Abstract

The relationship between the Constitution and the People is one of the areas of greatest 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 topic 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, different forms of public and private powers were tested. In particular the legal debate since 1789 has been characterized by a continuous dialectic between direct democracy and representative system with a predominant focus on the question of the identity of the People and the Representatives.