Abstract
It is no secret that former President Charles De Gaulle’s sympathy for judges—and arguably for law and lawyers more broadly—was rather limited. Statements such as “[i]n France the only Supreme Court is the people” or “[r]emember the following: there is first France, then the State and then, as long as these two other major interests are guaranteed, the law” have been attributed to him. While similar proclamations in any national context might raise some eyebrows, they are more problematic in a country that has been historically rather diffident towards judges and where the “government by judges” (le gouvernement des juges) functions as a sort of scarecrow seen as either bringing France back to the arbitrariness of courts under Ancien Régime or as importing American judicial problems. Given such an unfavourable context to an independent and strong judiciary, it comes as little surprise that “De Gaulle’s” Constitution of the Vth Republic—which is still France’s constitution today (hereinafter the 1958 Constitution)—had extremely limited constitutionality control of legislation and did not intend to fully consider the judiciary amongst the actual powers of the State, only referring to it as “judicial authority”. Another reason for this choice seems to be that judges are not elected and therefore cannot be considered a state power but only an authority.
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Notes
- 1.
“En France, la cour suprême, c’est le peuple”. De Gaulle made this statement supposedly in conjunction with the ratification of the European Convention on Human Rights, which he opposed and it is referred to in various places. See e.g.: Favoreu (1992), p. 500.
- 2.
“Souvenez-vous de ceci: il y a d’abord la France, ensuite l’Etat, enfin, autant que les intérêts majeurs des deux sont sauvegardés, le droit.” This citation is mentioned in: Foyer (2006), p. 7.
- 3.
See on this expression: Lambert (2005).
- 4.
On this observation see: Chapsal (1984), p. 133. At the time, the critique was about the American Supreme Court’s laissez-faire liberalism which served to strike down a whole set of labour law protective statutes.
- 5.
In its initial version, Article 61 of the Constitution only allowed the President, the Prime Minister and the presidents of the two parliamentary houses to raise the issue of constitutionality of legislation and such a control could only take place before legislation entered into force. These criteria were later broadened by amending the French Constitution. Moreover, starting from its famous Freedom of association decision (Decision no. 71-44 DC of 16 July 1971) the Constitutional Council, France’s constitutional court, extended its review to assess legislation also against fundamental rights and principles.
- 6.
See Title VIII of the 1958 Constitution, entitled “De l’autorité judiciaire”. On this understanding of the judiciary not as a power but as an authority, see: Costa (1960), p. 261.
- 7.
See on this point, Foyer (2006), p. 66.
- 8.
For a critical assessment of this French “tradition” of exceptional tribunals, see: Jaffré (1962), pp. 229–337.
- 9.
CdE, Canal, Robin et Godot, 19 October 1962, Rec. Lebon, p. 552.
- 10.
- 11.
Arguably, for the French understanding and history of the judiciary, the administrative court system is not conceived of being part of that state power. This can be seen from the 1958 Constitution itself, where the administrative court system is not mentioned under Title VIII on judicial authority, leaving the CdE almost unmentioned in the 1958 Constitution. But from the human rights logic and the perspective of the European Court of Human Rights the CdE certainly is deemed to be part of the judiciary, despite the finding of some minor procedural issues tainting its functioning under Article 6 (right to a fair trial). See the famous judgment: Kress v. France, no. 39594/98, 7 June 2001.
- 12.
Id., pp. 101 and 105.
- 13.
Palais Bourbon is the name attributed to the building of the National Assembly. It should be mentioned that something that had been called Haute-Cour already existed under France’s Third Republic and it dealt with acts of treason by Ministers and the Senators were the judges of this political court. However, given that the Senate had disappeared and that under the Vichy Regime many Senators had voted in favour of Maréchal Pétain, it was difficult to use this institution to judge collaborators of the Vichy Regime. Id., pp. 91–92.
- 14.
De Gaulle (1967), p. 793.
- 15.
- 16.
This is essentially representative of the central government and the chief administrator at the local level.
- 17.
Ordonnance no. 62-780 du 12 juillet 1962 relative à la situation des magistrats en service en Algérie et à la limite d’âge provisoire des magistrats.
- 18.
Id. art. 16.
- 19.
Id. art. 16.
- 20.
Id. art. 17. Quite generously the regulation specified that for these judges the pension would be calculated as if they had reached 70 years of age (Id. art. 18).
- 21.
La limite d’âge des magistrats est ramenée à 67 ans, Le Monde, 14 July 1962, p. 8.
- 22.
See: M. Marcel Rousselet devient le premier Président honoraire de la Cour de Paris, Le Monde, 9–10 September 1962, p. 12.
- 23.
- 24.
Royer et al. (2016), pp. 1118 and 1124.
- 25.
Nécrologie: le Premier Président Marcel Rousselet (1984) Revue internationale de droit comparé, 36, 161–162.
- 26.
See in this group the already mentioned work by Jaffré (1962), p. 290 but also the book by Besson (1973), p. 354, fn. 1. The interesting thing about this author was that Besson had been named General Prosecutor of the Paris Court of Appeals (1949), of the French Supreme Court (1951) and later of the High Military Tribunal (1961), one of those exceptional jurisdictions mentioned above. In 1962, he was “relegated” to a post as governmental counsellor of judicial affairs which he held for a few weeks only. See on this: Royer et al. (2016), p. 1124.
- 27.
Mitterrand (2010), pp. 216–218.
- 28.
Monnerville (n. 15).
- 29.
The details of this version can be found in: Foyer (2006), pp. 222–224.
- 30.
Rousselet (1957).
- 31.
Id., p. 224.
- 32.
- 33.
Coignard and Lacan (n. 32), ibid.
- 34.
Arguably the term has been coined in 1997 (Zakaria 1997, p. 22) but has since then been popularized by Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán.
- 35.
Landau (2013), p. 189.
- 36.
Landau (2018), p. 521.
- 37.
See most recently on such amendments: Roznai (2017).
- 38.
The literature on this and the various constitutional law and European Union Law implications is quite vast. For the sake of brevity on the situation in Hungary, see: Halmai (2017), pp. 471–488; on the situation in Poland, see: Sadurski (2018); on the broader situation also with regard to the (non-) reaction by European institutions, see: Kovács and Scheppele (2018), p. 189.
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Möschel, M. (2019). How ‘Liberal’ Democracies Attack(ed) Judicial Independence: An Anecdote from De Gaulle’s France. In: Pinto de Albuquerque, P., Wojtyczek, K. (eds) Judicial Power in a Globalized World. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20744-1_19
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