Talk:1791 French legislative election

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Do we have a source for those totals? It's very hard for me to believe that such a large number of people voted, in an election that was only open to taxpayers. 68.56.141.153 (talk) 22:09, 25 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This book estimates a total of 572,086 total voters. 67.4.220.35 (talk) 03:50, 16 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I do not know how many people voted in the election, but the idea that 16 million people turned out to vote in 1791 is impossible and ridiculous. Removing the numbers until we can find a more reasonable estimate. Aclany (talk) 21:14, 22 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Roi.Frvr: I appreciate the attempt to improve the article, but it looks like you are just copying across the unsourced figures from fr.wiki. The vote figures look like back-calculations from the supposed seat figures (for example, the Feuillants are claimed to have won 264 of 745 seats, or 35.44%, which is exactly the percentage of votes reported to have won), so the vote figures look to be nonsense.

Some seat figures do appear in sources, but they are inconsistent. There is a detailed paper on trying to assign seat numbers for this legislature by C.J. Mitchell (Political Divisions within the Legislative Assembly of 1791), which is cited in the article. A useful excerpt from that is:

The party divisions within the Assembly invariably gain only a vicarious life, being described in terms of the fading squabbles of the Constituent Assembly or the coming fratricide of the Convention. We hear of the Feuillants and Jacobins and are even given membership figures(though no names to correspond to the figures), but these terms are loosely used as no more than a catch-all means of distinguishing the presumed right wing from the left. This lack of rigor is compounded by the disconcerting variety of political names used by contemporaries: enrages, patriotes, Girondistes, la Gironde, independents, moderes, lamethistes, ministeriels, constitutionnels, le cote droit, and so on.
Many of these terms are still used today but every one of them lacks substance, for none is built on a study of individuals. Most of them exist independently of any adherents or with a few supposedly representative characters being taken as sufficient to show the presence of a party and to fix its nature. Such use of these party names has become sanctioned by time, and all that the historian now asks of them is that they can be used in descriptions of the forces at work within the Assembly.

I would recommend you read this paper (it is accessible via the WikiLibrary) before readding details on party makeup. My conclusion after reading it is that doing so is highly inadvisable. However, perhaps what could be added to the results section is some more detail on the futility of assigning seat figures when the divisions were so unclear.

Also, I noticed you changed some cited information (for example "There were no formal political parties, although informal groups such as the Feuillants, Jacobins and the Réunion club emerged" to "There were no formal political parties, although informal groups such as the Feuillants, The Plain and Girondins emerged") despite this not being supported by the source. Please be careful about doing this, as in future if someone checks the information against the source, they may conclude it was made up. Cheers, Number 57 12:55, 18 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]