Costituzione e popolo. Riflessioni su democrazia e bonapartismo nell'esperienza francese (The Constitution and the people. Democracy and Bonapartism in the French experience)

The relationship between the Constitution and the People is one of the areas of most interest of legal modernity. The reference to the popular legitimacy to justify the Constituent moment, but also the suspension of law and guarantees, has been a constant in the history of modern public law, with semantic variants in the meanings of the terms “people” and “populist”. From this point of view the French experience has been a constitutional laboratory where, starting from the Great Revolution, were tested different forms of public and private powers, based on alternative ideas on the state and on the society. In particular the legal debate since 1789 has been characterized by a constant dialectic between direct democracy and representative system with a predominant focus on the question of the identity of the People and the Representatives. In the French constitutional history, therefore, the period between the outbreak of the Revolution and the Paris Commune was characterized by different regimes, based on opposing legitimacy, but that, in different ways and measures, have made use of the instrument of the “appeal to the people” with the consequent suspension of the constitution, or vice versa, freezing of constitutional guarantees to “save” the People.