The 50th anniversary of the international commission for the history of representative and parliamentary institutions 1936–1986∗

Abstract

In addressing you at this congress on the social aspects of representation in medieval, modern and contemporary times, it is my pleasure to thank those foreign and Italian colleagues who, in August of last year at Stuttgart, during the International Congress of Historical Sciences, elected me as President of the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions. As President I am glad to receive you in this city of Florence where I have been living for a quarter of a century and where I have been teaching since 1970. I am grateful to the Mayor of Florence, Massimo Bogianckino, for having put at our disposal for the inauguration of the congress this beautiful and historic room in Palazzo Vecchio, but I must also express my gratitude to the Rector of the University of Florence, Professor Franco Scaramuzzi, and to all the public and private bodies which, with various contributions, have made it possible for us to organize this meeting in the year in which Florence is the European capital of culture. This International Commission was born in 1936, when, with the formation in Europe of single party governments, representative systems and parliamentary institutions were undergoing a period of crisis. To fight this crisis in Austria and Germany the voices of some jurists such as Hans Kelsen and in France those of Joseph Barthelemy and Boris Mirkine-Guetzevich, were raised. In Belgium a group of anti-fascists had rallied round the journal of international political studies Res Publica directed by Francesco Luigi Ferrari; in the second issue (1931) a young French jurist, Marcel Prelot, examined 'La structure constitutionnelle de la dictature fasciste apres 1925'. There was then circulating in Europe a book of essays, published at Lausanne in 1928 by the Inter-parliamentary Union in order 'to refute the attacks directed against the very existence of the parliamentary system'. This book contained an essay by Gaetano Mosca which traced the history of parliamentary institutions back to classical antiquity and to the tradition of the Italian republics and which finished as follows: 'There may be moments in the life of nations in which a temporary absolutism may be necessary to save a country from anarchy. But if a people of European culture acquiesced indefinitely in this form of government, that would be an indication of profound intellectual and moral decadence' (p.81). The first meeting of our International Commission took place at Lausanne. The Frenchman A. Coville was made president with P.S. Leicht of the University of Rome as vice-president; Emile Lousse was named secretary. In his opening speech the first president said