Constitutional law

The first entry is le pouvoir constituant, and its adjective will be misread by anyone who follows the English look-alike. In English a « constituent » is above all a voter: somebody who lives in a constituency and writes to the member who represents it. The political sense faces downwards, towards the people who elect. Outside the laboratory, where both languages use the word for one ingredient of a mixture, French constituant faces the other way. It is the present participle of constituer, to set up, and in public law it names whoever sets up the constitution itself. Used as a noun it becomes a term of art with no neat English match: le constituant is the author of the constitution, and la volonté du constituant is what an English lawyer would call the intention of the framers. Le constituant de 1958 means those who drafted the text of the Fifth Republic, never its electorate, and historians speak of les constituants for the members of the assembly of 1789. Read le pouvoir constituant as a power held by constituents and the entry turns upside down. It is the power that comes before any constitution, and so before any constituency.