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FRENCH POLITICS, SOCIETY AND CULTURE
The French Parliament

and the European Union
Backbenchers Blues
Olivier Rozenberg
French Politics, Society and Culture
Series Editor
Jocelyn Evans
School of Politics & International Studies
University of Leeds
Leeds, UK
This series examines all aspects of French politics, society and culture. In
so doing it focuses on the changing nature of the French system as well as
the established patterns of political, social and cultural life. Contributors
to the series are encouraged to present new and innovative arguments so
that the informed reader can learn and understand more about one of the
most beguiling and compelling of European countries.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14991
Olivier Rozenberg
The French Parliament

and the European
Union
Backbenchers Blues
Olivier Rozenberg
Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics
Sciences Po
Paris, France
Original French edition published by Presses de Sciences Po, Paris, 2018
French Politics, Society and Culture

ISBN 978-3-030-19790-2 ISBN 978-3-030-19791-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19791-9
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
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The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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The book is dedicated to Denise and Roger, and Solange and Hersz,
my grand-parents.
Acknowledgments
This book was published in 2018 in French under the title Les députés
français et l’Europe. Tristes hémicycles? by the Presses de Sciences Po in
Paris. It was translated from French by Ray Godfrey, Richard Jemmet,
Katharine Throssell and Julia Zelman. Thanks to them and especially to
Julia, who coordinated it all.
I am grateful for all members of parliaments, clerks and civil servants
who gave me their time and their words in interviews.
The book would not have been published without the initial support of
Professor Richard Balme, the decisive support of David Por and Yves
Surel, the final support of Renaud Dehousse and Florence Haegel … and
the continuous support of Emilie. Merci à eux. Thanks also to my OPAL
colleagues, Claudia Hefftler et al., “al.” being, among others, Katrin Auel,
Christine Neuhold, Julie Smith, Angela Tacea, Anja Thomas and
Wolfgang Wessels.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Institutional Adaptation: A Case of trompe-l’oeil? 9
3 The Enrolment of National Parliamentarians 59
4 The Constituency Member: Dilettante, Lobbyist or

Mediator101
5 The Defender of Land and Tradition: The Activism of the

Righter of Wrongs133
6 The Sovereigntist: An Ephemeral Role165
7 The Career Politician: The Europeanisation of Political

Outsiders193
ix
x CONTENTS
8 The European Specialist in Search of a Role223
9 Conclusion263
Appendix: List of Interviews Held with Political Leaders277
Index283
Abbreviations
COM Communist group in the National Assembly (1962–2002)

CPNT Hunting, Fish, Nature and Traditions party (1989–)
DL Liberal Democracy (right-wing party) (1997–2002)
EP European Parliament
EU European Union
FN National Front (radical right party) (1972–2018)
LR Republican party (right-wing party) (2015–)
MDC Movement for Citizens (Eurosceptic party) (1993–2003)
MEP Member of the European Parliament
MoDem Democrat Movement (centrist party) (2007–)
MP Member of Parliament
MPF Movement for France (Eurosceptic party) (1994–)
PC Communist Party (1920–)
PS Socialist Party (1969–)
RCV Group communist, green and radical in the National Assembly
(1997–2002)
RPF Rally for France and the Independence of Europe (Eurosceptic party)
(1999–)
RPR Rally for the Republic (right-wing party) (1976–2002)
SOC Socialist group in the National Assembly (1978–2007)
UDF Union for French Democracy (right-wing party) (1978–2007)
UDI Union of Democrats and Independents (right-wing party) (2012–)
UMP Union for a Popular Movement (2002–2015)
xi
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Meetings of the Delegation to the EU (1979–2008) then

European Affairs Committee (2008–2017) of the National
Assembly24
Fig. 2.2 Length of meetings of the European Affairs Delegation/
Committee of the National Assembly (hours) 25
Fig. 2.3 Hearings conducted by the European Affairs Delegation/
Committee of the National Assembly 26
Fig. 2.4 European Affairs Delegation/Committee of the National
Assembly reports and resolution proposals 26
Fig. 2.5 The Implementation of Article 88-4 of the Constitution 27
Fig. 2.6 European parliamentary chambers ranked by prerogatives and
activity level in European matters (2010–2012) 31
Fig. 3.1 French opinion on EU membership (%) 63
Fig. 3.2 Support in the National Assembly to different EU or European
treaties64
Fig. 3.3 Parliamentary base for French government (percent of Assembly
seats)78
Fig. 3.4 Resolutions adopted on the floor by the National Assembly 79
Fig. 6.1 RPR (subsequently UMP) opponents to the European treaties 176
Fig. 7.1 Change in Bayrou’s approval ratings between June 2004 and
June 2005 (%) 218
xiii
List of Tables & Inserts
Tables
Table 2.1 European prerogatives and activities in different parliamentary
chambers, per-year averages from 2010–2012 30
Table 3.1 Various groups’ support in France for the principle of a federal
Europe (2010–2011 in %) 65
Table 4.1 Title of texts distributed to members of the Delegation during
the meeting on 19 March 2003 108
Table 4.2 Reports with a local dimension presented by the Delegation for
the EU (1997–2002) 109
Table 4.3 Actors in contact with Alain Marleix (2002) 121
Table 4.4 Actors in contact with Laurence Dumont (2001) 124
Table 5.1 Electoral results for the CPNT in European elections 136
Table 5.2 Vote on the final reading of the hunting bill on 28 June 2008
by parliamentary group 140
Table 5.3 The electoral situations of the Socialist MPs who voted against
the party line on the hunting law of 26 July 2000 149
Table 5.4 Votes on the hunting law of 26 July 2000 of Socialist MPs in
constituencies where hunters obtained more than 5% in the first
round of the legislative elections in 2002 150
Table 6.1 Voting by anti-Maastricht MPs on later European treaties or
constitutional revisions 180
Table 7.1 The positioning of Socialist MPs regarding the constitutional
treaty and the constitutional revision prior to its ratification 213
Table 9.1 Europeanisation of French Parliamentary roles (1992–2017) 265
Table 9.2 Factors in Europeanisation of French MPs (1992–2017) 267
xv
xvi List of Tables & Inserts
Table 9.3 Types of psychological gratification associated with European

involvement (1992–2017) 269
Table 9.4 Regimes of French national MPs activities in European matters
(1992–2017)271
Inserts
Insert 2.1 Excerpts of interviews with non-specialised MPs in European
Affairs relating to the oversight of European questions by the
National Assembly 35
Insert 2.2 Excerpts of interviews with MP members of the Delegation to
the EU about the National Assembly’s oversight of European
questions45
Insert 5.1 Extracts of comments by MPs during the reading of the law of
3 July 1998 152
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
On 9 January 2007, the National Assembly resumed deliberations follow-

ing the winter break. Its Speaker, the Gaullist Jean-Louis Debré, opened
the question time with this pronouncement:
My dear colleagues, by now you have certainly not failed to notice the pres-
ence of the national flag in the Chamber. In response to a wish unanimously
expressed by the National Assembly, I insisted upon putting an end to an
anomaly that, astonishingly, had persisted under each Republic: the absence
of a Republican national symbol in the Chamber. Today, thanks to you, this
symbol has been restored.1
The MPs applauded. During the next day’s session, as on every first
Wednesday of the month, the first four questions were dedicated to
European topics. The Minister for European Affairs, Catherine Colonna,
concluded her response to a question by alluding to the previous day’s
decision: ‘Allow me to express my wish, since it’s the season for it, that the
day will come when the European flag is present beside the French flag in
this Chamber. After all, we have been part of Europe for the past fifty
years’.2 Speaker Debré interrupted: ‘That decision would fall under the
National Assembly’s responsibility’. A few minutes later, another inci-
dent occurred:
© The Author(s) 2020 1

O. Rozenberg, The French Parliament and the European Union,
French Politics, Society and Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19791-9_1
2 O. ROZENBERG
Jean Dionis du Séjour: In the name of the UDF party, I wish to sup-
port Ms. Colonna’s proposition to place the
European flag next to the tricolour flag.
(Applause from several benches of the Union for
French Democracy party.)
Speaker: Mr. Dionis du Séjour, the absence of the
European flag has no symbolic significance.
The Bureau of the National Assembly consid-
ers this Chamber to be emblematic of national
debate and the development of national law.
Jean Lassalle: Hear, hear!
Jacques Desallangre and
M. Maxime Gremetz: Quite right!
Speaker: That is the reason why the Bureau chose to
place only the French flag here. (Applause from
several benches of the Union for a Popular
Movement, the Union for French Democracy, the
Socialist group and the Communist and
Republican group.)3
This seemingly insignificant anecdote is revealing in several ways. First,

it bears witness to the Assembly’s fierce desire for independence from the
executive branch. This impulse is far from new; it constituted the main
driver for the institutionalisation of Parliament in France (Gardey 2015).
This impulse may even explain the long absence of the tricolour flag in the
Chamber: the avoidance of Republican symbolism evinces the Palais-
Bourbon’s penchant for insularity ad absurdum.4 Second, the anecdote
illustrates the destabilising effects of the European issue on divisions
between political parties. Speaker Debré’s blunt refusal to fly the European
flag recalls his opposition to the Maastricht Treaty. Fifteen years on, the
neo-Gaullists remained split, with the Chirac-appointed Minister
(Colonna) supporting putting the flag in place. More generally, these divi-
sions hold true for most of the right wing, as between the two centre-right
MPs, Dionis du Séjour and Jean Lassalle, in the above exchange. Finally,
the anecdote reveals forms of emerging cross-party support: the cries of
‘Hear, hear!’ from MPs sitting in the extreme left of the Chamber, as well
as the applause from members of all political groups. More than a year
later, a different Speaker, Bernard Accoyer, made a proposal to the Bureau
1 INTRODUCTION 3
of the Assembly to place the European flag in the Chamber during the
French presidency of the European Union in the second half of 2008.5
This was accomplished, and the flag has not since been removed.
However, the controversy around the flag has remained. One decade
later, in June 2017, the colourful extreme-leftist MP Jean-Luc Mélenchon
was elected to the Assembly. As he was visiting the hemicycle the day after
his election, surrounded by journalists, he exclaimed pointing at the flag:
‘Hey, honestly, do we have to stand for that? It’s the French Republic
here, not the Virgin Mary’—an allusion to the stars surrounding Mary in
the Christian iconography that by the creator’s own admission inspired
the flag. A new Speaker, François de Rugy, was elected the following day.
At the end of his thank-you speech, he said:
In this so particular moment for a political life, I am also thinking of my

family, of the values my parents and grandparents transmitted to me. Victims
of World War Two, they passed on to me a deep European commitment that
makes me proud to sit before you, in front of this European flag. Speaker
Accoyer had the wise idea to place this symbol of lasting peace in our hemi-
cycle: this is its place, next to our national colours.6
He was warmly applauded. But Mélenchon did not relent. In October

2017, his group officially proposed withdrawing the flag. His motion,
supported by the extreme right, was defeated, but it enabled him to
develop a strategy for capturing extreme-right voters by focusing on issues
of sovereignty. President Macron, who has shown himself willing to frame
the debate on Europe, said in reaction that France, like some other
Member States, officially recognised the symbols of the European Union
(EU). A National Assembly resolution proposed by his party affirmed
this decision.
The controversial rejection of the blue twelve-starred flag in the
Chamber of the Palais-Bourbon, its almost surreptitious installation, and
finally the repetition of the controversies years later reveal the Parliament’s
troubles in adapting to France’s participation in European integration. I
have chosen to speak of ‘the blues’ in the sub-title of this book chiefly to
underscore the normative importance of the democratic stakes implicated
in the subject. Within each Member State concerned, European construc-
tion raises the question of legislative authority. The European states
decided, de facto, to federalise certain competences—customs, currency,
4 O. ROZENBERG
internal market rules, and international trade. The EU also acts in a great
number of other domains. Even where the Union does not intervene or
does so in a limited manner, it still exerts an influence through the effects
of its decisions, for example through the jurisprudence of the European
Court of Justice or the monitoring of public financing. Indeed, within the
framework of the Economic and Monetary Union, the EU’s institutions
seek to set limits on national budget deficits. The integration of Europe is
predicated on certain specific legal instruments that are derived from trea-
ties and binding on national legislation. Suggested at times by heads of
state or of governments on the European Council, systematically proposed
by the European Commission, adopted by ministers on the Council of the
EU and, often, by the European Parliament, European regulations and
directives are imposed—directly in the case of the former, and through
transposition for the latter—on national law. The European prerogative is
universally binding: on ministries, businesses, citizens and, of course, on
national parliaments. The EU thus calls into question the authority of
national parliaments not only to participate in the European legislative
process but also to legislate freely on the national level.
Aside from legislation, parliaments also have a role in the oversight of
executive power, a function which may become difficult to exercise in
European matters as much for technical reasons (complexity of the proj-
ects, access to information, etc.) as for lack of diplomatic opportunities.
The parliamentarians’ state of gloom (which does not preclude brief flights
of optimism) therefore stems from their observation of European political
systems’ problems in overcoming the tensions arising from the mecha-
nisms of representative democracy on a national basis—a legacy of the
nineteenth century—and the integration of a continent, ongoing since the
second half of the twentieth century. The portrait of an institution with a
‘case of the blues’ will be frequently reinforced and only rarely contra-
dicted in the pages that follow.
However, following the example of other European assemblies, the
French Parliament has not been idle in the face of these existential chal-
lenges. It has successfully worked to obtain new rights, created structures
and procedures for European issues, and dedicated substantial resources
to these new tools. Yet the Assembly and the Senate remain marginal play-
ers on the European stage in both the creation and debate of European
public policies. This book seeks not only to illuminate the reasons for this
ineffectuality but also to elucidate the multiple, diffuse, and unequal
forms of French parliamentarians’ acculturation to Europe, beyond any
1 INTRODUCTION 5
specialised procedure. It aims, in effect, to grasp how France’s participa-

tion in the EU has progressively changed what it means to be a parliamen-
tarian and how to behave and even to think as a representative. In this
respect, I assert that even if French Parliamentarians do not change
Europe, the inverse is not true. Few aspects of parliamentarians’ vocation
have been immune to the process of continental integration, whether
relationships with voters, with the law, with ministers or with themselves.
More precisely, this book considers the Europeanisation of the French
Parliament over the quarter of a century beginning in 1992. Most of the
case studies were conducted during the three terms from 1997 to 2012.7
By Europeanisation, I mean changes instigated in Parliament by France’s
participation in the EU as well as parliamentary activities applying to
European subjects per se: ratification of treaties, transposition of EU
norms, scrutiny of EU drafts, debates and questions in sittings, etc. Finally,
in addition to legislative and oversight practices, I consider those which
concern each parliamentarian directly: grant-writing, communication of
voter grievances, lobbying in Brussels, and realisation of political strate-
gies, to name some examples.
The book will focus on the National Assembly but will also occasionally
consider the Senate. It will first consider the specific control and participa-
tion procedures in European affairs, concluding with an assessment of their
relative superficiality. However, the observation of a certain surface-level
Europeanisation is not the end of this analysis but rather its starting point.
A more general reflection on parliamentary behaviour in its state of subor-
dination to the executive branch has led me to stress the prevalence of
specific roles in elected officials’ activities, and of individual emotions in the
interpretations of these roles. It is in these conditions—those of an emo-
tional economy, bound by predefined behavioural norms—that Europe is
perceived in the Palais-Bourbon. This perspective opens with a description
and analysis of the relationships of various parliamentary roles to Europe:
roles that have been created, roles that have been transformed, and roles
that have been overlooked. The pleasure, the anger, and the ‘blues’ spoken
of in this work arise from the players themselves: the backbenchers whose
presence on the European stage, I hypothesise, takes place at the meeting
point of institutional mechanisms and emotional aspirations.
This book is based on several political science field studies. The first was
conducted in the beginning of the 2000s,8 based on interviews with
approximately sixty parliamentarians and former ministers, mainly MPs,
and also with assistants and parliamentary and governmental civil servants.9
6 O. ROZENBERG
This approach was supplemented by several observations of committee

meetings and floor sessions. The second field study was conducted ten
years later and consisted of the collection of quantitative data on European
activities in national parliaments.10 During these years, the examination of
parliamentary reports and committees’ debate or session minutes helped
me to diversify my sources of information. The methodology of this study
therefore encompasses multiple aspects, but the principal approach is qual-
itative. Interviews with elected officials, cited verbatim, thus hold a promi-
nent place.
The book begins with an evaluation of the French Parliament’s
European activities from 1992 to 2017 beginning with an overview of the
institutions and their constitutional framework and constitutional over-
view, delving into a quantitative and comparative view, and finishing with
a more subjective analysis. Readers with little taste for law or figures may
skip directly to the third chapter, which seeks to explore parliamentarians’
difficulty in assuming a strategic attitude in European affairs. This chapter,
inspired by Donald Searing’s seminal Westminster’s World (1994), makes
use of a motivation-based approach toward defining parliamentary roles.
The rest of the book is dedicated to exploring the varying Europeanisation
of these roles. Chapters 4 and 5 consider two roles shaped by local con-
cerns: the constituency member and the defender of land and tradition. If
most Constituency Members tend to neglect European questions, con-
cerning a few Community cases, they act as lobbyists for their region vis-
à-vis the government or, more rarely, European institutions. The defenders
of land and tradition perceive themselves as protectors of local cultures
and customs against Brussels, as is evidenced by the constantly challenged
transposition of a 1979 directive on hunting migratory birds. Chapter 6 is
devoted to a certain ideological role that has developed in the European
context specifically: the sovereigntist. The story of the rise and fall of the
sovereigntists in the National Assembly during the 1990s and 2000s cor-
responds to the ratification of European treaties and the constitutional
revisions which preceded them. Chapter 7 studies those parliamentarians
who harbour ministerial or presidential ambitions, evaluating how the
attainment of the highest positions and even the concept of political suc-
cess have changed to fit to the European framework. The analysis of key
moments in the careers of François Bayrou, Philippe Séguin, and Laurent
Fabius leads me to foreground the parliamentary aspect of a favoured,
though risky strategy: the positioning of oneself as an outsider to critique
European construction. Finally, the last chapter returns to the theme of
1 INTRODUCTION 7
European specialisation, a subject raised in the beginning of this work,

through an institutional lens. The interviews help underline a major limit-
ing factor on specialisation: the difficulty parliamentarians experience in
producing actual changes via the process of reviewing European legisla-
tion. This obstacle drives active members of specialised structures in the
EU to seek other outcomes and other sources of satisfaction in the
management of European affairs, as shown through the portraits of suc-
cessive chairs of the Delegation from the French National Assembly to the
EU, reformulated as a Committee in 2008.
Notes
1. Journal officiel de la République française (JORF), Assemblée nationale
(AN), Compte rendu (CR), second session of Tuesday 9 January 2007,
p. 31.
2. JORF, AN, CR, first session of 10 January 2007, p. 108.
3. Ibid., p. 109.
4. The Palais-Bourbon is the name of the National Assembly main building,
the name for the Senate being le Palais du Luxembourg.
5. Minutes of the Bureau meeting of 25 June 2008.
6. JORF, AN, CR, 124th session of 27 June 2017, p. 91188.
7. From 1997 to 2002, France experienced its third episode of divided gov-
ernment with a right-wing President, Jacques Chirac, and a leftist majority
in the National Assembly resulting from Chirac’s order of dissolution.
Lionel Jospin was Prime Minister of a coalition government dominated by
the Socialists and allied with the Communists, the Greens, the center-left
Radicals and a small group of former socialists called the Citizens. In 2002,
Chirac was re-elected and supported by a large majority in Parliament. For
Prime Minister he appointed Jean-Pierre Raffarin, then, in 2005, after the
rejection by referendum of the European constitutional treaty, Dominique
de Villepin. In 2007, a former minister of his, Nicolas Sarkozy, was elected.
Although originating from the same party, Sarkozy pretended to break
with Chirac’s legacy. He was backed by an absolute majority in Parliament
and chose François Fillon as Prime Minister for his whole term. In 2012,
Sarkozy was defeated by François Hollande, second Socialist President of
the Fifth Republic.
8. As part of a doctoral dissertation defended in 2005 at Sciences Po Paris,
under the direction of Professor Richard Balme.
9. See the list of interviews with parliamentarians in the Appendix. Names
have been removed from all other interviews, which are simply listed by
number. The Centre for Socio-Political Data at Sciences Po, and its beQuali
8 O. ROZENBERG
project, offer access to unabridged transcriptions to interviews with politi-

cal players and to certain analyses of primary documents. It is also possible
to listen the interviews. My warmest thanks to the founder of this project,
Sophie Duchesne, and to Guillaume Garcia for its implementation. See
http://www.bequali.fr/fr/les-enquetes/lenquete-en-bref/cdsp_bequali_
sp3/ or the website of the Quetelet network.
10. As a part of the OPAL project led by Sciences Po and Cambridge, Cologne
and Maastricht Universities from 2011 to 2014, funded in France by the
National Research Agency.
References
Gardey, D. (2015). Le Linge du Palais-Bourbon. Corps, matérialité et genre du
politique. Lormont: Le Bord de l’Eau.
Searing, D. (1994). Westminster’s World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
CHAPTER 2
Institutional Adaptation: A Case

of trompe-l’oeil?
Parliaments’ ability to change has generally been overlooked. True, parlia-

ments have always been characterised by a strong tendency toward proce-
dural continuity, as parliamentary procedure is partly founded on
precedents. The scrutiny of French law has followed essentially the same
process for more than a century, yet parliaments have changed and are
almost constantly evolving. Details of procedures are modified, new over-
sight tools are assessed, and emergent technologies such as pneumatic cyl-
inders, television cameras, open data and so on are incorporated little by
little. Except in the case of exogenous shocks, such as the establishment of
a new Constitution, parliaments change without fanfare in a subtle game
wherein practices and rules (originating in the Constitution, the law, or
internal regulations) exert a mutual influence.
Concerning European affairs, the French Parliament has changed much
since Maastricht. In 1979, it created delegations to the EU, committees of
sorts. From 1990 on, these committees began handling large amounts of
information on European projects. Each assembly could adopt legally non-
binding opinions—‘resolutions’—on European legislative drafts after 1992.
Little by little, delegations gained access to the whole body of European
documentation. In 2008, they were renamed ‘Committees’ (commissions)
and gained the ability to adopt resolutions on any European document. In
a more general fashion, European issues have begun to have a greater pres-
ence within the Assemblies (for example, in debate sessions regularly organ-
ised the day before European Council meetings) or outside of the Assemblies
© The Author(s) 2020 9

O. Rozenberg, The French Parliament and the European Union,
French Politics, Society and Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19791-9_2
10 O. ROZENBERG
(for example, visits of French parliamentarians to Brussels have been increas-

ing). This chapter aims to evaluate this type of Europeanisation, exceptional
in that it depends on domestic arrangements rather than EU texts.
Any assessment of the French Parliament in European matters between
1992 and 2017 must address the diversity of European activities, their
objectives and their public perceptions. Parliaments are complex institu-
tions to which constitutions allot different roles: the expectations of citi-
zens, actors and analysts differ widely and even contradict one another.
Therefore, I proceed from several different perspectives, enriching the
institutional evaluation with a mainly comparative analysis of the Chambers’
European activities. In a final, critically oriented section that engages more
subjective criteria, this chapter seeks to expand beyond the rather favour-
able impression given by formal prerogatives and figures in order to eluci-
date the reality of parliamentarians’ European activities.
The Ceaseless Adaptation of the French Parliament

The history of national parliaments’ adaptation to the EU, for most of the
Europe of Twelve Member States, was marked by the adoption of the
Single Act in the mid-1980s (Rozenberg and Hefftler 2015; Winzen
2012). The changeover to qualified majority voting in the Council for
certain fields of activity and the announcement of an ambitious new work-
ing agenda by Jacques Delors helped to mobilise national politicians. The
Europeanisation of the French Parliament, however, followed a different
timeline. To a certain extent, the adaptation to Europe began earlier with
the creation of specialised structures beginning in 1979, but in some ways
it also developed later, after the key forward step of the Maastricht Treaty
in 1992. Except for these two periods, the French Parliament’s
Europeanisation has been accomplished through a series of constitutional,
legislative and regulatory reforms, a process which may be understood
either as the expression of a desire to perfect the system or, alternatively, as
a proof of the difficulty of achieving stability. I will briefly consider these
reforms, distinguishing between an initial period (1979–1992), a post-
Maastricht phase (1992–2005) and the system that resulted from consti-
tutional revisions in 2005 and 2008.1
1979: An Ambiguous Founding Compromise

The creation of the delegations for the European Communities in 1979
was marked by an ambiguous duality that would continue to characterise
2 INSTITUTIONAL ADAPTATION: A CASE OF TROMPE-L’OEIL? 11
these structures for a long time. As Hervé Trnka, head of the European
Service division from 1976 to 1988, director of the Foreign Documentation
Service at the National Assembly, explains, ‘Faure was the father of the
European Service; Foyer was the father of the Delegation’.2 The radical Edgar
Faure, a confirmed pro-European, headed the assembly during the Fifth
Parliament (1973–1978) and created the European Service as a branch of
the Foreign Documentation service in 1976. Trnka, the director of the
latter, recounts the follow story about the creation of the Delegation:
With the direct election of the European Parliament in 1979, national delega-
tions disappeared. My two administrators told me that there was no link left
between the European Parliament and national parliaments. They proposed
that a Delegation be created; one already existed for demographics and plan-
ning. This Delegation could collect documentation for the use of national par-
liaments and give hearings to French MEPs [Members of the European
Parliament]. We asked ourselves who might take up this idea. Jean Foyer, chair-
man of the Law Committee, was the most anti-European. He had written
articles along the lines of “we’re going to be overwhelmed”. He agreed to sponsor
a bill on creating the Delegation to which the government would have to submit
draft European texts.
The Delegation’s advocates also benefitted from the support of former

Prime Minister Michel Debré and from the uproar in the Chamber pro-
voked by the transposition of the sixth directive on the VAT, which on 30
November 1978 had occasioned an unprecedented vote for an objection
of inadmissibility by the Assembly (Hochedez and Patriarche 1998,
p. 64s). On 7 December of that year, the Gaullist Jean Foyer submitted a
bill which aroused the opposition of the government. Jean François-
Poncet, Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, recalls: ‘In 1979, when I
was Minister, we established the delegations to satisfy the assembly’s Eurosceptic
parliamentarians who wished to monitor what was happening in Europe’.
The law, while short of initial ambitions, was adopted.3 The atmosphere of
tension surrounding the establishment of the delegations might seem to
suggest that they were created to satisfy essentially Europhobic aspira-
tions. Yet the role of Faure and his clerks, the moderate stance of the
Senate and the personalities of the first chairs indicate that, from the
beginning, the Assemblies’ activities in European matters brought together
both advocates and opponents of the vision of Europe then being
constructed.
12 O. ROZENBERG
The delegations originated and developed, therefore, from two con-

cerns. One, from a Europhile perspective, was a desire to increase the
Assemblies’ awareness of European questions. The other, critical of Europe,
sought to resist any impairment of national sovereignty and the French
Parliament’s prerogatives. In addition, accounts of the period testify to the
doubly-compounded difficulty of creating these structures, despite their
lack of institutional power. First, the government was anxious not to relin-
quish its prerogatives to Parliament in the European domain. This reluc-
tance was exacerbated by the political tension within the majority between
the Gaullists and the centre-right, which extended to European issues; this
was the era of the Call of Cochin by Jacques Chirac.4 Secondly, the National
Assembly, especially its standing committees, evinced a certain hesitancy
towards the delegations. Because of this, Faure had to ‘camouflage’ (the
term is Trnka’s) the European Service by integrating it with the Foreign
Documentation Service, which had existed since the 1930s and whose pur-
pose was to oversee the exchange of documents with foreign parliaments.
Each of the two Assemblies created a Delegation in charge of European
questions. These structures, each of which must be approved by a specific
law, are undoubtedly less prestigious than the standing committees, whose
number was constitutionally restricted to six until 2008 when up to eight
were permitted. In response to this constraint, a delegation on the question
of audio-visual communication was created by the Assembly in 1972. The
choice of this arrangement implied that the members of the delegations
also had to be members of one of the standing committees. The decision
to give each assembly its own structure, rather than what would be imple-
mented for the Parliamentary Office for Scientific and Technological
Options in 1983, stemmed from the political sensitivity of the European
question and allowed for disagreements between the two chambers.
The ‘Delegation of the National Assembly for the European
Communities’ had to contend with the Foreign Affairs Committee’s
defence of its own prerogatives. The Foreign Affairs Committee, which
has long assembled some of the most prestigious parliamentarians (Riaux
2014), is tasked with reporting on any treaty-related text, including
European treaties. It fought a lengthy if discreet institutional battle to
affirm its primacy over the Delegation. Trnka offers the following anec-
dote, which reveals the relationship between the first chairman of the
Delegation, Michel Cointat, and the former Prime Minister Maurice
Couve de Murville, who headed the Foreign Affairs Committee until 1981:
We composed a report every six months. Cointat told me we had to give it to

Couve de Murville. Couve welcomed us, thanked us, and threw our report in
the rubbish bin before our very eyes.
This reluctance to grant autonomy led to a restrictive definition of the

delegations’ powers (Hochedez and Patriarche 1998, p. 66). Their scope
of action was limited to European Community institutions, rather than to
any issues linked to European integration. The government’s obligation
to supply information, determined by vague criteria, was limited to mat-
ters relating to statutory law—a distinction that would resurface at
Maastricht. All attempts to grant the delegations real prerogatives, whether
the authority to conduct investigations, the government’s duty to consult
them, or merely their ability to send their conclusions to the Assembly
Speaker, were explicitly rejected during the examination of the bill.
Despite these difficulties, the delegations survived the political change-
overs of 1981, 1986 and 1988. They met regularly and reported on the
European issues of the day, for example the commercial agreements with
the South, the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) and the policy on the
steel industry. Ten years after the 1979 law, a broad perception of the sys-
tem’s inadequacy, as well the implementation of the Single Act, relaunched
the debate on delegations. In 1990, the Josselin law5 expanded the condi-
tions under which the chambers would obligatorily receive information,
and authorised the delegations to hear members of the government and to
publish reports. The number of delegation members was raised from 18 to
36 per assembly.
1992: A ‘Resolute’ Parliament

In 1992, the right to receive information was complemented by the right
to express opinions. The opportunity came in the form of the constitu-
tional revision preceding the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty. The
Constitutional Council ordered the revision after finding several contra-
dictions between the Treaty and the Constitution. The question of national
parliaments was not, however, one of these incompatibilities. Indeed, as
the constitutional organisation of Member States is a matter of national
sovereignty, the provisions relating to national parliaments were—and still
are—minimal, symbolic, or incidental. The transformation of parliamen-
tary assemblies was part of what Bastien Irondelle has conceptualised as a
form of ‘Europeanisation without the European Union’ (Irondelle 2003):
14 O. ROZENBERG
a process in which the EU constitutes only a resource or constraint in all

scopes of action (evocation, relational networks, foreign paradigms, etc.)
except that of law. In this instance, the granting of prerogatives was impor-
tant for several reasons, the first symbolic: François Mitterrand, who had
abandoned socialism in favour of Europe as his number-one priority,
sought to associate all the emblems of the nation with the European proj-
ect, including the Constitution, the recognition of French as the language
of the Republic, and the Parliament. Secondly, strategy figured in the
granting of new prerogatives to the Parliament, since the support of the
two Assemblies during the revision was necessary. Finally, there was a nor-
mative dimension, insofar as the constitutional revision marked the exact
moment when the question of European democratic deficit emerged in
French political life.
MPs and Senators agreed on an Article 88-4 of the Constitution,
inserted into a new title dedicated to Europe. This reinforced the govern-
ment’s duty to provide information, and more importantly, allowed each
assembly to adopt resolutions. The Parliament’s ability to express an opin-
ion with no legal consequences had been expressly forbidden by the
Constitutional Council since 19596; with this article, such a right was
enshrined in the Constitution. It is true that legally, the French Minister
negotiating within the Council of the EU is not obligated to align herself
with the Chambers’ positions. Unlike her counterpart from Denmark,
where the system has been established since its membership in the EU, she
is not mandated by the Assemblies. Politically, however, the Fifth Republic
obeys a parliamentary working logic in which the successful running of the
country’s affairs is contingent on the absence of a parliamentary majority
bent on toppling the government. Therefore, parliamentary resolutions are
potentially effective tools. Certainly, the government is not forced to adopt
the National Assembly’s position, but it is neither logical nor advantageous
to oppose directly or repeatedly the body that can censure or weaken it.
Though innovative, this new ability to pass resolutions had two major
limitations. First, it could only affect proposals for Community acts, which
barred Parliament from intervening in intergovernmental decisions
relating to diplomacy, justice, or internal security, according to the pillared
architecture of the EU between 1993 and 2009. Second, draft European
proposals were required to pertain to the domain of law within the mean-
ing of the French Constitution for the Assemblies to be able to give their
opinion. This rule may seem surprising, given the absence of the resolu-
tions’ legal consequences, and given also the ‘residual’ (Carcassonne and
Guillaume 2014, p. 191) character of the independent regulatory power

under the Fifth Republic. It illustrates, however, the executive branch’s
desire to maintain its dominant position in European affairs. The rule
necessitated the systematic consideration of all draft acts by the Council of
State to determine their nature as either legal or regulatory texts.
The restrictions were gradually lifted. In 1999, the constitutional
review preceding the Amsterdam Treaty authorised Parliament to pass
resolutions on drafts relating to all three pillars (if they belonged to the
field of statutory law). This review also allowed the government to remove
the law/regulation distinction at its discretion, as when in 2004 the
Raffarin government refused to transmit a document on the opening of
membership negotiations with Turkey within the context of 88-4.7 It
would not be until 2008 that a constitutional amendment would erase the
distinction.
The newly gained ability to vote on European resolutions did not
immediately increase the delegations’ power, not only because the new
provisions of the Constitution did not mention them (given the Senate’s
opposition) but also because the first versions of the Assemblies’ standing
orders tended to minimise their role in favour of the standing committees.
On the model of the private members’ bills procedure, the six standing
committees in each house were tasked with preparing the resolution pro-
posals (Fromage 2015, p. 135s). However, in the Assembly, as in the
Senate, rules and procedures were modified after several months, granting
a central screening and initiating role to the delegations. These regulatory
vagaries are revealing in two ways. They offer another illustration of the
standing committees’ above-mentioned preoccupation with safeguarding
their traditional prerogatives. Moreover, the delegations had to content
themselves with writing proposals that would only become definitive after
consideration by a standing committee and, potentially, a plenary debate.
However, the delegations’ progressive assumption of the task of reviewing
resolutions despite these preventative measures also suggests that the
structure’s specialisation constituted the sine qua non groundwork for a
permanent control of European affairs. Because of the committees’ focus
on legislative procedure and their lack of sensitivity toward European
questions, but also because of the vast output and technical complexity of
Community documentation, a certain organisational division of labour
became inevitable. On that subject, it is striking that all Member States’
national parliaments have created their own committees on European
affairs, even if these differ significantly from one another.
16 O. ROZENBERG
Specialised structures also have helped spearhead the acquisition of new

prerogatives. In 1990, and again in 1994, bills were approved at the behest
of the Chair of the Delegation of the Assembly. In 1994, the Pandraud law
renamed the structures as Delegations for the EU and extended their right
to receive information.8 The government was effectively obliged to send
them draft acts relating to the second and third pillars (even if, given the
restrictions of Article 88-4, the delegations could still only write conclu-
sions about them, not resolutions). It was during this period that its Chair
joined other leaders of groups and committees in the Conference of
Presidents,9 proof of the Delegation of the Assembly’s newly acquired
political importance. On an administrative level, the European Affairs
Service assumed its independence vis-à-vis the Foreign Documentation
Service. Its workforce increased considerably to about 10 administrators
in 1997, an increase from just three in 1979.
It can also be noted that the resulting system is a sort of perfect, non-
cooperative bicameralism: perfect, since the two Assemblies have the same
powers; non-cooperative, in the sense that there is no back-and-forth system
between them and each votes on its ‘own’ resolution. This organisational
structure largely derives from the veto power of the High Chamber in mat-
ters of constitutional review (given that most of the Assemblies’ European
prerogatives are written into the constitution). It appears, furthermore, that
the government benefits from the Assemblies’ division, since a united reso-
lution from Parliament could potentially have a greater political impact.
Two years after the creation of the resolutions, another tool was added
to the kit: the parliamentary scrutiny reserve. In 1994, Prime Minister
Edouard Balladur decided that ministers would no longer vote in the
Council unless Parliament had finished examining the Community act
proposal in question.10 Parliament could not dictate the government’s
position but could prevent it from expressing it. This procedure was mod-
elled on the British system, which had been established from the country’s
date of entry into the EU. Today, it is organised as follows: during the
eight weeks following a Commission proposal, the government may not
express its official position to Brussels—a commitment which does not
impose great cost, since European treaties have guaranteed a waiting
period of up to six weeks (Amsterdam), then eight weeks (Lisbon) between
the submission of a Commission proposal and its examination by the
Council. If, during this period, one of the two Assemblies signals its inten-
tion to examine a text, the government assents to delay expressing its own
opinion for as long as this scrutiny lasts—even if it extends beyond eight
weeks. Such is the theoretical organisation of the system; in practice, as we

shall see in Chap. 3, it is not quite so favourable to the Parliament.
2008: A Second-Order European Committee

The French Constitution was amended in July 2008. This ‘law of mod-
ernisation of Fifth Republic institutions’ had the greatest quantitative
impact of any introduced under the Fifth Republic, as it amended almost
half of the articles of the Constitution.11 Though not central to the revi-
sion, European issues were nevertheless considered, as the new version of
Article 88-4 demonstrates:
The government shall lay before the National Assembly and the Senate drafts
of European legislative acts as well as other drafts of or proposals for acts of
the European Union as soon as they have been transmitted to the council of
the European Union. In the manner laid down by the rules of procedure of
each House, European resolutions may be passed, even if Parliament is not in
session, on the drafts or proposals referred to in the preceding paragraph, as
well as on any document issuing from a European Union Institution.
A committee in charge of European affairs shall be set up in each parlia-
mentary assembly.
In comparison with previous versions of Article 88-4, including those

that had been approved by vote but not implemented, there are two major
changes. For one, the right to issue European resolutions is no longer
contingent on the legislative nature of the draft act, or on its transmission
by the government, because this right applies to ‘any document issuing
from a European Union Institution’. In addition, the erasure of the dis-
tinction between law and regulation allowed the Assemblies to accelerate
the process of scrutinising texts, freeing up the week normally used by the
Council of State to decide of the legal nature of the draft.
A second change was that the Committee would thenceforth replace the
Delegation for the EU. This detail is more remarkable since it is the sole
committee whose purpose is explicitly mentioned in the constitutional text.
Yet, although it gives the Committee its new title, the Constitution does not
specify anything about its structure. The law of 15 June 2009 also simplified
the provisions of the Pandraud law, letting each assembly decide on the
Committee’s composition, method of appointment, and working rules.12
The number of members rose from 36 to 48 in the Assembly and to 41 in
18 O. ROZENBERG
the Senate. Those EU committees were kept distinct from the standing
committees. The principle of parliamentarians’ double membership, in the
committee responsible for European affairs and in a standing committee,
was therefore maintained. The inscription of the delegations into the
Constitution nonetheless facilitated their capacity to adopt resolutions by
granting them greater clout. In the Assembly as in the Senate, it was thence-
forth established that if the relevant standing committee had not submitted
a report on the European Affairs Committee’s resolution proposal within
one month, the resolution would be considered approved by this standing
committee. Nevertheless, the resolution would not yet be definitive, since
the Conference of Presidents could potentially decide whether it would be
discussed on the floor. In the Assembly, the Conference has two weeks to
decide to do so, while in the Senate, a motion may be brought before it
within two days, after which it has seven days to decide. In addition, the
National Assembly European Affairs Committee gained a monopoly on pre-
paratory examinations of resolutions: it now systematically scrutinises reso-
lution proposals presented by groups of MPs or individual members.
If the ex-delegations are less dependent on the goodwill of the standing
committees, it is still possible for standing committees to redo, or even
veto, the European Affairs Committee’s work. A reading of the Standing
Orders of each chamber is ample testimony to the European Affairs
Committee’s auxiliary status, which the draft constitutional law had ini-
tially named, in French, as a ‘comité’ and not a ‘commission’. In the
Assembly, a standing committee may ask the European Affairs Committee
to examine a European text and formulate a report. Furthermore, it may
demand that the European Affairs Committee do so within a month. In
the Senate, the European Affairs Committee is subsidiary, the standing
committees having priority to examine a European text for the two weeks
that follow its transmission. Another limitation on both European Affairs
Committees is that they have not obtained the right to give their views
officially during the domestic legislative procedure.13 The European
Committee of the Assembly may certainly ‘make observations’ on a bill
‘relevant to an area covered under EU activity’—which is not restrictive—
and potentially present them on the floor. But these observations are not
amendments, a fact which deprives the committee of the related proce-
dural guarantees, not to mention of a certain prestige.
Apart from provisions relating to European resolutions, the constitu-
tional revisions of 2005 and February 2008 introduced new provisions
derived from various European treaty articles offering new rights to

national parliaments. The main treaty provision, inscribed in Article
88-6 in the Constitution, concerns subsidiarity checks. An innovative,
relatively complex procedure was indeed introduced by the Lisbon Treaty
following the Convention on the Future of Europe (2002–2003).14 The
early warning mechanism for subsidiarity checks aims to associate parlia-
mentary chambers’ individual scrutiny of draft European texts with collec-
tive participation. It effectively grants each chamber the right to issue a
(reasoned) opinion if it has subsidiarity concerns about a draft legislative
act within the eight weeks that follow the draft’s transmission. If one third
of national parliaments decide thus,15 the ‘yellow card’ threshold is
reached, and the European Commission can maintain, amend or withdraw
the text and must provide justifications. To date (June 2019) this situation
has arisen three times. In the first case, the Commission decided to with-
draw its proposal, and in the second and the third, it did not change the
text. If the threshold reaches half of national parliaments—the ‘orange
card’—the Council of the EU or the European Parliament can easily block
the proposal. Article 88-6 inscribes this provision in the French
Constitution. The Lisbon Treaty also provides for flexible review systems
of the European legislative procedure implemented through Article 88-7
of the French Constitution.
Apart from these provisions, the two Assemblies have developed other
types of European activities European debates are regularly organised in
session, particularly before European Council meetings. Since 2009, the
National Assembly standing orders provide that, during the so-called
‘control week’,16 a session prioritises European questions. Different solu-
tions related to oral questions have been tested, such as opening the ques-
tion time with European issues once per month. In the Senate, the
Standing Orders mention oral questions on European subjects. Hearings,
whatever their framework, may also occasionally raise European issues.
More rarely, the National Assembly receives state leaders and Prime
Ministers, inviting them to speak on the floor. This exceptional case
occurred for the European Commission President, José-Manuel Barroso,
on 24 January 2006. Giscard d’Estaing also delivered a speech on the floor
in 2002 as the President of the Convention on the Future of Europe.
In addition to these procedures, we may mention a multitude of activi-
ties related to inter-parliamentary relationships between national parlia-
ments (bilaterally or on a larger scale) and with the European Parliament
20 O. ROZENBERG
(Nuttens and Sicard 2000; Hefftler and Gattermann 2015). The frame-
works facilitating cooperation are especially plentiful, since they corre-
spond to relations between different geographic zones (Franco-German,
Franco-British, Franco-German-Polish, etc.), different regional geopoliti-
cal structures (certainly the EU, but also the Council of Europe, NATO,
the Union for the Mediterranean, etc.) and assembly apparatus: the speak-
ers, the chief clerks, all the standing committees (particularly the Foreign
Affairs, Defence and Budget Committees), the so-called Friendship
Groups with other EU countries, and of course the European Affairs
Committee. These last are part of a structure initiated by the National
Assembly Speaker Laurent Fabius in 1989, known as the Conference of
Community and European Affairs Committees of Parliaments and desig-
nated with the French acronym COSAC (Conférence des Organes Spécialisés
dans les Affaires Communautaires). COSAC meetings reunite members of
each national Parliament’s European affairs committee every half-year in
the capital of the country currently holding the presidency of the Council
of the EU. Mentioned in the treaties, this conference possesses few powers
but has served as a place to socialise and exchange parliamentary monitor-
ing practices and norms (Buzogany 2013)—a purpose that is especially
crucial since, as mentioned, the treaty provisions relating to national par-
liaments are by necessity minimal.
Overall, the history of the institutionalisation of European activities in
the French Parliament evinces remarkable progress given the weakness of
the French Parliament under the Fifth Republic, but also testifies to lasting
difficulties, particularly regarding the institutionalisation of specialised
parliamentary structures in European matters. Indeed, it took no fewer
than 30 years for the delegations to be renamed committees, and even so,
they did not attain the status of standing committees. Fully 16 years passed
before the Assemblies could adopt resolutions on all types of European
acts even though they were legally innocuous. This process was, in the
end, not greatly influenced by European treaties, depending mainly on
internal political considerations. The changes often required forms of
convergence between Eurosceptic and Europhile politicians. As a last

point, the permanence of these changes, reforms and adaptations is strik-
ing. With remarkable consistency, the Assemblies seek to improve the cur-
rent system by drawing on foreign examples and by learning from past
mistakes. The next section of the chapter is devoted precisely to evaluating
this institutionalisation.
A Favourable Institutional and Quantitative

Evaluation
This section will first evaluate the prerogatives obtained by the French
parliamentary chambers. This approach alone is insufficient in assessing
the chambers’ success in adapting to the EU, as parliamentarians do not
necessarily make use of their rights. As Philip Norton, the British expert
on Parliament, stresses, ‘[W]hat is remarkable about the legislatures is not
their power to say no to government but rather their reluctance to employ
that power’ (Norton 1998, p. 192). Institutional routine, parliamentary
discipline, and free-rider mentality often reduce the impact of informa-
tional reforms. Therefore, after considering the institutional prerogatives,
this chapter will turn to a quantitative examination of parliamentary activi-
ties. Finally, these rights and practices will be considered in comparison to
other European parliaments.
Notable European Prerogatives Attained in Spite of the Fifth

Republic
Parliaments’ institutional capabilities in European matters can be grouped
around three main issues: access to information, the scrutiny infrastruc-
ture, and the legal scope of parliamentary opinion (Auel et al. 2015).
Regarding information first, as from 1 January 2006, the European
Commission sends documents directly to national parliaments. The Lisbon
Treaty later formalised this obligation. Therefore, the issue now concerns
parliaments’ access to internal Council documents and the quality of
information shared by the government. On this first point, a 2012 COSAC
report reveals that the French Parliament is one of six parliaments that
have clearance for documents categorised as ‘EU Confidential’.17 Since
2015, the clerks from both European Affairs Committees also gained the
ability to consult diplomatic telegrams directly on their computers; the
heads of the services can even access confidential ones. The clerks inter-
viewed during the 2000s and 2010s are unanimous on this point: civil
servants within the state apparatuses, particularly in the SGAE,18 give them
ample access to information. With respect to the quality of this informa-
tion, however, the situation is less advantageous. It remains difficult to
obtain timely, official, comprehensive information from the government
on its position on upcoming European negotiations. Unlike, for example,
22 O. ROZENBERG
memoranda of the UK government, impact statements (fiches d’impact

simplifiés) are focussed on legal issues and are neither regularly nor inte-
grally sent to Parliament. In 2014 for instance, the Assemblies received
only 28 statements whereas the European Commission proposed 62 draft
laws.19 The method of inter-ministerial preparation of France’s official
position under the SGAE is partly to blame for this paucity (Lequesne
1993). It would appear easier to make the executive branch’s point of view
known in good time when a lead ministry is tasked with formulating it.
With regards to Parliament’s institutional ability to scrutinise European
documents, the French Parliament enjoys a rather beneficial situation.
Specialised services have existed for the past two decades. Around 12
administrators and assistants have worked in each Assembly since the end
of the 1990s. Filtering procedures are used to sort European documents
according to importance. Lastly, concerning the legal effect of oversight
procedures, the French Parliament, like nearly half of other national parlia-
ments, does not have the ability to give a mandate to the negotiating
minister at the Council. True, resolutions are included in the minister’s
negotiation file and successive letters from Prime Ministers have stressed
that they must be considered. Moreover, Europe-wide, most ministers
who are given a mandate may still ignore it during the talks (Karlas 2012).
Only the Austrian and Danish ministers are technically required to rene-
gotiate with Parliament during the Council. However, this practice is
rarely followed in Austria, and in Denmark the mandate is first drafted by
the government, then discussed and potentially amended in Parliament.
While it would therefore be a mistake to exaggerate the significance of
mandates, the fact remains that the French Parliament lacks the authority to
dictate a minister’s position. The whole oversight procedure for European
questions is furthermore dedicated to the scrutiny of draft European texts,
rather than the position of the government on these texts. By contrast, in
many other parliaments, the scope of the monitoring process includes not
only European drafts but also the government’s European policy. Such is
the case in Estonia, Finland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal,
and Sweden.20 In the case of directives, this weakness is further exacerbated
by the law/regulation distinction, since only about half of directives neces-
sitate a legislative transposition measure (Bertoncini 2009, p. 28). The
French Parliament cannot use its veto power strategically by trying to influ-
ence drafts in advance. The parliamentary scrutiny reserve could potentially
supply another lever for influence. However, it carries little weight in reality,
partly because it constitutes a commitment by the executive rather than a
legal obligation. More generally, the interviews I conducted confirm the

difficulty of monitoring European decisions ex post.
In sum, the institutional capabilities of French Parliament in European
matters are significant, even considering the lack of a binding mandate
and of governmental memoranda. Numerous parliamentary prerogatives,
beginning with the existence of specific committees, are guaranteed by
the text of the Constitution. Moreover, we may observe through the
examples of resolutions or of delegations that European issues have rein-
forced Parliament’s position in the political system even outside of
European matters.
More broadly, we may hypothesise that the emphasis on parliamentary
scrutiny of European affairs after 1992, making use of extensive legal,
human, and financial resources, considerably contributed to legitimising
the idea that the Parliament does not exist solely to legislate. Parliamentary
oversight was certainly recognised as a constitutional mission since 1958,
but European issues gave it a concrete reality beyond parliamentary oral
and written questions and inquiry committees. The 1992 revision essen-
tially prefigured that of 2008, which gave Parliament a third duty, the
evaluation of public policy, and tried to decrease legislative activities by
obliging Assemblies to devote one weeklong session out of four to over-
sight and evaluation. Furthermore, the monitoring of European affairs
also helped discredit the idea of a presidential domain outside of parlia-
mentary oversight. The president’s constitutional primacy in diplomacy
and defence, and his lack of responsibility towards the Parliament, had
long fostered the idea that Parliament could not restrain the president in
certain areas. Slowly and in a piecemeal fashion, the oversight of European
affairs aided in changing minds. After 2008, this led to the establishment
of parliamentary approval procedures for armed interventions and presi-
dential nominations.
The European Affairs Committee’s Continued Vitality

In 1996, in the first publication of his commentary on the Constitution,
Guy Carcassonne wrote of Article 88-4: ‘It remains for us to hope, in any
event, that the usual scenario will not recur, in which parliamentarians cry
out for another instrument only to leave it by the wayside once the novelty
has worn off and return to wherever their business calls them, meaning,
for many, the local communities that they govern’ (Carcassonne 1996).
Twenty years later, actual figures allow us to conclude that this hope has
24 O. ROZENBERG
been fulfilled. The specialised procedures for monitoring European affairs

have not only been reinforced through a series of constitutional revisions,
but are also significantly and continuously used. To make a full account, I
have studied the National Assembly’s annual statistical statements, striving
to situate the ensemble of European activities within the context of the
MPs’ occupations elsewhere.
The first indicator I have chosen is the number of European Affairs
Delegation (subsequently European Affairs Committee) meetings.
Figure 2.1 presents the data gathered since this structure’s creation. Over
the whole period, the committee convened 38 times by year on average,
compared to 62 times for standing committees. Since 1994, the frequency
of meetings has risen to 48 per year, compared to 66 for standing and special
committees. The proportion of committee meetings in total represents 9%
of those held by standing special committees, a ratio that has remained fairly
stable for 20 years. In terms of absolute value, however, the number of
meetings has reached new records since 2012, with more than 70 meetings
per year—although the relative meeting duration, indicated in the next fig-
ure, does not show a similar trend. The number of Senate committee meet-
ings is comparable, with an average of 40 meetings per year since 2000.21
The duration of these meetings, shown in Fig. 2.2, is consistent with these
120 20%
100
15%
80 76 73 75 75
60 55 54 56 10%
49 49 46 48 47 46 46
42 42
40 35 37 36 34 35 32 34 37
33
31 29
26 24 22 27 26 25 24 5%
19 20
20 13
9 9
0 0%
EU Delegation/Committee mean for the standing committees % of meetings (right)
Fig. 2.1 Meetings of the Delegation to the EU (1979–2008) then European

Affairs Committee (2008–2017) of the National Assembly. Source: National
Assembly annual statistical statements. Note: ‘% of meetings’ = Proportion of EU
Delegation/Committee meetings as a percent of the meetings conducted by
standing and special committees
200 30%
180
25%
160
140
20%
118
120 108 108 109
100 90 90 15%
84
78 77
80 70 71 67 69
65 66 63
60 62 10%
60 50 52 55 52
45
40
5%
20
0 0%
EU Delegation mean for the standing committees % of meetings (right)
Fig. 2.2 Length of meetings of the European Affairs Delegation/Committee of

the National Assembly (hours)
trends. On average, the European Affairs Committee of the National

Assembly has met 74 hours per year since 1994, versus 104 hours for a
standing committee. This amount of hours represents a proportion of 11%
of that of the standing and special committees.
The second indicator concerns committee activities. Figure 2.3 reveals
the European Affairs Committee’s dynamism in holding hearings with
members of the government (these constitute half of the hearings) or with
other players. The Committee has organised or, along with the standing
committees, co-organised 26 hearings per year since 1993, compared to
42 hearings for each standing committee. These hearings represent 9% of
the total held in Parliament. In the Senate, the average is slightly lower at
17 hearings per year since 2000. Figure 2.4 indicates the number of
reports and resolution proposals tabled by the Assembly committee since
1993. Thirty-two reports are tabled on average each year. The resolution
proposals are less numerous at an average of 12 per year. In the Senate, the
number of reports is distinctly lower: an average of eight per year since
2000. This low figure is not surprising, given that Senators consciously
avoid excessively dispersing their energies, instead focusing on certain sub-
jects. Senators publish fewer reports but accompany them more systemati-
cally with resolution proposals.
26 O. ROZENBERG
90 20%
80
69
70
15%
60
50 46 46 47 47
10%
40
31 31
30 26 27 25
24
20 21 21
17 17 5%
20 15 16 14
12 13 14 13
10
10
0 0%
EU Delegation mean for the standing committees % of meetings (right)
Fig. 2.3 Hearings conducted by the European Affairs Delegation/Committee

of the National Assembly
50
45
40
35
30
25 23
20 18 20
20 16 15
15 13 14 12 13 12 12 11 13
10 10 11 8 9 10 9 8
10 6 7
5 3
0
Reports Draft resolutions
Fig. 2.4 European Affairs Delegation/Committee of the National Assembly

reports and resolution proposals
The third series of indicators, presented in Fig. 2.5, is concerned with

the implementation of Article 88-4. The figure shows the explosion in the
number of documents transmitted under 88-4, that is, the number on
which it is possible to pass a resolution, after the constitutional revision of
2008. The average until 2008 was 262 texts per year, but subsequently
30 1200
25 1000
23
20 20
20 800
18
17
15
15 14 14 600
13 13 13 13
12
11 11
10 10 10
10 400
8 8 8 8
7 7
5
5 200
0 0
Assembly Resolutions Senate Resolutions
Documents transmitted 88-4 (right) Proposed directives (right)
Fig. 2.5 The Implementation of Article 88-4 of the Constitution. Sources and
notes: (1) ‘Assembly Resolutions’: Annual statistical bulletins of the National
Assembly. Only one resolution per text has been counted. 88-4 resolutions only.
(2) ‘Senate Resolutions’ and ‘88-4 documents sent’: http://www.senat.fr/
europe/dpue-bilan.html. 2013/14 = data for the year 2014. (3) ‘Proposed direc-
tives’: Eur-lex
rose to nearly one thousand. In parallel, the European Commission has

tended to propose fewer texts, for reasons which remain poorly under-
stood. Therefore, draft directives and resolutions which by volume consti-
tute half of documents transmitted to the Assemblies count for no more
than 5% of texts. Since the creation of this legislative instrument, the
Assembly has adopted an average of 12 resolutions per year, and the
Senate, 11.
The change in the number of European resolutions adopted by the
Assembly can be divided into two stages. After a dynamic launch in 1994,
the implementation of 88-4 trended downward until the beginning of the
2000s, with only five resolutions in the election year of 2001/2002. In
the second stage, the number rose progressively. The Senate is also more
active since 2011. The two Assemblies’ tendency towards convergence has
its basis, to a great extent, in the constitutional revision of 2008. The
standing orders reforms which followed the revision allowed the adoption
28 O. ROZENBERG
of resolutions to be accelerated and reinforced the two European Affairs

Committees’ control over the process. Where once in the name of effi-
ciency committees were limited to communicating simple conclusions to
the government, they now are encouraged to propose resolutions.
Ultimately, it appears that resolutions, as parliamentary instruments,
have been perpetually used in the two Assemblies. The novelty trap antici-
pated by Carcassonne has been avoided. Specialised procedures have not
been used in a totally continuous fashion, but they have not been neglected
since 1992 and have increased due to regulatory strengthening. The
European Affairs Committees’ activities make up 10% of total Assembly
activities, taking into account the number and duration of meetings and
hearings. The same proportion holds for the reports presented by the
Delegation of the Assembly from 1997 to 2002. The Delegation pre-
sented 9.5% of the 1454 reports under this legislature, and its 27 rappor-
teurs accounted for 9.4% of the total number of MPs who submitted at
least one report. This one-in-10 proportion is an approximation of the
frequency of specialised activities in European affairs in the Assembly. The
ratio is like that proposed by various studies attempting to measure quan-
titatively the impact of European legislation on French law or on the
French Parliament’s legislative activities. Completely refuting Jacques
Delors’ prediction that 80% of all legislation would be issued from the
European community, different studies set the ratio between about 10 to
15% during the 2000s (Bertoncini 2009; Brouard et al. 2012; Fekl 2010).
Despite the difficulty and roughness of approximations in these assess-
ments, we may assert that the French Parliament’s oversight activities in
European matters are close to the normative impact of European texts in
domestic law.
A Parliament That Bears Comparison

As a final step in evaluating the French Parliament’s European activities,
we will turn to a comparison with other parliaments. From 2011 to 2014,
the Observatory of National Parliaments After Lisbon, or OPAL, brought
together several European universities to study this question. Noting that
European prerogatives in assemblies are not always used, Katrin Auel,
Angela Tacea and I measured the precise level of activity in the 40
European national parliamentary chambers. First, we compiled an index of
institutional prerogatives, taking into account 12 types of variables
grouped into three equally important categories: access to information,

scrutiny infrastructure, and the legal effects of parliamentary oversight.22
An index of European activities was also formulated around five types of
variables: the number of European resolutions, the cumulative duration of
European affairs committee meetings, the frequency and proportion of
European debates dedicated to EU questions on the floor, the frequency
of legal opinions sent to the European Commission, and the frequency of
the European Affairs Committee’s hearings of the Prime Minister. The
data were collected over three years, from 2010 to 2012.23 Table 2.1 com-
pares the French Assemblies’ and certain European counterparts’ aver-
ages, using institutional indices in the first section and indices of six
different types of European activities in the second section. Figure 2.6
ranks the 40 parliamentary chambers on each of the two indices, by insti-
tutional measure and by measure of activity.
In terms of institutional prerogatives, the two French Assemblies stand
above the European average, due mainly to their extensive access to con-
fidential information. The Senate’s slightly more favourable position—
12th out of 40 assemblies, whereas the National Assembly is 13th—is
explained by the fact that the index incorporates the ratio of European
Affairs Committee members to constituents of the entire chamber: 8% in
the Assembly and 10% in the Senate over the relevant period. The number
of parliamentary clerks, difficult to verify, is not considered in calculating
the ranking. However, a 2013 COSAC report allows us to calculate the
average number of clerks per European Affairs Committee at 11 for 35 of
the chambers. The two French Assemblies employ about the same number
of clerks, far fewer than does the Bundestag.24
Concerning European activities, the situation is replete with greater
contrasts. Overall, the two Assemblies do not differ widely from the
European average: The National Assembly (17th) is slightly more active
than the Senate (22nd). A similar gap is found in the majority of the 13
bicameral European parliaments. The two European Affairs Committees
are relatively active compared to their counterparts. The Assemblies
together hold a rank closer to the average in number of adopted resolu-
tions and in debates on the floor, though the comparison for these types
of activities is a more delicate task. However, if we focus only on debates
dedicated to European Councils, the National Assembly, along with the
lower Dutch, German and Irish chambers and the Danish Folketing, fig-
ures as one of the assemblies that most systematically organises plenary
Table 2.1 European prerogatives and activities in different parliamentary chambers, per-year averages from 2010–2012
Prerogatives Activities
Access to Infrastructure Influence OPAL Resolutions EAC EAC Plenary Political Opinions on OPAL
information institutional meetings meetings debates dialogue subsidiarity activity
index (number) (in hours) index
National 0.67 0.47 0.5 0.55 11.7 45.7 91:20 9.7 0.7 0.7 0.21
Assembly
Senate 0.67 0.5 0.5 0.56 19.7 46.3 55:56 9 3.3 5 0.16
EU average 0.59 0.44 0.43 0.49 33.9 43.5 66:06 13.3 11.2 1.4 0.21
Lower 0.62 0.43 0.44 0.5 27.2 41 62:50 17.6 5.3 1.3 0.2
chambers av.
Higher 0.53 0.44 0.35 0.44 23.7 42.1 60:29 13.4 13.8 1.5 0.17
chambers av.
Europe of 0.53 0.47 0.42 0.48 26 51 71:52 15.3 15.9 1.5 0.22
twelve av.
National 14th 20th 13th 13th 27th 15th 8th 18th 35th 18th 17th
Assembly
Senate 14th 14th 13th 12th 22nd 14th 20th 19th 16th 14th 23rd
Bundestag 1st 5th 4th 2nd 12th 27th 10th 3rd 19th 18th 5th
(Germany)
Commons 24th 15th 13th 17th 14th 11th 14th 7th 26th 4th 27th
(UK)
Chamber 31st 21st 7th 22th 15th 2rd 11th 9th 7th 18th 9th
(Italy)
Note: The ‘prerogative’ variables are indices between 0 and 1 calculated from different rights attributed to assemblies. The activities are given as an absolute value. EAC = European
Affairs Committee. Italian Chamber = lower house
Source: Auel et al. (2015)
0.7
0.6 FI
SE
0.5
0.4
Activities
DK
PT DE1
CZ2
0.3 IT1 NL1 EE
UK2
IT2 LT
ES1 DE2
ES2 AT1 National Assembly
0.2 average SK
BE1 SI1
BE2 RO1 IE1 LU PL1 UK1 LV
Senate
RO2 IE2 BG AT2 HU
0.1 CY CZ1
EL PL2 MT NL2
SI2
0
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9
Institutional prerogatives
Fig. 2.6 European parliamentary chambers ranked by prerogatives and activity

level in European matters (2010–2012). Note: 1 = lower chamber; 2 = higher
chamber; AT = Austria; BE = Belgium; BG = Bulgaria; CZ = Czech Republic; DK
= Denmark; DE = Germany; EE = Estonia; IE = Ireland; EL = Greece; ES = Spain;
IT = Italy; CY = Cyprus; LV = Latvia; LT = Lithuania; LU = Luxembourg; HU =
Hungary; MT = Malta; NL = Netherlands; PL = Poland; PT = Portugal; RO =
Romania; SI = Slovenia; SK = Slovakia; FI = Finland; SE = Sweden; UK = United
Kingdom. Source: Auel et al. (2015)
debates before the summits (Wessels and Rozenberg 2013). After them,
French MPs, like those of the Bundestag, prefer that the Foreign Affairs
Minister (or another minister) report during joint hearings before several
committees.
Finally, concerning opinions sent to the European Commission
through the informal channels of political dialogue25 or opinions on the
subsidiarity principle, the two chambers have diverged in their choices
(Thomas and Tacea 2015). Like other parliaments in Europe, including
powerful chambers such as the German Bundestag or the Finnish
Eduskunta, the National Assembly is not very active in this domain. MPs’
potential willingness to act is discouraged by the adoption procedure of
opinions on subsidiarity. Modelled on the resolution procedure specified
in Article 88-4, this provides for review in the European Affairs
Committee, then (possibly) in a standing committee, and subsequently
(likewise possibly) on the floor. Given the time periods granted at each
stage, the European Affairs Committee can use only two weeks de facto
32 O. ROZENBERG
out of the eight weeks accorded to parliaments by the Lisbon treaty for
submitting an opinion. The Senate has used this possibility more exten-
sively by creating an informal structure within the European Affairs
Committee responsible for detecting possible violations of the subsidiar-
ity principle.
In summation, in the period from 2010 to 2012 the two French
Assemblies were close to European averages in terms of their formal pre-
rogatives as well as their actual activities. Figure 2.6 shows, furthermore,
that the relationship between their prerogatives and activities is close to
the average observed in Europe, unlike for example in the case of Czech
MPs, who have greater rights than they exercise, or that of the Portuguese
Parliament, which is in the opposite situation. This result is significant in
view of the usual classifications produced by comparative legislative stud-
ies. Such studies, numerous and sometimes mutually contradictory, agree
universally on the French Parliament’s position at the bottom of the scale.
From a constitutional perspective alone, French legislative power is at a
deficit when the particular prerogatives of the head of state, whom the
Assembly cannot censure, are taken into account (Woldendorp et al.
2000). By enlarging their focus with not less than 32 institutional criteria
relating to the relationship between the executive and legislative, Steven
Fish and Matthew Kroenig place 24 European parliaments in their index
in a range from 0.63 (Portugal) to 0.84 (Germany and Italy) (Fish and
Kroenig 2009). In short, the French Parliament is one of the weakest in
Europe in general, while specifically in European matters it is near the
average. It can therefore be distinguished from many other assemblies, as
comparative literature has established that the acquisition of EU preroga-
tives usually reflected the domestic constitutional balances (Karlas 2012;
Raunio 2005; Winzen 2017).
It is difficult to distinguish to what extent this gap is due to national or
European factors. On the one hand, constitutional blocks and restrictions
on domestic subjects may have bolstered MPs’ motivation to claim
prerogatives in European matters. Additionally, the European route con-
stitutes a rare possibility for the executive branch to demonstrate its will-
ingness to modernise the Fifth Republic. Indeed, as we will consider in the
following section, European adaptation is still restricted in several ways.
The Europeanisation of French Parliament was therefore even more
acceptable to the executive branch in that it did not threaten the latter’s
pre-eminence in European matters. The competition between both
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
again, I shall adopt khaki breeches, and send my petticoats by
express to our destination. This reminds me that I have not spoken
of our trunks. Nine out of ten people that we have met in San
Francisco have asked, “What became of your trunks, or didn’t you
have any?” Before leaving New York we sent, collect, by American
Railway Express, a large wardrobe trunk, the usual steamer trunk,
and a French hat-box to San Francisco, “Hold until claimed.” These
were held for seven weeks, and the total expense, delivered to our
hotel, was $45.50—not at all bad.
No matter of what material your clothes are made, a long motor
trip ruins them. It is a large expense to get them pressed, and a
small electric iron answers the purpose. It takes up but little space—
every small hotel is equipped with electricity—and you appear sans
creases and wrinkles. Don’t do as one friend did, who put it in her
traveling case with her bottles. One good bump did the business,
and when she took it out “the mess of tooth-powder, cold cream,
sunburn lotion, and broken glass was enough to spoil my trip.” Her
stock was soon replenished. In every small town across the
continent, without one exception, we found the Rexall drugs and
articles for sale; even when the town failed to boast of a ten-cent
store, Dr. Rexall was on hand. It struck us as very remarkable, and
was most convenient many times.
The one article that I regretted not bringing was a good camera.
When all our friends said, “Of course, you will take a camera,” my
husband replied, that he wouldn’t be bothered with one; “they are a
perfect nuisance.” That may be true, and the camera did not go
touring; but some incidents that occurred cannot be adequately
pictured in words—one in particular, our encounter with bears! Of
this I shall speak later.
And now, of the car! I wished my husband, who had all the care
of the car, to write his chapter. “Every man knows what to take, and
how to care for his car, and there is no use giving any advice.”
Perhaps he will—he has!
BY T. G. M. (UNDER PROTEST)
The authoress demands that I, a mere hubby, include a few

chirps of advice and what-nots to the intrepid masculine persuasion
who drives his own car and contemplates the trip across. You will
first undoubtedly think of wearing apparel, and pass those attractive
window displays in your home city, with Claude in a lovely green
plush hunting suit and Myrtle in a rakish hat, leather coat, and white
shoes! Don’t succumb, but take your old “comfy” gray golf or outing
suit, with extra trousers, two caps, a medium-weight overcoat, a
stout pair of driving-gloves, a half-dozen golf shirts with short sleeves
(these are a joy for hot-weather driving and working around the car),
a long pongee dust-coat, and one extra suit for emergencies. Your
“soup and fish” may better be left at home, unless you plan a stay in
some city. One scarcely ever sees evening dress about the hotels in
the West, especially among tourists, and never among their distant
cousins, the “Fordists.”
For the car, I should carry a wire cable, a tow-line, a spool of
annealed wire, six extra spark-plugs, two spare mounted shoes, an
extra tube, a valve, and a valve-spring. Be provided with an engine-
driven tire-pump, a roll of tape, a tube-repair kit (Lowe’s is a good
one), and a twelve-inch Stillson pipe wrench, which you may find a
life-saver in an hour of despair. Of course, you will have oil and
grease-guns, a pound of grease, and plenty of soft old cloths (which
are preferable to waste), and your regular equipment of tools.
Our first puncture was a nightmare. The car was heavily loaded
with fourteen pieces of baggage, four spare tires, etc., and it taxed
my vocabulary and my moral and physical strength to raise that right
rear wheel. Next day I acquired a T. C. (or traveling companion) that
never left me—a nice scraggly four-by-six wood block about thirty
inches long, chamfered at one end. Of course, the next puncture
was also a rear-wheel tire—this time the left one; but here was
where T. C. came in. I wedged the chamfered end of T. C. under and
ahead of said tire, started the engine, and advanced the car until it
rode the block, then put the jack under the rear axle and took the
car-weight off the block, pulled out the block, changed the tire,
pushed the car off the jack—and presto! there it was, ready for the
road, and not even a hair mussed. T. C. is my friend!
By all means acquire honestly (surreptitiously, if you must) a
waterproof khaki tarpaulin about eight feet by five. You will find this
invaluable to cover the spot where you must kneel or lie to fix things
when Old Father Fate hands you a puncture or other kill-joy.
Cord tires are also worth your while; they not only wear much
better, and stand up under heat and sand, but you can safely carry a
low tire-pressure. Our car weighed close to five thousand pounds,
but we carried only fifty-five to sixty pounds pressure. This makes for
comfortable riding, reduces your chances of a broken spring, and
eases the pain when bucking the deadly chuck-holes that look so
harmless but feel much worse than you anticipate—yes, much
worse!
We preferred the gas sold by the service stations of reliable oil
companies, and, in the main, found it much better and cheaper than
the average garage gas—and, between friends, more accurately
measured.
The tire-service stations are provided with handy local maps,
and between them and the garages you can get the best information
relative to the roads in general, and particularly detours, the
motorists’ bugbear. Road conditions often change entirely in a few
days, and, outside of guiding you along the main traveled routes, the
Blue Book ordinarily is not of much assistance. For setting-up
exercises, every morning I tested my tire-pressure, turned down all
grease-cups, looked over steering mechanism, rear axle, drive-shaft,
brakes and spring shackles, and, as a result, we came through with
flying colors, without the slightest accident, and our car runs better
now than when we started, 4154 miles away.
It may be of interest to speak further of the gas, for, as an item of
expense, and your greatest necessity, you have to consider it. We
saw no Socony gas after leaving Chicago; the Red Crown gas had
taken its place. There were a dozen other makes—Union, Iroquois,
Shell, Associated, etc., ranging in price from twenty to forty cents a
gallon. Every town and many grocery-stores on the road could
supply you. As our tank held twenty-one gallons, not once did we
have to carry extra gas. The longest stretch was seventy miles
without gas for sale. Of course, you get less mileage in the high
altitudes, and the radiator needs to be filled several times a day.
We carried an extra can of water, with our drinking-bottles filled,
through the highest mountain country and in the desert; otherwise,
the town pump was easily found. We had four spare shoes, but used
only one. Two punctures from New York to California is a record to
bring joy to any motor heart. Twice we picked up nails, and once
some joker stuck a long pin into a tire. Dr. B., of Bronxville, New
York, advised us to have a Yale lock put on either side of the hood of
the engine, remarking, “Those rubes in country garages are mighty
inquisitive, and have no love for city cars. I have had my carburetor
monkeyed with many times.” We took his advice and saved
ourselves a lot of trouble. In the East we paid $1.50 for a night’s
storage in a garage. Through the West we have paid as low as fifty
cents. Our total mileage, the amount of gas and oil used, and the
cost of each, with the garage expenses, I will give later.
I must add that, except for cleaning the spark-plugs, we had no
engine trouble, and the car arrived in perfectly good shape in
California.
VII
THE TWIN CITIES AND TEN THOUSAND

LAKES
August 6th and 7th we spent in St. Paul, at the first-class St.
Paul Hotel—a perfect joy! Our stay here was filled with interest. The
capitol building is a noble pile. Summit Avenue boasts of many
beautiful homes, but the business life is fast overtaking it.
Minneapolis is such a close neighbor that we could not tell where
one city began and the other left off. Here cousins took us to the
Athletic Club for lunch, in as beautiful a café as we have seen. A
bounteous luncheon was served for sixty cents that we would have
paid at least two dollars for in New York. This was our last feast on
broiled whitefish. As we were all chatting over our trip, a crash as of
broken china brought us to a pause. “What in Heaven’s name is
that?” we exclaimed. “Oh, just the boys in the ‘training’ café, having a
hurry-up lunch,” laughed our host. On the many floors men were
spending their noon-hour exercising and keeping themselves fit.
We drove out to the famous summer resort, Lake Minnetonka,
picturesque and edged with lovely summer homes. Near by were the
Minnehaha Falls, known to all Longfellow lovers, and the Fort
Snelling reservation, where the sturdy pioneers defended their lives
in the old round tower and block-house. By far the most attractive
spot we visited was Christmas Lake, seventeen miles out of town,
where the Radisson Inn nestles in the woods, quite hidden from the
highway. No private villa could be more lovely. In the large dining-
room, which was really a sun-parlor, each table had its own color-
scheme, with vines and wild flowers. Plants, ferns, vines, and flowers
growing everywhere in the most original baskets and boxes made of
twigs, bark, or moss. We all stood exclaiming, like a lot of children,
“Isn’t it adorable?”—“Oh, my dear, do look at this Indian
rug!”—“Where did they get this willow furniture?”—“Altman never
had such exquisite cretonnes!”—“Let’s give up the trip and stop
here!”—and so on. We were told that the table was in keeping with
the house, and that the place was full all season. This was another
high spot on the trip.
Still another pleasure was in store for us—we were to play golf
and dine at the Town and City Club. The club is situated between the
two cities, near the banks of the Mississippi River. We drove past
before we realized that it was not a private estate. Stopping a young
man, we asked where the club was. “Got me stuck, Missis; never
heard of it.” A small boy of seven came up, and, with a withering
glance which took us all in, waved his arm, saying, “Right before
your eyes!” We drove through lovely grounds to the club-house.
Such gorgeous old trees!—hedges that made you think of
Devonshire, lawns like velvet, and a riot of color in the beds and
borders—every flowering shrub and plant you could dream of. Of
course, the links were fine, and the twilight lasted until nearly nine
o’clock. We had ordered dinner in advance; so by a quarter to nine
we were seated at our table, with faultless appointments, enjoying
such a good dinner, and watching the sky-line of Minneapolis, with
its church spires and towering buildings, fade in the afterglow of the
sunset. Not one of us spoke as the twilight deepened and the stars
came out; we went out on the lawn and saw the new harvest moon
through the trees—a bit of Nature’s fairyland, the memory of which
will always stay with us.
Here we left the Yellowstone Trail and followed the National
Parks Highway north to Fargo, North Dakota, 265 miles; winding in
and out over good roads through a myriad of lakes—ten thousand,
we were told—in Minnesota. Every mile of the way, as far as the eye
could see, were acres of potatoes, corn, and wheat, fertile and
green. If you want to visualize Frank Norris’s books and understand
how we can feed starving Europe, motor through this state. It was
harvest-time. Great tractors were snorting like live creatures,
hundreds of men on the big ranches were “bringing in the sheaves,”
the country was alive with action, and the world was to reap the
benefit of the toil and endless energy of these sturdy men. You have
never seen our country until you have traveled through this great
grain-belt. Every small town had two or three grain elevators. There
were beautiful fields of alfalfa, a mass of bloom with its bluish purple
flower as sweet as honey. As we came near these fields, the air was
always cool. We couldn’t account for it; but it is a strange fact that
the air is considerably cooler when you near an alfalfa field. Can you
see the picture? Lakes on every side, as blue as great sapphires,
sparkling in the sun, the road lined with the wild sunflowers, often
forming a golden hedge on either side for miles, the blue mass of
color of the alfalfa fields, and above it the green corn and golden
wheat. The magpies were in flocks, and the sea-gulls were skimming
over the inland lakes, hundreds of miles from any large body of
water, and hundreds more of them were resting on the shores.
Strange, was it not? Through the West we have noted the absence
of many birds, especially in Montana, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada. But
here the crops were so abundant that the little songsters “had first
whack at the grain,” as my husband remarked. He was the bird-man
of the party, and when he was driving at a top-notch speed or turning
a hairpin curve he would calmly ask, “Did you girls see that blue
heron?”
Alexandria, and the hotel of the same name, were comfortable
beyond our hopes. The next day we passed through Fergus Falls,
where the cyclone of June 22d had demolished the better part of the
town. It had been a thriving, attractive place in the heart of the grain-
belt, with fine buildings and pretty homes. Now, less than two months
later, the wreck and débris were appalling. The wind had wrought
strange sights. We saw a sewing-machine in the top of a neighbor’s
tree, festooned with bedding, petticoats, and a bird-cage. Houses
were turned over as if they had been toys; others were crushed to
kindling. Here a small tree or a chicken-coop would be intact, and a
building five feet away would be demolished. We stopped off for
lunch in a small café in the part of the town that had escaped the
gale. The people were talking of nothing else. The whole countryside
had driven in to see it, to take the sufferers home, or to render
assistance. The waitress paid no attention to our order—just talked.
“Why, lady, it was the awfullest thing you ever heard tell on! One
moment we were all sitting at our work, and then we heard a roar like
a mad bull, or thunder, and the sky got so black that you couldn’t see
across that counter. Windows smashed in, and this house shook like
jelly. Folks were blown down that street like old newspapers.
Scared? My Gawd! we just crawled under the counter and prayed!
The door was blown in and the front window smashed. A little kid
was blown across that street and straight through that broken glass.
My maw’s house was shook to pieces. Maw was cookin’, and she
and the stove went off together. Paw was feedin’ the cattle; when we
found him he was lyin’ in the next lot with a cow a-lyin’ on top of him
and a milkpail a-coverin’ of his head. Most everyone got cut by the
glass or broke an arm or leg, tryin’ to hold on to somethin’. The piany
in the schoolhouse was took up and planted in a street two blocks
away not hurt a bit. It sounds just beautiful now. Some folks I know
had their two cats and three dogs killed, and the canary was a-
singin’ like mad when they found the house in the end of the garden.
The wire fences were the worst; they just wound themselves up like
yarn.” Many others told us similar weird tales. We left that town,
already being rebuilt, a sober party.
“I wonder what would happen to us if we should meet such a
cyclone,” said Toodles.
“I think we would ‘blow in’ to lunch with our friends in Boston,”
mused the bird-man.
He has given me this list of birds that we saw through the West:
Mudhens, bluebirds, bluejays, robins, ospreys, cranes, loons, terns,
the Canada goose, song-sparrows, meadowlarks, hawks, wild
swans, woodpeckers, orioles, wild doves, and others. Later we saw
sagehens and eagles.
VIII
MILLIONS OF GRASSHOPPERS
We had wired to our cousins, Mr. and Mrs. H., of Fargo, to make
a reservation for our party, which they did at the Gardner Hotel. We
found a big comfortable hotel, with large rooms, good table, and
excellent service. We enjoyed our “stop off” of two days here more
than in any other city on our trip. Fargo spells hospitality and “pep.”
Our greeting was, “What can we do for you?”
“Find the Packard service station, give us some home-cooking,
and let us play golf and tennis.”
“There are only two Packard cars in town, but the manager of
the garage owns one and can help you out.”
He did—kind, obliging person! Our second request was granted
to the full. Never did fried chicken and creamed potatoes covered
with gravy taste so good. We went back the next day and finished up
the rest of the chicken. After driving about this charming “up-to-
tomorrow” Western city, we went out to the Country Club and the
links, and met many truly delightful people.
Western people in the same walk of life as your friends at home
are traveled, cultured, broad-minded, most interesting people. I was
especially impressed by the women. They think for themselves on
the public questions of the hour, and voice their opinions in no
uncertain terms. As Philip Gibbs said in his article in Harper’s
(“Some People I met in America”), “Desperately earnest about the
problems of Peace, intrigued to the point of passion about the policy
of President Wilson, divided hopelessly in ideals and convictions, so
that husbands and wives had to declare a No Man’s Land between
their conflicting views.” It is so in our family. My brother has
expressed it aptly: “President Wilson is a state of mind. You are all
for him, or not at all.” But Heaven help me to keep politics out of this
peaceful narrative!
We found many golfers ahead of us. Mrs. W., the chairman of
the house committee, and especial hostess of the day, played with
us. She played, as all Western women enter into everything, with
enthusiasm. The course was flat, easy, and of nine holes.
But the grasshoppers! I had seen plenty of them on the trip while
going through the farming country. They would jump into the car,
take a ride on the hood or windshield, get on your veil or down your
neck, or collect in family parties on the luggage or in your lap; but
that was utter isolation compared to the crop on those links. The
seventeen-year locust had nothing on these grasshoppers! On the
fairway, when you hit your ball, hundreds would fly up in a cloud and
your ball was lost to sight. You walked on a carpet of them. It
reminded you of “the slaughter of the innocents.” Your clothes were
covered with them. When I sat down at the third tee, I heard a
crunching noise, unlike anything I ever experienced. Mrs. W. called
out—alas! too late—“Oh, you mustn’t sit down until you shake the
grasshoppers out of your skirts. You will ruin your clothes.” That
white satin skirt has been boiled, parboiled, dry-cleaned, and hung in
the sun, but the back looks bilious and pea-green in spots! When I
got back to the hotel, I found them inside of my blouse and under-
linen, and even in my hair and shoes. It is fortunate that they did not
bite, or someone else would be writing this tale.
After real afternoon tea, with toast, hot biscuits, and sandwiches
(not our ice-cream cones), we drove back to the city and dined and
talked until the lights were put out in the hotel and the elevator man
had gone to sleep. We were told of the fine roads through North
Dakota, “but not in bad weather; then you will have to reckon with
the gumbo.” “Gumbo” is described by Webster as “soup, composed
of okra, tomatoes, etc.” But that learned gentleman never drove after
a rainstorm in North Dakota.
The next morning the sky looked threatening, but we started out
for Jamestown, one hundred miles away. All went well until noon,
when a gentle drizzle set in, and we put up the top, stopped under a
big tree, had our lunch, and waited until the supposed shower was
over. Farther west it had poured; we noticed that the cars coming in
were covered with mud, and concluded that they had come over
country roads. Surely not the National Parks Highway! So down went
the top, and off we started in a wet atmosphere, but not really
raining. The chains had not been disturbed since they were
comfortably stowed away on leaving New York. One man advised us
to put them on, but with a superior don’t-believe-we-will-need-them
air we left our tree shelter. He called out after us, “Say, strangers,
you don’t know what you all are getting into.” We didn’t, but we jolly
soon found out! In ten minutes we had met gumbo, and were sliding,
swirling, floundering about in a sea of mud! I will try to describe it. A
perfectly solid (apparently) clay road can become as soft as melted
butter in an hour. Try to picture a narrow road, with deep ditches, and
just one track of ruts, covered with flypaper, vaseline, wet soap,
molasses candy (hot and underdone), mire, and any other soft,
sticky, slippery, hellish mess that could be mixed—and even that
would not be gumbo!
“Thank God for the ruts!” we devoutedly exclaimed. If you once
got out of the ruts, your car acted as if it were drunk. It slid,
zigzagged, slithered, first headed for one ditch, and then slewed
across the road. It acted as if bewitched. We had passed several
cars abandoned in the ditch, and those ahead of us, even with
chains on, were doing a new version of a fox trot. The road grew
worse, the mire deeper. The ruts were now so deep that we just
crawled along, and, to prevent getting stalled, we pulled out of them.
In a shorter time than it takes to write it, our left front wheel was
down in the ditch and the car lying across the road, and stuck fast.
That was all that prevented us from being ditched. There we were,
unable to move. We had not tried to walk in gumbo. That was an
added experience. All three of us got out to see what could be done.
It would be impossible to jack the car up there and put on the chains;
the jack would have sunk out of sight. And no car could pass us.
Your feet stuck in the gumbo so that when you pulled up one foot a
mass of mire as large as a market-basket stuck to it, or your shoe
came off, and you frantically slid and floundered around until you got
it on again. We thought of a dozen clever things to do, if we could
only have walked. There was a farmhouse half a mile ahead where
no doubt we could have hired a team to pull us out. But how could
we get there? My sympathies are all with the fly caught on sticky
flypaper! In a short time, a Dodge car came up back of us, a man
driving it, with his wife, his son, a boy of fifteen, and a small girl.
Being a light car in comparison, and having chains on, they fared
better; but they could not pass. They offered to pull us back onto the
road. Fortunately we had brought a wire cable with us. This was
attached to both cars, and then both tried to back. Did we budge? No
such luck! All hands got to work, sliding around like drunken sailors,
and filled in back of our wheels with stones, sticks, cornstalks, and
dry grass. After being stuck there just one hour, we got back onto the
road and into the ruts, and slowly we crawled up to the top of a hill,
where some guiding angel had scattered ashes and sand. We got to
a dry, grassy spot, where a sadder and wiser driver put on the
chains. How did we get there, Toodles and I? Those blessed Dodge
people invited us to stand on their running-boards while they crawled
up the hill. Later we overtook them having tire troubles, and we were
glad to be able to return their kindness. The next lovely job was to
clean our shoes. Nothing can stick worse than gumbo, and we had
been soaked in it. Needless to say that our shoes were ruined, but
we were lucky it was not the car.
So, with care, and crawling about five miles an hour, still slipping
and sliding like eels, we covered the forty miles into Jamestown. The
hotel dining-room was closed, and we had supper in a Chinese
restaurant, then went to have our shoes cleaned in what had been
before July 1st a typical Western saloon. It was filled with miners and
cowboys playing billiards, and a villainous automatic piano playing
rag-time. We sat up in the chairs while a “China-boy” dug at the
gumbo, now hard as stone. One Westerner stood there taking us all
in, and drawled, “You folks must have struck gumbo.” We had; but
then again—“It might have been worse.”
IX
THE BAD LANDS—“NATURE’S FREAKIEST

MOOD”
From now on we experienced the real thrills, the discomforts, and

the wonders of our trip. Will the Eastern people (or the rest of our
country) ever realize the debt of gratitude that we owe to those early
pioneers—the men who blazed the trails across the wilderness,
suffering every privation, facing inconceivable dangers, and many
dying of cold and starvation? As we studied our map and saw those
hundreds of miles ahead of us, through the bad lands, over the dry
Montana plains, through the desert, and over the Rocky Mountains, I
admit that it seemed like the end of the world, and a million miles
from home—almost a foolhardy undertaking! Then we felt ashamed
of ourselves. With a good car, and all of us in prime condition, we left
old gumbo and fears behind, and made a fresh start. The big towns
are one hundred miles apart. Governor H. had told us not to stop in
Bismarck, a fine big city, but to go across the Little Missouri River to
Mandan, sixteen miles farther on. Bismarck’s fine hotels and cement
pavements were a great temptation to stop, but our hopes were
more than realized. This river, like all of these Western rivers, once
navigable by big boats, was so low that teams were driving across in
many places. When we reached the ferry we found a tiny steamer
with paddle-wheels at the stern waiting for us. It held two small cars
beside ours. On the other side a corduroy road had been built out
over what had been the bed of the river at least a quarter of a mile,
so that the ferry could land. The rest of the way was through pine
woods.
Mandan is a beautiful city, with the new Lewis and Clark Hotel,
owned by Governor H. It was crowded, but when we showed the
clerk Governor H.’s signature we were given his private suite.
Remember that we had been coming over the plains for a hundred
miles, and you can share our joy to walk into a Fifth Avenue hotel,
with a Ritz-Carlton suite to revel in. This was where extremes met. It
was wonderful that it was so beautiful. It was really more wonderful
that it was there at all.
The next day we went through another hundred miles of cattle
and grain ranches. We were told that these towns, a hundred miles
apart, had been trading-posts and stage-stops in the early days.
Dickinson, Glendive, Miles City, and Billings, Montana, are all fine,
thriving cities—excellent modern hotels, wide paved streets, fine
churches, stores, office buildings, and theaters, not overlooking the
movie houses. In passing, I wish to speak of the movies—a national,
educational institution, to be reckoned with. If we were not too dead
tired after a scrub, change of clothes, and dinner, we went to a movie
and saw excellent pictures and the world’s doings to date. Usually
there were plenty of electric fans, and always one big “paddle” fan
outside the front entrance. This we found the case with banks, office
buildings, and shops. (Solve that if you can!) In many dozens of
canaries were singing a jubilee. There was always a large clock in
full view of the audience—another sensible idea. These cities were
equipped with every modern device and invention. They claimed
your admiration and deserved your unstinted praise. It was almost
impossible to believe that the next morning, ten minutes after you left
the pavements, you would again be out on the prairies, and perhaps
meet no one for hours.
At Dickinson, North Dakota, we found the St. Charles Hotel very
good. We had been told to have lunch the next day in Medora, at the
Rough Riders Hotel, one of the few buildings left of the early cowboy
days. The town is nothing—a new school and store and a handful of
old buildings. It is quite near the ranch where Colonel Roosevelt
lived for two years. They instantly tell you that with real pride, for
these people loved the man as they knew him. Like the buffalo, the
picturesque cowboy is almost extinct. On the big cattle ranches we
saw near cowboys—boys in their teens herding the cattle, and some
ordinary, dirty-looking men on horses. There were half a dozen men
eating noon dinner at the hotel(?), a tumble-down old building about
as romantic as any old woodshed. One grizzly old fellow was pointed
out as having been a guide for the Colonel. The place was dirty, the
food impossible, greasy and cold, and the few bullet-holes in the far-
famed bar were not sufficient to make this member of the party rave
over the place. It seemed like a travesty, or a ghost of some former
existence. You may infer that we did not care for Medora!
For the next hour we climbed steadily up, the roads growing
narrow and rocky and full of chuck-holes. Everything that is rough
and bad going in the Far West is “chucky,” and we were soon to get
acquainted with real chuck-holes. Presently we came out on a
plateau, and before us lay the Bad Lands of North Dakota. You may
read of them, see pictures of them, or see them from a train, but you
have never really seen their wonder, their grotesquely beautiful
grandeur, until you stand in their midst as we did. High cliffs, deep
canyons, queer formations of stone and earth that look like great
castles or human heads. Again they resemble mushrooms of
mammoth size, in all colors—gray, pink, orange, black, greens of a
dull hue (not from the verdure, for there is none to speak of), yellows,
and even purplish and chalky white. Here again you can see the
outline of some giant creature, as if it had been carved in a
prehistoric age. We are told that the sea once covered these lands.
You can plainly see the ridges, like a rock on the ocean shore where
the water has receded. I suppose they are called the Bad Lands
because they are arid and nothing will grow. They are the
wonderlands of this country—geological wonders, left from some
glacial period before the foot of man trod the earth. No pen can
adequately describe that scene; no brush could do justice to its weird
beauty. The stillness of death reigned. Not a bird or a living creature
did we see. The way winds around these strange cliffs, now up a
steep incline, where you look down at the road below, again in the
bottom of a ravine or chuck-hole, and you wonder how you could
drive the car either down or up again.
“Did you ever see anything like this, anywhere?”
“No, but it looks like what I imagine the bottom of hell must look
like.”
All that day we drove in and out, with an ever-changing
panorama of fantastic shapes and colors. We were awed, thrilled to
our very marrow, and even now, weeks later, as I write of it, I realize
that my hands are cold. Believe me, my friends, this is the acid test
of driving. If you qualified, well and good; but if you lost your nerve or
your head—a long good-night, and a perfectly good funeral!
Glendive, Montana, and the comfortable Jordan Annex looked
human and mighty good to us that night. We all admitted that we
were scared half to death. But, oh, the wonder and majesty of that
sight! We blessed our good car, we blessed our Maker, and we slept
as if we had been drugged.
X
THE DUST OF MONTANA
Poor Montana! Burned, scorched to ashes from four summers of

drought, and no rain in six months! Everywhere the people told us
the same story. The rivers and streams were dry as bones. “Don’t
stop here for water” was a familiar sign. We met hundreds of families
driving out, in old “prairie-schooners,” with all their household
furniture and their cattle. These poor souls had to find water for their
cattle and themselves. They had tried to raise crops, and were
literally driven out. The children looked pinched and starved. The
women and men were the color of leather, tanned by the scorching
sun of the plains, the dust, and the dry, hot winds. They had lost
everything. Their faces were pathos personified. It wrung your heart
to see them. We always slowed down and waved to them, and often
stopped and talked. It was rare to get a smile from even the children.
When we would give some little kiddie an orange, it was the pathetic
mother who tried to smile. Before we had covered the four hundred
miles across the state, our faces were burned, our lips so dry and
cracked that they bled, and our eyes nearly burned out of our heads.
Yet we had but a few days of it, and they had suffered for four
summers! At night we would soak our hands and faces in cold
cream, but the next night they were quite as bad. The dust was from
six to eight inches deep, and the roads were either through sand or
chucky. We know now why Lohr named his song “My Little Gray
Home in the West.” It could not possibly have been any other color.
A dozen times we thought our springs were gone. The road looked
like a level stretch of dust; then down you would go to the bottom of
a chuck-hole with a thud that made your teeth chatter.
The cattle looked as starved as the people. We came to one
valley that had been irrigated, and for a mile or so the crops were
green. The ditch was full of water—real wet water. Horses and cows,
dogs and people were standing in it. We filled our radiator and
bottles and laved our hands and faces. Germs or no germs, we
drank our fill. In half an hour or less your throat and mouth would be
as dry as ashes, and your thirst was insatiable. We found that fruit,
especially oranges and pears, quenched the thirst better than water;
so we always kept plenty of fruit in the car. The going was so bad
that we did not reach Miles City until late. After leaving Fargo, each
morning we had taken the precaution to wire ahead for reservations,
always adding “driving,” so, if we were belated, the rooms would still
be held for us. We had been told that the Olive Hotel at Miles City
was the only poor hotel on the route. Everyone had given it a black
eye. We had mentioned it to the manager at the Jordan Annex in
Glendive. “I think you will find it very comfortable. Our company has
taken it over and refurnished it.” When we were sending our usual
morning wire, he very politely said that it would be his pleasure to
notify them of our coming.
To digress for a moment—the people of Montana pride
themselves on their universal courtesy to strangers. Time and again,
we had people say, “You have found our people polite and
obliging?”—“Yes; they are kindness itself”—and they were.
When we reached the Olive Hotel we were agreeably surprised.
Everything was clean and comfortable, looking like Paradise after
the dust and scorching sun of the plains. We were having our
lunches put up by the hotel each morning, as there was absolutely
nothing decent en route (shades of Medora!). I asked for the
manager, Mr. Murphy.
“We shall be glad to put you up a lunch,” he said. “What would
you like?”
“Anything but ham sandwiches. We have been so fed up on
them that we can’t look a pig in the face for fear we will see a family
resemblance.” Then I added, “May the bread be cut thin, and
buttered?”
He laughed and assured us that it would be “all right.” Right! Ye
gods, we had a feast! Oh, how we have blessed dear Mr. Murphy!
May his shadow never grow less! As we were starting in the morning
the head waitress came out with the lunch neatly done up, saying,
“Mr. Murphy has had some extras put in. We like Easterners and try
to please tourists.” We paid the modest price of $2.50 (for three
people) and decided to curb our curiosity until noon. This was a real
occasion, and just the proper spot must be found for our party. Some
days we had driven many miles to find a clump of trees to lunch
under. Today we went ten miles and never even saw a tree—the
deadly monotony of the endless plains—heat, dust, sand, sagebrush
the color of ashes, and only a jolly little prairie-dog scurrying to his
hole or a hawk flying overhead. Not a tree—not even a big bush to
give shade! We asked some ranchers where they got wood for fuel.
“There ain’t no wood. Every fellow digs his coal in his own backyard.”
It sounded simple, and I was glad to hear that nature had provided
some compensations for the farmer, whose life at the best is not all
“beer and skittles.”
On we drove until one o’clock—and still no trees! A wail from
Toodles: “What about having lunch in the car?” There was a bend in
the road over the top of a hill. “I have a hunch that there will be a tree
around the bend,” ventured the bird-man. There was!—just one big,
glorious cottonwood tree that would shelter a drove of cattle, and the
only tree in sight on those plains as far as the eye could see. Out
came the faithful old rug and the hamper—and then we unpacked
the lunch! Three juicy melons, a whole broiled chicken for each one,
thin bread and butter, a jar of potato salad, fresh tomatoes, three jars
of marmalade, eggs, crisp lettuce, pickles, and the best chocolate-
cake I ever tasted, besides peaches, pears, and hot coffee. You may
think we were a lot of greedy pigs, but that was the banner lunch of
the trip. May Mr. Murphy never go hungry! He has made three
friends for life.
Miles City is the last and best of the representative “cow-towns”
of early days. The annual “round-up,” a celebration of frontier days,
is usually held on the 4th of July. Here our watches went back an
hour. We were now in the land of silver dollars. It had been some
years since we had seen them in New York. Out here, when you had
a bill changed, you received nothing but silver dollars. A bit heavy,
but all right, if you had enough of them.
That night we reached Billings. We had gone through some
fertile ranches where the irrigation system had turned an arid waste
of sand into fields of green crops. The country improved, as we
neared this “Metropolis of Midland Empire,” as they term it, the
center of the sugar-beet industry. Wherever we saw crops, there the
sugar-beet flourished. They must raise many thousands of tons of
them. The fair grounds and elaborate buildings are of interest. It is a
real city rising out of the plains, like a living monument to the
pioneers, men and women. The Northern Hotel was the finest we
had seen since leaving the Twin Cities. We rested up for a day, had
the car cleaned and oiled, and had ourselves laundered,
shampooed, and manicured, starting refreshed and full of
expectations on our last lap to the Yellowstone. In contrast to the
Olive Hotel, our lunch here was the one real “hold-up” in any hotel.
Six eggs, six tongue sandwiches, and four cups of coffee were
$3.75. We protested, and they deducted seventy-five cents.
We had heard pleasing reports of Hunter’s Hot Springs being the
French Lick of the West; anything that spelled water sounded good
to us, although we had crossed the upper Yellowstone River only to
see a little stream so low that the cattle were standing in the middle.
There is nothing but the hotel—not even a garage. All the cars were
parked in front and stood there all night. The place was crowded with
tourists from all over the country. “Hello there!” greeted us, and to
our surprise and great pleasure we found our cousins, Mr. and Mrs.
H., of Fargo, with the glad tidings that she would go through the park
with us. This place is unique—a low, rambling building, with a quarter
of a mile of porches, a very large swimming pool of mineral water,
hot from the springs, and private baths of all descriptions. The big
plunge had been emptied and scrubbed, and the hot water was
pouring in, but would not be sufficiently cool to swim in for another
day.
Many charming people were here, taking the course of baths,
resting, or just stopping en route, as we were. One celebrity was

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The French Parliament and The European Union Backbenchers Blues 1St Ed Edition Olivier Rozenberg Full Chapter

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The French Parliament and the

European Union: Backbenchers Blues

The French Parliament

More information about this series at

The French Parliament

Original French edition published by Presses de Sciences Po, Paris, 2018

French Politics, Society and Culture

Cover illustration: AG photographe / Getty Images

2 Institutional Adaptation: A Case of trompe-l’oeil? 9

3 The Enrolment of National Parliamentarians 59

4 The Constituency Member: Dilettante, Lobbyist or

5 The Defender of Land and Tradition: The Activism of the

6 The Sovereigntist: An Ephemeral Role165

7 The Career Politician: The Europeanisation of Political

8 The European Specialist in Search of a Role223

Appendix: List of Interviews Held with Political Leaders277

COM Communist group in the National Assembly (1962–2002)

Fig. 2.1 Meetings of the Delegation to the EU (1979–2008) then

Table 9.3 Types of psychological gratification associated with European

On 9 January 2007, the National Assembly resumed deliberations follow-

© The Author(s) 2020 1

This seemingly insignificant anecdote is revealing in several ways. First,

In this so particular moment for a political life, I am also thinking of my

He was warmly applauded. But Mélenchon did not relent. In October

specialised procedure. It aims, in effect, to grasp how France’s participa-

This approach was supplemented by several observations of committee

European specialisation, a subject raised in the beginning of this work,

project, offer access to unabridged transcriptions to interviews with politi-

Institutional Adaptation: A Case

Parliaments’ ability to change has generally been overlooked. True, parlia-

© The Author(s) 2020 9

(for example, visits of French parliamentarians to Brussels have been increas-

The Ceaseless Adaptation of the French Parliament

1979: An Ambiguous Founding Compromise

The Delegation’s advocates also benefitted from the support of former

The delegations originated and developed, therefore, from two con-

We composed a report every six months. Cointat told me we had to give it to

This reluctance to grant autonomy led to a restrictive definition of the

1992: A ‘Resolute’ Parliament

a process in which the EU constitutes only a resource or constraint in all

Guillaume 2014, p. 191) character of the independent regulatory power

Specialised structures also have helped spearhead the acquisition of new

weeks. Such is the theoretical organisation of the system; in practice, as we

2008: A Second-Order European Committee

In comparison with previous versions of Article 88-4, including those

derived from various European treaty articles offering new rights to

A Favourable Institutional and Quantitative

Notable European Prerogatives Attained in Spite of the Fifth

memoranda of the UK government, impact statements (fiches d’impact

legal obligation. More generally, the interviews I conducted confirm the

The European Affairs Committee’s Continued Vitality

been fulfilled. The specialised procedures for monitoring European affairs

EU Delegation/Committee mean for the standing committees % of meetings (right)

Fig. 2.1 Meetings of the Delegation to the EU (1979–2008) then European

EU Delegation mean for the standing committees % of meetings (right)

Fig. 2.2 Length of meetings of the European Affairs Delegation/Committee of

trends. On average, the European Affairs Committee of the National

EU Delegation mean for the standing committees % of meetings (right)

Fig. 2.3 Hearings conducted by the European Affairs Delegation/Committee

Reports Draft resolutions

Fig. 2.4 European Affairs Delegation/Committee of the National Assembly

The third series of indicators, presented in Fig. 2.5, is concerned with

Assembly Resolutions Senate Resolutions

2 Institutional Adaptation: A Case of trompe-l’oeil? 9

3 The Enrolment of National Parliamentarians 59

4 The Constituency Member: Dilettante, Lobbyist or

5 The Defender of Land and Tradition: The Activism of the

6 The Sovereigntist: An Ephemeral Role165

7 The Career Politician: The Europeanisation of Political

8 The European Specialist in Search of a Role223

Appendix: List of Interviews Held with Political Leaders277