Rząd a parlament w III Republice Francuskiej (do I wojny światowej)
Authors: Stembrowicz Jerzy 
Published: April 2023

The omnipotence of the parliament in the. Third Republic came about to counteract the constitutional division of authority into the legislative and executive one, and therefore could not be free from hence ensuing contradictions. This tendency was reflected by the attempts to furnish the parliament with powers relating not only to the appointment of ministers and undersecretaries (and thus to manifest its supervision over the government) but also to dissolving ministries and transfering the competence from some to others (this pertained to the very organization of the government). Thus the parliament attempted to abolish the main attribute of the executive, i. e. the right to decide about its interior organization, somas it is the case with the regulation of inner activities of the legislature (the regulations of the houses). The standpoint of the parliament resulted in such an arrangement that actually the ministries were set up and their competence determined by the president, under the political supervision of the parliament and on the condition that respective credits had been granted. The exponents of the doctrine acknowledged the right of the executive to determine about its own functions and offices, even though the praxis had no legislative background. The former right was even recognized as constitutional, since the head of the state was the main executive of the resolutions, and in consequence the competence to organize the executive, i. e. respective offices and to divide competence among them, lay with him.Moreover, in spite of the parliament’s supremacy over the government, the resolutions of the former did not predominate the governmental legislation in the form of the president’s decrees. The latter were actually adopted by ministers during the Council, or outside and independently, and next submitted to the head of the state to be signed. For, apart from the decrees which were to carry out the resolutions, there also existed independent decrees — the remnants of the government legislation (domaine règlementaire), which dated back to the limited monarchy and the traditional, horizontal division of legislature, not the vertical one, put forward by Carré de Malberg. Without any constitutional foundations and oposition on the part of the doctrine the custom of the legislative activity of the president was continued into the Third Republic, although he was provided with no legislative commission whatsoever, either explicit or implicit. The said legislative activities related mainly to the administration of colonies, the order, security, structure and functioning of the public administration — hence the autonomic decisions of the government regarding the ministries. Finally, the president — ’’the civil servant” — though effaced by the parliament, in the doctrinal terms was the ’’only agent of the state” and from time to time he could again play the role of the main political, executive leader, thwart the plans of the candidates for the office of the president of the Council of Ministers, affect the ministerial nominations, play a real part in foreign policy. The mentioned facts indicate that within the said parliamentary system of the political accountability of the French government there were certain elements, or even a trend of the balanced parliamentarianism, where the activities of the government became detached from the parliament, and the former could be autonomous in organizational, legislative and even political terms. However the trend was manifested in legal-organizational sphere rather than in the political one. Consequently there was a political domination of the houses over the executive. Nevertheless the discussed trend gained permanent supporters (so as the case was with the parliamentary absolutism) who considered the executive to account for the actual, natural and primary life of the country and opposed the former being dominated by the legislature.