ABSTRACT
Summarising 50 years of institutional history is necessarily a perilous exercise. There is of course the danger of teleology, i.e. interpreting history as a determinant of the present. This present may precisely be the exception to a long-term trend. Moreover, if the Fifth Republic regime is no longer in its infancy, it still remains one of the shortest lived regimes among Western liberal democracies. There is also the problem of biographical illusion, especially for authors who have not witnessed most of that history and who are not historians. This paper cannot pretend to avoid these dangers. Rather, we will concentrate on them by taking two particularly salient features of the current state of the Fifth Republic and putting them into historical perspective.
