The Tréveneuc Law (French: loi Tréveneuc) was a law passed in the early days of the French Third Republic which established a legal framework by which the country could invoke a state of emergency (régime d'exception) in order to oppose a power grab by a rogue chief executive who illegitimately dissolved the National Assembly.
There were several occasions where serious discussion or attempts to invoke the Tréveneuc law arose, in particular several times during World War II, either by the Vichy regime, or by those opposing it.
[4] On 25 July 1871, Henri, Viscount of Tréveneuc and representative of Côtes-du-Nord in the National Assembly, presented a bill, co-authored by Charles de Janzé and Émile Depasse.
[7] Under the exceptional circumstances envisioned by the law, the power normally held by the national legislature is partially devolved to the departmental councils, who are to meet "immediately" to maintain public order locally, and calls for the establishment of an "Assembly of Delegates" (assemblée des délégués) consisting of two delegates elected from each departmental council.
[2] It provides for its use in the event that the Parliament is illegally dissolved[b] or prevented from sitting, for any reason whatsoever, in the places[c] assigned to them in Paris[d] or in any other city where the Government has transferred the seat of public powers.
The law assigns itself a double objective: to provide for the measures immediately necessary for the administration of the country, and for the restoration of the constitutional mandate, either of that previously in progress, or of a new one, resulting from general elections, which must be convened after one month of exercise of the "Assembly of Delegates".
[12][better source needed] The Tréveneuc law appeared at the top of the page of the constitutional declaration of 16 November, in which Charles de Gaulle supplemented the Brazzaville Manifesto of 27 October.
[13] The attitude of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in late 1943 and early 1944 towards de Gaulle and FDR's reservations about recognizing the French Committee of National Liberation as far as an entity that would govern post-liberation was based on his view that a government ought to be based on an election by the people, and he took measures to restrict the authority of American authorities' interaction with the CFLN.
[14] It was in January 1944 that FDR wrote Alexis Léger, ex-secretary general of the Quai d'Orsay at the time of the armistice and ex-pat in the U.S. to seek advice on how de Gaulle's insistence on being recognized as head of a provisional government post-Liberation might be countered.
Léger wrote Roosevelt stating that the Tréveneuc law should be invoked to determine the government of a post-war France, explaining that it would be illegal for Washington or any other foreign government to grant recognition to de Gaulle, based on the requirements of the law to either constitute a new national assembly, or to recreate the previous one—namely, the one at the end of the Third Republic, when the armistice was signed.
The French Committee of National Liberation rejected this overture, however, preferring a solution that marked a separate course rather than something that represented a return to the Third Republic.
The solution that was ultimately found, rested more upon the illegality of Vichy to begin with, based on earlier discussions between de Gaulle and Jules Jeanneney.