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This article explores the well‐known saga of the European Court of Justice's introduction of direct effect of Coun-cil Directives on the basis of new comprehensive archival research. The expansion of the doctrine of direct effectto include Directives was part of a drive of the Legal Service of the European Commission and the ECJ tostrengthen the enforcement of European law. This threatened the deeper balance of competences betweenthe European Community and its Member States and consequently led to a sharp response from the national par-liaments and courts. The force of these responses and the deep crisis that had evolved in the late 1970s betweenFrance and the ECJ, led to a change in the EC's case law that limited the direct effect of Directives to the verticalrelation between citizens and the respective Member State and excluded any horizontal effect. The story is anexample of how the activist ECJ of the 1970s ran into resistance from the Member States and had to modifyits doctrinal advances. It also suggests that the successful acceptance of the constitutionalisation of the Treatiesof Rome pursued by the ECJ was by no means secure by the late 1970s.
