Éléments de droit constitutionnel

Constitutional democracy faces new, or renewed, challenges (e.g. the role of "civil society," globalization, the religious question). The State itself has been blamed and the question of its being obsolete has been posed, when, moreover, the political life of the people seems to teeter between futility (“peopolisation”) and fatality (war, poverty, ecological catastrophe). The constitutional right is the cause.

Law expresses the multimillenial effort for reasoned control of social life, constitutional law its application to the social body, itself organized in a determined territorial context (the State), endowed with power derived from this body (democracy), and guaranteeing autonomy of the body's members (rights and liberties).

The first part of this work describes the historical and intellectual formation of the State, its universalization and the conflicts between different forms of democracy. The second part describes the field of constitutional law: demotic (one earth, one people), political (one power), and civic (liberties). The third part poses the rarely addressed question of the limits of constitutional law, particularly in the context of the European construction.