Between 1893 and 1912, imports of Algerian wine quadrupled and discontent in France mounted. How did this Algerian shock reshape voting? We find that it pushed voting leftward. We interact département-level wine yields with this import surge to estimate the effect of trade exposure on commune-level election outcomes across six legislative elections. Exposed communes experienced a within-left substitution; the socialist vote share rose by 2 percentage points per standard deviation of exposure while the Radical share declined by a similar magnitude; the centre-right lost 5 to 6 percentage points; turnout increased.
Keywords: import competition, political radicalisation, economic geography
JEL: F14, D72, N43
Candau, F. and Lévêque, C. (2026). “Trade Competition and the Rise of the French Left: The Algerian Wine Shock, 1893–1914.” Working paper.
@unpublished{CandauLeveque2026AlgerianWine,
author = {Candau, Fabien and L{\'e}v{\^e}que, Christophe},
title = {Trade Competition and the Rise of the {French} Left: The {Algerian} Wine Shock, 1893--1914},
year = {2026},
note = {Working paper},
url = {https://fcandau.github.io/Homepage/Papers/AlgerianWineShock.html}
}