the
enactment, and the amending of laws, save that money bills must be
introduced in and passed by the Chamber of Deputies before being
considered in the upper branch. Except for this limitation, measures
may be presented in either house, by the ministers in the name of the
President, or by private members. The vast fabric of Napoleonic law
which has survived to the present day in France has narrowed
perceptibly the range of legislative activity under the Republic.
During the first generation after 1871 few great statutes were
enacted, save those of a constitutional character. In our own day,
however, the phenomenal expansion of social and industrial
legislation, which has been a striking feature of the public life of
most European nations, has imparted a new vigor and productiveness to
French parliamentary activity.

Each of the chambers possesses certain functions peculiar to itself.
Aside from the initiation of money bills, the principal such function
of the Deputies is the bringing of charges of impeachment against (p. 329)
the President or ministers. The Senate possesses the exclusive power
to try cases of impeachment. It is given the right to assent or to
withhold its assent when the President proposes to dissolve the
Chamber of Deputies before the expiration of its term. And by decree
of the President, issued in the Council of Ministers, it may be
constituted a court of justice to try any person accused of attempts
upon the safety of the state.[492]

[Footnote 492: Y. Guyot, Relations between the
French Senate and Chamber of Deputies, in
_Contemporary Review_, Feb., 1910.]

II. POLITICAL PARTIES SINCE 1871

*357. Republicans and Conservatives.*--In its larger aspects the
alignment of political parties in France to-day dates from the middle
of the nineteenth century. In the National Assembly of 1848--the first
representative body elected in France by direct universal
suffrage--the line was sharply drawn between the republicans of the
Left, who wished to maintain the Republic and with it a liberal
measure of democracy, and the reactionaries of the Right, who began by
insisting upon a restoration of clerical privilege and bourgeois rule
and ended, in the days of the Legislative Assembly, by clamoring for a
restoration of monarchy itself. After the _coup d'etat_ of 1851 both
groups were silenced, though even in the politically stagnant era of
the earl