Avant la commune : l'associationnisme à petite échelle et la « souveraineté réelle »

Based on an analysis of workers’ newspapers published before 1870, this article investigates how the local scale, the sub-national territory, was perceived before the Commune and the advent of municipal socialism. The 19^th century saw the development of associative dynamics, and workers wondered about the geographical scope of these dynamics, and the space in which they should be deployed. Underlying this was the relationship between the associative economy and the space of the nation, through an economic dilemma: within national boundaries, was the associative economy compatible with competition and free trade? Should state power unify the associative dynamic and banish ‘laissez-faire’ or should it allow associative units to develop locally and, possibly, enter into competition? In this paper, I show that behind these questions lies the implicit issue of popular and social sovereignty, as generated by the associative dynamics. This article gives a geographical interpretation to this issue: on what scale should popular sovereignty be concretized – within the vast body of the nation, or below?