Institutions
Article 91 of the constitution stipulated that the institutions of the Community were to be established by 4 April 1959.
These were as follows:
The President of the Community was the President of the French Republic. The member states also took part in his election and he was represented in each state by a High Commissioner. In 1958 President de Gaulle was elected by an absolute majority in all the states.
The Executive Council of the Community met several times a year, in one or other of the capitals, on the summons of the President, who assumed the chair. It was composed of the chiefs of the governments of the different states and the ministers responsible for common affairs.
The Senate of the Community was composed of members of the local assemblies designated by them in numbers proportional to the population of the state. This body was functionally powerless, and after holding two sessions it was abolished in March 1961.
A Community Court of Arbitration, composed of seven judges nominated by the President, gave decisions in disputes between member states.
Because France did not want to become 'a colony of its colonies', African countries did not make up a majority voting bloc and were functionally required to join with French parties in order to gain voting power.
Read more about this topic: French Community
Famous quotes containing the word institutions:
“In my short experience of human life, the outward obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails—aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... no woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)