Chamber of Representatives (France)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Chamber of Representatives existed for fewer than two months, yet in that brief window it did something no legislature before it had dared: it forced Napoleon Bonaparte to step down as Emperor of the French. Created under the Charter of 1815, the chamber was the popularly elected lower body of a new French Parliament, 629 members strong, each meant to serve a five-year term. The upper house was the Chamber of Peers. What questions does that short lifespan raise? How did a brand-new parliament summon the nerve to confront Napoleon? What happened when the victorious allied powers arrived? And what became of the chamber once the old monarchy came knocking?

• 2. Demanding Napoleon's Fall

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  On the 22nd of June 1815, the Chamber of Representatives issued Napoleon a formal demand for his abdication as Emperor. That date places the confrontation squarely at the tail end of the Hundred Days, the period following Napoleon's return from exile and his catastrophic defeat at Waterloo. The chamber did not dissolve into confusion after delivering that demand. The very next day, on the 23rd of June 1815, the deputies named Napoleon II as Emperor, signaling that they were not abolishing the imperial line but rather replacing its figurehead. Jean Denis, comte Lanjuinais, served as president of the chamber throughout this turbulent period, presiding over decisions that reshaped French history in a matter of days.

• 3. The Commission de Gouvernement

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  Alongside the demand for abdication, the chamber moved to fill the governing vacuum. On the 22nd of June 1815, the same day as the abdication demand, the deputies elected three of the five members of a new body called the Commission de gouvernement. The three members the chamber chose were Carnot, the duc d'Otrante, and the comte Grenier. This five-member commission was intended to constitute a new government for France, a caretaker authority for the chaotic weeks that followed Waterloo. The choice of Carnot, a figure closely tied to the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, signals the political character of the chamber itself.

• 4. Occupation and Suppression

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  The allied powers of the Seventh Coalition occupied Paris, and the Chamber of Representatives capitulated on the 3rd of July 1815. What followed made clear that the victors had a specific outcome in mind: the restoration of Bourbon rule. The chamber's fate arrived on the 8th of July 1815, when armed force was used to prevent it from meeting, which effectively ended the body. The legislature that had issued an imperial abdication and named a new emperor was shut out of its own meeting place within six weeks of its creation. When the Bourbon monarchy returned, the Chamber of Deputies was restored as Parliament's lower house, and the reactionary Ultra-royalist delegation seated in October 1815 earned itself a distinctive nickname: the Chambre introuvable.

• 5. The 1873 Revival Attempt

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  Nearly six decades later, the name surfaced again. During the early years of the French Third Republic, France operated with a unicameral National Assembly that had been elected in 1871. That body also functioned as a Constituent Assembly, tasked with writing a new constitutional order. A draft constitution drawn up on the 20th of May 1873 proposed re-establishing a Chamber of Representatives as the lower house of Parliament, with a Senate serving above it. The proposal did not survive to become law. The final French Constitutional Laws of 1875, passed by the same Assembly, established the Chamber of Deputies in that lower-house role instead, leaving the 1815 body's name without a successor.