtless because, by entering the game without taking it seriously and without taking himself seriously, this extra-ordinary player threatened the very foundation of the game, in other words, both ihe belief and the credibility of the ordinary players, The authorized representatives of power were caught in the very act of abusing power: whereas, in the normal course of events, they present themselves as spokespersons of 'public opinion’, and as guarantors of all authorized words, they give us, not the truth about the social world, but the truth about their relation to that world, forcing us to ask whether the same is not equally the case on other occasions.

* S. Hoffman, Le movement Poujade, Cahiers de la fondation nationale des sciences potitiques (Paris: A. Colin, 1^56), pp. 209-6(1. 246.

especially potential stances or, better, of the principle underlying these stances, namely, the space of objective positions in the field and the dispositions of those who occupy them. This ‘practical sense of the possible and impossible, probable and improbable stances for the different occupants of different positions is what enables the politician to ‘choose’ suitable and agreed stances, and to avoid ‘compromising’ stances, which would mean being of the same mind as the occupants of opposite positions in the space of the political field. This feel for the political game, which enables politicians to predict the stances of other politicians, is also what makes them predictable for other politicians: predictable and thus responsible, in other words, competent, serious, trustworthy - in short, ready to play, with consistency and without arousing surprise or disappointing people’s expectations, the role assigned to them by the structure of the space of the game.

Nothing is demanded more absolutely by the political game than