ABSTRACT
There are two major differences between the Fifth and Third Republics: instead of being elected by a joint session of the two houses of Parliament, the President is elected by universal suffrage; instead of having powers absolutely identical to those of the popularly elected National Assembly, the Senate no longer has full legislative power. The Fourth Republic had rapidly found the means of re-establishing this procedure, despite a poorly phrased constitutional prohibition. While Parliament enacted 815 statutes in the first decade of the Fifth Republic, 131 legislative acts were promulgated without the participation of Parliament. In the practice of the first decade of the Fifth Republic, however, this regime came to look very different from the way it was envisaged in the beginning, and the role of Parliament became even less important than imagined by many of those who had initially accepted the 1958 Constitution.
