French presidential elections under the Fifth Republic French presidential elections under the Fifth Republic There have been eleven presidential elections in France since the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958. Originally the president was elected by the Collège des Notables (an assembly of "notable electors") that included around 80,000 county and city/town councillors (who had been elected locally). Following the 1962 de Gaulle's constitutional reform (the constitutional Act of November 6, 1962) the president has been directly elected by the people of France. Until the French constitutional revision of September 24, 2000, the president had been elected for a seven-year term. Under this revision the term
French Second Republic French Second Republic The French Second Republic was a short-lived republican government of France under President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. It lasted from the 1848 Revolution to the 1851 coup by which the president made himself Emperor Napoleon III and initiated the Second Empire. It officially adopted the motto of the First Republic, "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité". The Second Republic witnessed the tension between the "Social and Democratic Republic" () and a liberal form of republicanism, which exploded during the June Days uprising of 1848. The 1848 Revolution in France, sometimes known as the February Revolution, was one of a wave of revolutions