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It seems that the first one to use the term 'semi-presidential' with reference to the institutions of the Fifth French Republic was the editor of the important daily Le Monde , Hubert Beuve-Méry, in an article published the very day when President De Gaulle entered the Elysée.1 It is Duverger himself who recalls the fact immediately underlining that he made use of the concept in a technical way, defining and analyzing its meaning in the 11th edition of his Institutions politiques et droit constitutionnel (Duverger, 1970, 277).2 The usage of the term by Beuve-Méry was meant to be critical of the new regime and of the allegedly exaggerated powers given to the President of the Republic. It is fair to say that the French left shared this evaluation for a long time, so much so that its future President, François Mitterrand, wrote a book entitled Le coup d'Etat permanent (Mitterrand 1965). Only later, once elected in 1981, Mitterrand declared that, while the French institutions had not been shaped to its liking, they would fit well his political goals.
Following an embarrassing right-wing past, it was only by the late 1950s that Maurice Duverger shaped and shared many constitutional ideas of the moderate French left. These ideas revolved around two major points. The first one was the full awareness that, politically and constitutionally, the Fourth Republic had been a conspicuous failure, never to be repeated. The second point was that a new regime was absolutely necessary or, at least, a significant and profound revision of the traditional French variant of parliamentary democracy had to be implemented. Participating in the activities of the influential Club Jean Moulin (1961), Duverger had suggested as a possible and incisive reform the popular election of the Prime Minister whose government had to last the entire parliamentary term; if not, there would follow an automatic dissolution of parliament and new elections. Indeed, he articulated a precise proposal to that effect (Duverger, 1958). His negative evaluation of French unbridled parliamentarism was fully argued in one important scholarly article Duverger (1964) and, much later, in one widely read essai (1988) in the best French tradition chastising Mitterrand's decision to reintroduce, defensively and opportunistically, the proportional electoral system.
While favourably evaluating the many...