A word of warning for ppl looking for smoking hot-takes on the French elections tonight: actually, were unlikely to find out much and it'll be very hard to predict the final results, especially bc this election is extremely unpredictable. The few things to watch out for are... 1. Participation. The higher it is, the more people care and the more unpredictable the results and modelling of future results will be. If we exceed 70%, even the best pollsters and analysts will struggle to model the future.

Some elements to help analyse what is happening in France, where police violence, racism and social deprivation are once again in the news. First, there is nothing new. This cocktail has plagued France since the 1990s - remember the film La Haine? Basic causal factors... ...remain true: economic stagnation, withdrawal of the state, v high unemployment, systematic police violence, racism, drugs, petty crime, inadequate infrastructure, poor building quality etc. The design of France's postwar housing projects concentrated these problems spatially.

Some thoughts (to be continued as the night goes on):

1) Biggest news by far is that France's far-right finally has a bloc in parliament that matches its electoral strength. This is the logical conclusion of institutional normalisation, but 80+ députés for the RN is still huge. 2) Macron losing a majority is also a big deal - he really will need the centre-right to govern. Parliamentary politics over next 5 years will be much more incoherent and fragmented.

3) NUPES have done well, some big scalps (Ferrand, Castaner), but haven't exceeded expectations.

For all the hot-takes about the French far-right, the thing that strikes the assiduous reader of opinion polls is the stability of the "adherence" to the FN/RN's ideas. A quarter of voters identified with those ideas in 1984; it's the same today. Source: lemonde.fr/politique/arti… There are contextual shifts, eg. leadership change in the party. But the bottom line is that about a quarter of the French electorate lean to the far-right. This hasn't really changed since 1980s and it's MLP's biggest asset - and her biggest weakness.

There's been so much disruption to research recently, but one thing I'm really *very* proud of is the completion of the first comprehensive, text-searchable Eric Hobsbawm Bibliography (hobsbawm.shca.ed.ac.uk). Here's a short thread about what it is and who made it happen... 1/n The blurb says it all: this is a complete database of every published book, journal article, book chapter, review, newspaper article and pamphlet Hobsbawm ever wrote, along with his unpublished work and his private papers. There are over 3,000 entries. 2/n