The Liberation and the Institutional Question in France

Abstract

The question of France’s institutions may at first sight seem secondary compared to other pressing issues confronting the Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Française (GPRF) on its move to Paris at the end of August 1944. Yet it had absorbed the attention of the Resistance movement and of political parties, both established and new, as early as 1941. It was therefore soon aired in the legislative or quasi-legislative organs of the Resistance and Liberation authorities. The first of these was the Provisional Consultative Assembly, set up in Algiers in September 1943 to enhance the democratic legitimacy of the Comité Français de la Libération Nationale (CFLN), the predecessor to the GPRF, by representing the main political parties, and reconstituted a year later in Paris. It was replaced in October 1945 by the first of the two National Constituent Assemblies. This, like its successor elected in June 1946 (and unlike the Consultative Assembly), was a legislature legitimated by universal suffrage, in which the parties wielded deliberative power via their Deputies.

My special thanks to Françoise and Rolland Bourié for their help with the translation of this chapter.