French Politics, Society and Culture
1 total work
What is the Senate for and what does it do? Everyone knows what the French president, the National Assembly and political parties are for and what they do, but not the upper house. At his inauguration in October 2008, the Senate's new speaker made it his goal to make this commonplace redundant by the end of his term in 2011. It may be the least well known of the institutions of the Fifth Republic, but the Senate is an assembly based on that most particular aspect of French political culture -- local government and local elus. As Paul Smith shows here, it is an institution that has evolved with the regime, sometimes in unexpected ways, and finds itself, at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, on the brink of potentially great and certainly unexpected changes in form and content.