The Constitutional and Administrative Background

Abstract

Abstract The ‘duality’ of the droit civil and the droit administratif in France, and more particularly the dual system of courts, cannot be under stood without some appreciation of French constitutional history and the present Constitution of the Fifth Republic. This is particularly important because the Conseil d’Etat was the child of the Revolution of 1789 and the period of the Consulate (1798-1802), although droit administratif itselfwas, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, a later development. The course of French political history since the Revolution has been charted by repeated shifts of power between the executive and the representative assembly. On the one hand, there has been the authoritarian or Bonapartist tradition (inherited from the Ancien Regime) of autocratic rule based upon a powerful and centralized bureaucracy and acting more or less independently of parliament. On the other hand, there is the parliamentary tradition whereby the elected assembly imposes its will upon the executive, although still relying upon a strong bureaucracy.