A constituent assembly allows the establishment or modification of a Constitution.
Assembly , originating from the French word assemblée , is an institution that is created from the call of a certain number of individuals who meet to debate some issues and make a decision regarding them.
Constituent , for its part, is a term used to name the person or object (physical or symbolic) that creates, composes or determines something. There are, therefore, different types of constituents.
What is a constituent assembly
The institution that is specifically conceived for the creation or modification of a Constitution is known as a constituent assembly . It should be noted that the Constitution , also known as Magna Carta , brings together the most important norms of a State .
The constituent assembly, whose members are simply known as constituents, has the power and authority to dictate or change these rules that will govern the functioning of the political and social system of a territory. The constituents are elected by the people, so a constituent assembly is an organ of democracy.
Those who make up a constituent assembly are called constituents.
Its implementation in the French Revolution
It is often said that the first constituent assembly was the one that took place in France in 1789 , when the Revolution began. This National Constituent Assembly remained in history not only for establishing the French Constitution , but also for eliminating the feudal regime and for approving the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen .
However, we must not forget that this assembly was characterized by another important series of interesting data that marked a milestone in History:
* led to the creation of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which replaced the Concordat of 1516 and carried out the profound reorganization of the Church of France. The result of that was that the priests became public officials of an ecclesiastical type;
* The Assembly was made up of about 1,117 representatives of the three existing States: 604 from the Third Estate, 295 from the clergy and 278 from the nobility ;
* Many were the important figures of that time who took part in this "institution." Specifically, among those we could highlight Honoré Gabriel Riquetti (count of Mirabeau), Marquis de La Fayette, Maximilien Robespierre, Jean-Joseph Mounier and Jacques Antoine Marie de Cazalès;
* one of the most important days in the life of this National Constituent Assembly was the night of August 4, 1789. And during that evening feudalism was put to an end at the proposal, curiously, of two nobles: Louis-Marie de Noailles and Armand Desiré of Vignerot du Plessis;
* The Tuileries Picadero, Versailles and the Archbishop's Palace of Paris were the three enclaves that served as the setting for the development of the sessions of this entity so important in the History of France and the world;
* September 30, 1791 was the day the Assembly was finally dissolved.
Constituent assemblies of recent decades
Among the constituent assemblies that took place in recent decades are the National Constituent Assembly of Venezuela (held in 1999 ) and the National Constituent Assembly of Ecuador ( 2007 ).
It is possible to distinguish between two types of constituent assembly:
* not institutionalized : it is conceived spontaneously, without prior regulation . One of the clearest examples is found in the provinces of Upper Peru, which gave rise to the Bolivian Republic in 1825;
* institutionalized : the Constitution itself regulates and contemplates this type of assembly, which, in general, is an organization that was created with the purpose of carrying out reforms in its texts. It is pluralistic, elective, representative, temporary and democratic in nature. This type of constituent assembly is formed to make a particular amendment and is dissolved upon completion of its objective.