Bicameralism and political culture in the French Republic

Abstract

Bicameralism in France dates back to the summer of 1789, when the Monarchiens, liberal constitutional monarchists who briefly held sway over the National Assembly, put before their colleagues a proposal to give France a parliament comprising a House of Representatives and a Senate, based on the provincial assemblies. The proposal failed, however, in the face of the prevailing view that representing the one and indivisible France meant there could be only one assembly. The shortcomings of the Legislative Assembly, created in 1791, the fall of the monarchy, the still-born experiment of the Jacobin constitution and the Terror, put a second chamber back on the agenda in 1795. The Thermidorians threw away the Jacobin constitution of 1793 and drew up a bicameral one that established a body of 750 representatives split into two assemblies: a Council of Five Hundred — the ‘imagination’ of the Republic — and a Council of Elders — its ‘good sense’, as Boissy d’Anglas, one of its authors, put it. The complicity of the Elders in Bonaparte’s seizure of power in 1799, however, did nothing to secure bicameralism a place in the minds of nineteenth century French republicans. That the Council of Elders successors — the Imperial Senate under Bonaparte, the Chamber of Peers under the Bourbon (1815–30) and Orléans (1830–48) monarchies and the Sénat conservateur of the Second Empire — all comprised royal or imperial nominees, only cemented the view that the Republic should have only one chamber.