This thesis analyses the radicalisation of the bürgertum in a single Bavarian town, Hof-an-der-Saale, in the five years after the First World War. It is bookended by two important and enormously different elections. In the first of these – the January 1919 elections to the National Assembly – the bürgerliche districts of Hof voted almost entirely for the German Democratic Party, a left-liberal, pro-Republican party that called for a parliamentary democracy, the separation of church and state, rights for women, a renunciation of German militarism and a close collaboration with the Social Democrats. But just five years later, in the Reichstag elections of May 1924, these very same districts cast their votes for the Völkisch Block, a cover organisation for the then-banned Nazi Party. Within half a decade, then, Hof's bürgerliche milieu had switched its allegiance from a party of left-liberal democrats to the most radical nationalists in German history. Why did this dramatic and disturbing electoral turnaround occur? In an effort to answer this question, this thesis offers a detailed study of the narratives and discourses that circulated within Hof's bürgerliche milieu during this five-year period. It uses newspaper editorials, the minutes of political meetings, electoral propaganda, the documents of civic associations and commercial organisations, the Protestant newsletter and a range of other sources in an effort to reconstruct what Hof's Burghers thought, said and wrote between these two elections. What happened between January 1919 and May 1924 to transform Hof's bürgerliche inhabitants from Democrat into Nazi voters, and how did this startling change manifest itself at the level of discourse and political culture?

Fondé à Munich en octobre 1946 suite à la réorganisation d’un proto-parti mariant rejet de l’unitarisme autoritaire et provincialisme anti-prussien, le Bayernpartei (BP) se fit après la guerre le courtier des revendications autonomistes bavaroises et le médiateur de l’hostilité populaire à l’égard des réfugiés allemands originaires d’Europe centrale et orientale. Couronné de succès lors des élections fédérales post-dictatoriales de 1949 – à l’occasion desquelles il recueillit 20,9% des voix en Bavière –, il présente la particularité d’avoir subi pendant vingt ans un déclin électoral régulier, et d’avoir totalement cessé d’être « relevant » au sens de Sartori au moment même où l’on assistait à l’échelle européenne, et même occidentale, à un nouvel essor des partis et formations régionalistes procédant du clivage centre/périphérie.Quels sont les déterminants causaux du progressif déclin du Bayernpartei ? Quels facteurs explicatifs apparaissent susceptibles de rendre compte de sa graduelle transformation en ce que Manfred Rowold estime être une simple association folklorique sans importance ? Tel est le questionnement sous-tendant le présent travail de thèse, et auquel l’auteur propose de répondre en se dégageant du rétrospectivisme monocausal, linéariste et exogénéisant dont firent preuve les (rares) politistes ayant tenté de rendre compte de l’étiolement politique passé du parti régionaliste bavarois. / Founded in Munich in October 1946 after the reorganisation of a proto-party combining rejection of authoritarian unitarism and anti-Prussian provincialism, the Bavaria Party (Bayernpartei) appeared after the Second World War as the spreader of the Bavarian claims for autonomy, and as the echo box of popular hostility against German refugees from Central and Eastern Europe. After having been crowned with success at the German federal election of 1949 – on which it collected 20,9% of the votes in Bavaria –, he was affected during two decades by a steady electoral decline, so much so that it completely ceased to be “relevant” in the sense of Sartori at the very time when political scientists were witnessing at European (and even Western) level a new upsurge of regionalist parties and organisations.What are the causal determinants of the progressive decline of the Bavaria Party? What explanatory factors can be advanced to account for its gradual transformation into what Manfred Rowold considers to be a simple and irrelevant folk association? This is the question underlying the present work and to which the author proposes to respond by working on the assumption that it is necessary to break with the monocausal, linearist and exogenousing retrospectivism characterizing the analyses of the (rare) political scientists who have already attempted to explain the withering away of the Bavarian regionalist party.