Although the US Constitution is quite short, it is also quite old. The structures it called forth – including the presidency, the bicameral Congress, the Supreme Court – survive, even as their relationships have evolved. Its brief provisions have also spawned a complex body of jurisprudence on many issues that has shifted over more than two centuries; there are now more than 560 volumes of the official ‘US Reports’, that is, of cases decided by the US Supreme Court.1

The Constitution of India, adopted in 1949 and still in force today, was one of the earliest post-colonial Constitutions. Where the constitutional systems of most other newly independent states of the 1960s and 1970s have been marked by revolution, constitutional repeal and suspension, the Indian Constitution is remarkable for its durability. In fact, there are only a handful of states, with or without a colonial history, whose Constitutions have proved more resilient. The Indian Constitution is also the longest Constitution in the world, with the original draft consisting of 395 articles, eight schedules and a huge amount of administrative detail. There have also been 101 Amendments to the Constitution.

Until recently, standard accounts of the global constitutional landscape assigned the world’s constitutions to one of two dichotomous models for the constitutional protection of human rights: legislative supremacy or judicial supremacy. According to this binary taxonomy, the first model is characterized by the absence of any codified bill of rights and by the allocation of final authority on human rights questions to the legislative branch of the state. The second is characterized, to the contrary, by the presence of an entrenched and supreme law bill of rights, interpreted and enforced (including as against the legislature) by courts of some kind.1

Constitutionalism is the set of ideas that defines what a constitution is or ought to be. For some, there exists an essential core meaning of the term;1 while for others, the concepts of ‘constitution’ and ‘constitutionalism’ have fundamentally changed over time.2

The term ‘federalism’ refers both to a plurality of historical experiences, and features both a static-structural and a dynamic-procedural dimension. The first dimension refers to the concrete organizational forms assumed by federalism (such as in the United States or India); the second dimension, on the other hand, concerns federal processes, that is to say the historical evolution and the progressive development of a union between several communities (for example, the European Union or the United Provinces of the Netherlands in the modern era).

Does China have a constitution? That depends on the way in which the word ‘constitution’ is understood. It is commonly thought that China did not have a written constitution until 1908, when the last dynasty enacted the Outline of Imperial Constitution (qinding xianfa dagang), but this does not mean that traditional China was not governed by basic rules and norms. As I argued previously, the Confucian cultural tradition that dominated China for over 2,000 years was centred on the fundamental moral precepts of humanity (ren) and righteousness (yi), around which an elaborate body of rules on rites, ceremonies, etiquette, and other aspects of human behaviour was developed.1 Taken together, they formed a vast normative system of ‘propriety’ (li, sometimes translated as ‘rites’),2 which stood for a set of customs, conventions and procedures to be practiced in daily life for the purposes of cultivating moral virtue, directing and containing human passions, and preserving a well-ordered society. Indeed, these rules were collected in a dense Book of Rites (Li Ji) and enforced by generations of the Confucian gentry, to various degrees of efficacy. To that extent, the traditional China did have a constitution – even a written constitution, if ‘constitution’ is meant to be a set of fundamental rules that govern society.

Governments can pose a threat to constitutional authority. As institutions, they pre-date constitutional regimes and are structurally least sympathetic to its limitations. Their sceptical predisposition towards constitutionalism has only grown in the twentieth and twenty-first century, when the rise of the bureaucratic state and internationalization coupled with government-led international law-making have only heightened the potential dominance of executive power. Functions and competences of governments are hence a central battlefield of constitutional calibration.

This chapter aims at providing readers with an introduction to French constitutional law and, more generally, to France’s constitutional tradition. France’s constitutional culture is dominated by a paradox: it is a revolutionary culture with frequent constitutional changes and amendments, but also some remarkably stable key characteristics. Amongst these is the establishment of a republican culture in a country governed for centuries by monarchs. This may explain France’s very special position with regard, in particular, to systems of government. While France chose parliamentarism during the nineteenth century, the 1958 Constitution – an embodiment of the ideas of General de Gaulle – is characterized by an insistence on presidential powers that many observers compare with a presidential monarchy. This is just one, albeit maybe the most conspicuous, of France’s constitutional paradoxes.