Acceso usuarios
Alessandro Torre
The parliamentary events of the final decades of the eighteenth century can be considered the starting-point of comparable legislatures in England, France and the United States of America. At the same time three different interpretations developed of parliamentary attitudes and a turning point occurred in different traditions of law-making. The growth of relationships grounded on confidence between a parliamentary one-party majority and the King's Cabinet in Westminster, the troublesome activity of the General Estates and soon of the Assemblée Nationale in revolutionary France, and the somewhat uncertain steps of the Congress in the newly founded American federal state, show, on the one hand, that the parliamentary experience was worthy to play an ever-increasing role in pre-liberal systems of government, but on the other hand that the three legislatures were likely in future to adopt different styles and different patterns of behaviour.
The most distinguished reflection on the role of legislatures and on the working of their inner machinery was offered, towards the end of the century and the outcome of revolution in France, by Jeremy Bentham, whose short book Political Tactics (1788–89) was an impressive gift to the incipient French parliamentary body. The book was offered to Bentham's own main cultural and political connections, the anglicisant circle of Mirabeau and Dumont, but it was in effect a failed effort to give a basic imprint to the beginnings of parliamentary debate and constitutional structure in Paris.
The latter part of Alessandro Torre's article focuses on a short but significant fragment from the Political Tactics: the chapter in which the English utilitarian dealt with the role of the presiding officer as a neutral magistrate of the assembly. The role was clearly modelled on that of the Speaker at Westminster, and that was why French parliamentarians did not take any account of it throughout the following experiences of the legislature's presidencies between 1789 and the Convention, and beyond.
From this foundation, the further development of parliamentary machineries in the leading Western models of law-making bodies shaped three different patterns of the presiding officer's role, as one who stood above the assembly's debate (the House of Commons model), amidst the actual party divisions (the Congress-House of Representatives model), or according to a rather miscellaneous design (the French model from the Revolution to the Restoration and liberal legislatures). This last ‘mixed’ model, consisting of both neutral and political elements in the single post of presiding officer, soon became the leading type in most liberal parliaments of continental Europe. The Westminster and American cases were two extremes never fully emulated elsewhere. According to Bentham's theoretical project, the summoning of the Estates General was the historical and constitutional stage when the three types of parliamentary experiment began on common ground, but the Benthamite dialogue was blocked out in France by the force of political events and of a basically cultural refusal to accept any opinion coming from Westminster, so that the later history of European parliaments displayed a relative fragmentation of theoretical models and concrete experiences.
