National Council and National Congress Divisions

The research for this book has entailed an analysis of many of the divisions by mandate at meetings of the National Congress and the National Council of the SFIO between June 1937 and September 1946. During that period the results of these divisions were recorded both as aggregate votes and as lists of the distribution of mandates by federation and were presented in the party's journal (La Vie du Parti until 1940 and the Bulletin Intérieur du Parti Socialiste (S.F.I.O.) after 1945) and for the 34th (1937) and 35th (1938) National Congresses in the published Comptes rendus sténographiques.

In order to obtain reliable and comparable division lists, the records of votes by federation were checked for any errors of transcription and addition which might have been made when the original data were prepared and printed. Two basic checking techniques were employed: first, the addition of the mandates attaching to each federal delegation, to make sure that the total matched the number of national mandates allocated to that federation, and, secondly, the addition of the mandates recorded under the different headings of a division in order to compare the results with the official returns published in the party journal.