ECOCIT
Economic governance, democracy, and the state in the French Third Republic (1880-1914). Networks, ideas, and European interwar legacies

Confederation Génerale du Travail - 1st Congress of Savoy Trade Unions, April 1910.

Project

The ECOCIT project interrogates different sources of late 19th century and early 20th century social thought to explore the extent to which reflection on the emerging problems of industrial society – the “social question” in the vocabulary of the age – shaped ideas about the governance of mass society in both democratic and anti-democratic versions.
Taking the French Third Republic as its context of reference, the project examines different sources of social thought – republican solidarisme, revolutionary syndicalism, social Catholicism – from the perspective of the history of democracy, and asks the question of the extent to which various forms of economic citizenship imagined at the time were seen as tools to improve, amend, or even overcome parliamentary democracy.

Research

Research aims

Two main objectives animate the project.

  1. First, it aims at proving quantitatively – through archival work, digital humanities methods, and network analysis – the extent of the interrelation between ideologically opposite strands of social thought. Social Catholics and secular republicans, at loggerheads on virtually every other issue, collaborated copiously on the elaboration of mechanisms of social protection, establishing an ideologically transversal field of scientific expertise. Did this field of expertise include more self-consciously insurrectional traditions such as revolutionary syndicalism?
  2. Second, it interrogates these different bodies of social thought to understand the ways in which they constructed the relationship between democratic and economic citizenship. To what extent was the economic representation of the social understood as a principle complementary to that of universal suffrage, and to what extent could it be seen as a substitute for it? What was the role envisaged for the state in this corporatist rethinking of democracy? Were reforms conceived as a form of empowerment of intermediary bodies at the expense of the state, or, alternatively, as a statist control and disciplining of intermediary bodies?

Broader objectives

The project examines these ideas and these networks especially in the light of the interwar years, a period in which ideas of economic citizenship proved important in structuring historically relevant alternatives to parliamentary democracy.
It seeks to integrate work on corporatism in a broader history of 19th century democracy and, even more broadly, into the different experiments of European modernity with the operationalization of the imperative of popular sovereignty.

Archives Municipales de Lyon, Fonds Chronique de France.

Activities

  • 27-28/11/2025 - Tommaso Giordani and Laura Cerasi attend the conference “Building Corporatist Europe” held at the University of Zurich.

Team

Tommaso Giordani
Tommaso Giordani

Principal Investigator

Laura Cerasi
Laura Cerasi

Tutor