Pluralism, Parliament and the Possibility of a Sénat fédérateur, 1940–1969

Abstract

Mention pluralism to any group of parliamentary and constitutional historians of France and they will probably think automatically of the second chamber. That is not to say that pluralism and bicameralism are synonymous, or that the absence of a second chamber bears witness to an absence of pluralism. One can think of pluralist societies whose parliaments are unicameral. But in France, where so much emphasis in republican liturgy is laid on oneness and indivisibility embodied in the National Assembly and on the rights of citizens, the Senate, a mixed, territorial assembly, represents a problematic other: sometimes more significant, sometimes less, but always the other, and stands for a tradition of representing the nation differently to the way that it is represented in the National Assembly or, since 1965, by the President. Paradoxically, despite its fundamental ‘otherness’, the Senate embodies the synthesis of the national and the local so characteristic of French political culture.