The role played by a developing transnational legal academy in the formation of Europe's constitutional practice of law has generally been overlooked, despite the traditional influence of expert opinion on the continental judiciary.Footnote ¹ Two social scientists, Karen Alter and Antoine Vauchez, have recently analysed the impact of the European Law Associations (ELA), including the umbrella organisation, the Fédération internationale pour le droit européen (FIDE).Footnote ² Their conclusions are striking. According to Vauchez, FIDE became a centralised transnational network, providing academic and professional entrepreneurs with a brokering role at the European level and the chance to co-ordinate efforts with the Commission and European Parliament to empower the European Court of Justice (ECJ).Footnote ³ Likewise, Alter found that the ELA ‘critically defined what European legal integration became’,Footnote ⁴ enabling crucial test cases to come to the ECJ, organising conferences and seminars to spread ECJ doctrine and building support among national justices in favour of the constitutional practice. They did so – the argument goes – mainly due to the significant social and political capital of its members, who, by serving in multiple government, academic and legal roles, were able effectively to promote the new European legal order.Footnote ⁵ Both authors mainly focus on the impact of FIDE and the ELA at European level, however.

This article will seriously question these conclusions. The history of the French Association des juristes européens (AJE) from 1951 to 1970, as revealed in new archival documentation drawn from both the association itself and from recently opened private archives, leads to a deeper and significantly more contextualised understanding of the first and most important ELA, which crucially includes the impact at both the European and national level.Footnote ⁶ It will demonstrate that despite the AJE having a significant number of high-profile politicians, judges and academics among its members, the impact of the association on the French reception of European law before 1970 was minimal. In the 1950s the AJE was a small and insignificant association. When it finally expanded its membership and increased its activities after 1958, the new Gaullist Fifth Republic made it almost impossible to promote the general acceptance of European law in the French state and judiciary. This delayed French acceptance of the constitutional practice until the 1970s. Significantly, the AJE's membership contained many high-profile members of the Fourth Republic, which made it even more difficult to influence the new Gaullist elite after 1958. At the European level, the AJE fared somewhat better driving the foundation of FIDE, which proved useful to the general mobilisation of the European institutions in support of the ECJ after 1963. It will be argued that FIDE, besides facilitating the production of a number of crucial test cases to the ECJ, mainly provided academic legitimation for the court. The article deals first with the origins of the AJE in the 1950s, then the foundation and development of FIDE from 1961 onwards, and it concludes with an analysis of the role and impact of the AJE in France during the 1960s.

The foundation and consolidation of the Association des juristes européens, 1952–1961

During the winter of 1952–53, excitement prevailed within the European Movement: the institutions of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) had only recently been launched and for jurist and professor of political economy André Philip,Footnote ⁷ the most important matter now was to fortify the European construction on the basis of European law.Footnote ⁸ First, it was necessary to bring together a body of European-minded jurists to work on the project. Philip based his hopes on a pre-existing circle of Parisian jurists founded in early 1951 by three lawyers of the Paris Cour d'Appel: his childhood friend Maurice Rolland, Gérard Rosenthal and Michel Libersa.Footnote ⁹ This narrow circle, with neither foundational statutes nor any kind of financial base, bore the name of Association des juristes européens.Footnote ¹⁰ During a founding meeting at the Palais de Justice in Paris at the end of 1952, the four met with two colleagues from the European Movement, René CourtinFootnote ¹¹ and Germaine Peyroles,Footnote ¹² to define the purpose of the AJE.Footnote ¹³ Other colleagues of the European Movement would lend ‘crucial support’ to the AJE throughout the 1950s.Footnote ¹⁴ These others included René Mayer,Footnote ¹⁵ Paul-Henri Spaak,Footnote ¹⁶ Fernand DehousseFootnote ¹⁷ and Arthur Calteux.Footnote ¹⁸

This new association aimed

This broad remit was undoubtedly due to the fact that even in a domain as new as European integration the leaders of AJE wanted the grouping to appear just like a traditional apolitical legal association, able to host specialised jurists eager to invest time and resources in European law. The official birth of the association was on 22 June 1954, when the group – lawyers through and through – completed all the formal acts of compliance and made a deposition of the statutes to the police headquarters in Paris.Footnote ²⁰ An announcement followed in the Journal Officiel of 13 July 1954.Footnote ²¹

The AJE enjoyed only a very modest start. Rolland and Adolphe Touffait, his colleague from AJE and the Paris Cour d'Appel, remembered a rather small audience at the founding meeting back in the winter of 1952. While there was a second more successful meeting in 1954,Footnote ²² the subsequent demise of the European Defence Community in the Assemblée Nationale did not help the fortunes of the young association. It was only after 1958 that the AJE acquired a certain momentum both in terms of membership and in organisation, largely due to the addition of large groups of members from two associations of comparative law, the Association pour les Echanges entre Juristes Français et Allemands (AJFA)Footnote ²³ and Libre Justice.Footnote ²⁴ The successful strengthening of the AJE was symbolised in late May 1958 by a large public conference on European rural law at the Salle des Agriculteurs, rue d'Athène in Paris, where talks by Philip, Georges Vedel, dean of the Paris Faculté de Droit and Robert Marjolin, vice-president of the EEC Commission, were heard by a full house.Footnote ²⁵

A prosopography of the members of the AJE demonstrates that the large majority had already met through pre-existing networks such as the comparative law society, Société de Législation Comparée (SLC),Footnote ²⁶ and/or the ranks of the Resistance.Footnote ²⁷ The shared experience of resisting the ‘Hitlerisation of justice’ was a cornerstone of the group's ideals and identity, and making the law ‘the cement of the European construction’ was of central importance to them all.Footnote ²⁸ Alter describes how ‘the French association was more distant from academics because [the latter] were more involved in the teaching [than] in the development of law’.Footnote ²⁹ Indeed, the legal academy was outnumbered by professional AJE members during the 1950s. For this reason, the AJE was not well represented at the major academic conference organised in Stresa in early June 1957 to examine the legal character of the ECSC and whether it should be considered an international or ‘supranational’ organisation. In time, several of the French comparative law professors represented at StresaFootnote ³⁰ would become involved in the AJE, highlighting the general increase in academic involvement after 1963 and the continual importance of the discipline of comparative law in the association.

With this broadening membership around 1958, the AJE had to become much better organised. An Honorary Committee (HC) was formed from prominent legal and political personalities to promote the association.Footnote ³¹ It was up to a Steering Committee (SC)Footnote ³² to ensure the orderly functioning of the AJE by appointing a president and other officials. These appointments formed the Bureau which would run the AJE in co-operation with the SC and was responsible only to the General Assembly.Footnote ³³ This Assembly met at least once a year at the Comparative Law Centre (Centre de Droit Comparé) in order to vote on the following year's budget and to provide for the eventual replacement of SC members. The General Assembly was always led by a member of the HC and the chairman of the AJE, who was Rolland from 1951 to 1967. In addition to this organisation, the AJE also began publishing in 1958 a bulletin of the various activities of AJE, with Rosenthal as editor.

To conclude, the AJE was clearly born out of the European commitment of Philip, Rolland and a small circle of lawyers gravitating around the Paris Cour d'Appel. At the same time the association was founded not only as an ideological attempt to help the building of Europe by the means of law, but also very much as a traditional legal and academic association. Its beginnings were very difficult and the AJE was, despite its grand European ambitions, only a minor player in the legal landscape of 1950s Europe. This changed with the foundation of the European Communities (EC) in 1958, which prompted a dramatic increase in membership and the finalising of the organisational structure of the association. In terms of membership it was overwhelmingly constituted by practitioners, lawyers and judges, the large majority of whom had participated in the French Resistance during the war. Comparative law was the discipline and perspective of choice of the overwhelming majority of its members. This detailed investigation into a network of lawyers such as the AJE nuances Vauchez's statement that comparative law as a model for European legal integration failed in the early 1960s, when the projected programme of harmonisation of national law never got off the ground. The reality was that the AJE was very much born out of comparative law and that this clearly constituted a much broader legal approach to the construction of European law than merely harmonisation of national law.Footnote ³⁴ It remained the lens through which the AJE approached European law for much of this period.

Foundation and development of FIDE from 1961 onwards

In a tribute to Rolland delivered in 1978, Touffait, then judge at the ECJ (1976–1982) claimed that it was Rolland who had the idea of consolidating the national ELA of the Six into a single federation. Indeed, Article 2 of the AJE statutes stated that it ‘will be transformed into the French section of a European legal association as soon as the relations established between the French and foreign groups having the same aim allow’.Footnote ³⁵ Perceived very early on as part of a larger structure, the AJE apparently served as springboard to ‘find counterparts in the other five member states in order to create a common Federation’.Footnote ³⁶ By 1958 Rolland's efforts seemed successful in Italy (Associazione italiana dei giuristi europei), Belgium (Association belge pour le droit européen) and Luxembourg (Association luxembourgeoise des juristes européens) where associations similar to the AJE were established.Footnote ³⁷

The next step was to create a European umbrella organisation. Two meetings were held in Paris and Luxembourg during 1959, aiming to bring together jurists from across the member states. Those attending included the first two presidents of the Belgian association, Charles van Reepinghen (advocate at the Brussels Cour d'Appel) and Louis Hendrickx (Conseiller at the Brussels Cour d'Appel), Enzio Cortese Riva Palazzi (advocate general of the Milan Corte Suprema and general secretary of the Centro Italiano di studi giuridici, which had organised the Stresa conference) and the secretary of the Italian association, Mattia Persiani (advocate at the Rome Corte d'Appello). Unfortunately, there is no evidence to explain why there were no German representatives at the first meeting and no Dutch at either of the first two meetings.Footnote ³⁸ But the problem was how to establish an ELA in the two remaining member states. Due to these difficulties, the European Commission was asked to assist in creating the last two associations. The various national associations had different degrees of contacts with the CommissionFootnote ³⁹ and certainly the Commission was well informed about the attempts to establish a European federation in 1959.Footnote ⁴⁰ After a brief turf war with Directorate General IV (DG IV),Footnote ⁴¹ the legal service of the Commission would eventually win the right to develop the links with the new ELA.Footnote ⁴² However, both Michel Gaudet, the head of the legal service, and Pieter Verloren van Themaat, director of DG IV, would be instrumental in organising national associations in the Netherlands and Germany. Verloren van Themaat was present at the first founding meeting of the Nederlandse Vereniging voor Europees Recht (NVER) in December 1960.Footnote ⁴³ Gaudet facilitated the founding of the Gesellschaft für Europarecht in Germany.Footnote ⁴⁴

By 1961, the six associations were ready to establish FIDE as the common umbrella organisation. This happened at a conference on European law in Brussels on 12–14 October 1961.Footnote ⁴⁵ Rolland was appointed as president, the German jurist Bodo Börner as vice-president, and AJE member Louis-Edmond Pettiti as secretary-general. Hendrickx, Samkalden, Calteux and Carlo Bozzi, president of the Italian Consiglio di Stato constituted the general leadership in the Bureau.Footnote ⁴⁶ The national associations were paying members of the federation and so FIDE did not have individual members as such.Footnote ⁴⁷ The objectives of the federation were in principle academic, allowing national jurists interested in European law to study common solutions to legal problems posed by the emerging structures of European integration.Footnote ⁴⁸ In order to do so, FIDE would review important legal questions at major bi-annual international conferences, most often agreed upon with the Legal Service. While permanent institutional structures were planned, they were never established, and instead a rotating presidency based on the host of the next FIDE conference was introduced. As a result, FIDE remained highly decentralised, only very loosely co-ordinating the activities of the national associations.Footnote ⁴⁹ Financial support from the Commission was mired in internal budgetary fights and FIDE only received a subvention from the European executive on a regular basis from 1964 onwards.Footnote ⁵⁰

FIDE had three important effects on the evolution of European law. First, the large-scale FIDE conferences did provide a forum for important actors from the national associations, ministries and European institutions to network and learn about new developments in European law. In this way, FIDE also provided a platform for informing the European institutions about how European laws were conceived and received by the emerging academic and professional field of European law. This was crucial to both the Legal Service, which used FIDE as a sounding board for policy formation in the field, and to members of the ECJ, who could test ideas for future case law in an informal way. Second, these same conferences and the ensuing publication of their proceedings constituted landmarks in the study of European law and in particular of the case law of the ECJ. FIDE would vote on resolutions endorsing the most recent doctrinal development of European law. The conference in The Hague in 1963 consequently supported the doctrine of direct effect, and the Paris conference in 1965 endorsed the doctrine of primacy.Footnote ⁵¹ Together with the scholarly writings of members of the FIDE leadership and of important members of the national associations, this new academic field of European law would play an important role in legitimising the constitutional practice established by the ECJ. It would, despite massive opposition to European law in key member states, create a certain feeling of momentum. Third, FIDE, and indeed the national ELA, also facilitated the emergence of test cases from national courts. Thus leading advocates in the associations would pioneer the use of preliminary reference under Article 177 in order to test the nature of European law. Most importantly, the Dutch association established in November 1961 a working group on the self-executing nature of European law, which was a key question in Dutch law after two constitutional reforms in the 1950s.Footnote ⁵² It would be a lawyer in this working group, L. F. D. Ter van Kuile, who together with the former president of the Amsterdam bar, Hans Stibbe, would bring the Van Gend en Loos case before the Dutch Tariffcommissie and ask it to consider whether Article 12 of the EEC treaty on tariff standstill had direct effect.Footnote ⁵³ This was perhaps FIDE's most important contribution directly impacting the development of ECJ case law and in this case facilitating the launching of the constitutional practice by the ECJ.

Despite these successes, there is little evidence to support the far-reaching claim that FIDE functioned as the core network that played the brokering role, aligning the various campaigns of the European institutions and legal academic communities in legitimising the constitutional practice from 1963 to 1965.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Bureau of FIDE did not provide day-to-day leadership. Rather, Gaudet and the Legal Service provided the core leadership behind this campaign.Footnote ⁵⁵ They operated in a much smaller network that predated the formation of FIDE, including both the leadership of FIDE and figures that either never became members of the ELA, such as Dehousse, or entered them later in the 1960s, such as Lecourt and Lagrange. While FIDE as a network and the national ELA also facilitated the individual activism of a number of advocates and judges creating test cases to the ECJ of doctrinal importance, FIDE as an organisation did not constitute the key network nor did it ‘critically define what European legal integration became’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Its functions were always somewhat more modest.

Analysis of the role and impact of the AJE in France in the 1960s

During the 1960s the AJE's activities increased substantially. However, the impact of the association on how the new Fifth Republic and its courts would receive European law was nevertheless very small, reflecting the extent to which Gaullist France remained sceptical about European integration. This political context is central in understanding the limited impact of the AJE in France in this period.

The AJE mobilised on several fronts during the 1960s. Establishing centres outside of Paris had long been a priority and this process seemed to be well on track in the early 1960s as several conferences open to European lawyers were organised each year in the provinces. All of these conferences had a common denominator: the comparative study of national legislation, as it was ‘up to the jurists to prepare not only for the harmonisation of legislations but also for their merging’.Footnote ⁵⁷ This is of course not surprising considering the special relationship that had prevailed up until this point between the AJE and the SLC. Meetings on the harmonisation of the national laws within the Communities were held several times in Nice (2–4 June 1960; 13–15 May 1964; 11–13 June 1965), in Nancy (25–27 May 1962), in Lille (24–26 May 1963) and in Deauville (13–15 April 1967).Footnote ⁵⁸ The sections also enjoyed a broad autonomy and conferences could therefore be held on a purely local initiative. Such was the case in Lyon (14–15 May 1962),Footnote ⁵⁹ in Montpellier (9–11 October 1964),Footnote ⁶⁰ and in Rouen (10–12 November 1967).Footnote ⁶¹ The Lille and Montpellier sections were especially dynamic and summaries of their conferences were released on a regular basis in the AJE journal.Footnote ⁶² These conferences would typically have a tripartite structure, covering French, foreign and then comparative reports. Officials from the European institutions, associations or groups directly concerned by the theme were regularly invited. By pursuing such specific agendas, these conferences undoubtedly played a role in legitimising the gradual dissemination of European law in France.

The AJE's personnel and structural consolidation continued apace in the 1960s. As noted, academics became increasingly active in the AJE during the 1960s. As a consequence of the Van Gend en Loos decision, their numbers doubled during 1963. Vedel, dean of the Paris Faculté de Droit, inaugurated the Centre Universitaire d'Etudes des Communautés Européennes in the same year. The success was immediate and he entrusted its direction to three members of the AJE, Maurice Byé, Berthold Goldman, and Teitgen. The inauguration ceremony of the first class of European jurists took place on 22 February 1965 and was co-organised by Lagrange and Gaudet.Footnote ⁶³ The latter was invaluable as a professional and academic adviser, making corrections to important articles on Community law by prolific AJE columnists such as the specialist in comparative law Fernand-Charles Jeantet.Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1967, Rolland passed the AJE leadership baton on to Roger Houin, who was then professor at the Paris Faculté de Droit and chairman of the comparative law association, L'Association Henri Capitant.Footnote ⁶⁵ Houin was well placed to lead the AJE. He was a special adviser to the Commission in trade improvement through the co-ordination of company law, which was a major theme for the AJE and the Paris Cour d'Appel during the 1960s.Footnote ⁶⁶ He also co-founded the first specialised French journal on European law, Revue trimestrielle de droit européen.Footnote ⁶⁷ Houin and co-founder Colliard ensured the membership on the editorial board of the journal not only of Gaudet, but also of ten AJE colleagues, some of whom were leading figures in the Community institutions.Footnote ⁶⁸ Despite these achievements, it was clear that, with the new Gaullist elite in place in the Fifth Republic, the AJE's influence was always going to be limited. Too many of its leaders were linked to the previous regime. While they could still rely partly on important personal contacts when necessary, the Fifth Republic proved to be stony ground for their European ideas.

One such example of a useful personal connection helped secure state funding for the AJE. Minister of justice under the first government of Michel Debré, Bernard Chenot, had been friendly to AJE and initiated regular financing for its activities. The subvention he gave was, however, limited, allowing for very little logistic support.Footnote ⁶⁹ This forced Rolland to seek greater financial support for the funding of his ‘Legal Centre for European Law Documentation’ from the new minister of justice, Jean Foyer, in 1964.Footnote ⁷⁰ As a jurist respectful of the rule of law, Foyer had much to do with the Paris Cour d'Appel ruling of 26 January 1963 stating that European law was binding on national courts with the same force as domestic law.Footnote ⁷¹ Nevertheless he was a steadfast Gaullist and was cautious of the ECJ and later refused to be appointed as judge at the court.Footnote ⁷² It would take personal connections to convince him to improve the level of financial support. First, thanks to Gaudet, Rolland obtained a letter of support from Prime Minister Georges Pompidou.Footnote ⁷³ Second, Rolland was an old acquaintance of Foyer from the Resistance and the Paris Cour d'Appel in the early 1950s. By doing a favour for an old friend, Foyer was, in return, regularly informed not only of developments within the AJE, but also within FIDE too.Footnote ⁷⁴ This type of connection could prove very useful not only for the ministry of justice, but also for the Gaullist power apparatus.Footnote ⁷⁵ So while the Gaullist state was by and large uninterested in supporting the AJE and its aims, the AJE managed to secure relatively good relations with a funding ministry, as well as maintaining contacts with the few sympathetic Gaullists in the government.

Persuading the most important French courts to adopt European law proved more difficult. The fundamental changes that the French legal system underwent in the creation of the Fifth Republic clearly accentuated its traditional subordination to political power. De Gaulle had more or less tailored the 1958 constitution to his own ideas of national sovereignty.Footnote ⁷⁶ Article 26 in the 1946 constitution, which had granted supremacy to international law over national law, was modified into Article 55, which conditioned the supremacy of international law on the mutual contractual fulfilment by the other signatories of a treaty.Footnote ⁷⁷ It should be mentioned that the actual practice by French courts since the so-called ‘Matter’ doctrine of 1931 had been to enact subsequent national law when it was not possible to sidestep a conflict with international law. De Gaulle sought to limit any modifying influence on his power from internal or external forces.Footnote ⁷⁸ Having challenged the government on issues mainly related to Algeria, the French judicial system faced serious attacks on its independence and authority in the 1960s. At this point, French law was divided into two main categories: the judicial branch dealing with both criminal law and private law (for example, corporate law and law of contracts) and the public branch dealing with administrative law and constitutional law. The structure of both branches was divided between lower courts (inferior courts and intermediate appellate courts which heard cases on appeal from inferior courts) and the supreme courts which were the Cour de Cassation (private law), the Conseil d'Etat (administrative law). Moreover, the supreme courts did not have any power of judicial review in constitutional matters since this was the prerogative of the newly established Conseil Constitutionnel.Footnote ⁷⁹ Inferior courts’ independence was reduced while the influence of appellate courts and Parisian jurisdictions was increased, making lower court challenges to traditional high court positions much less likely. The political pressure was such that de Gaulle tried to abolish the Conseil Constitutionnel and the Conseil d'Etat (CE) several times.Footnote ⁸⁰

As a result, the kowtowed CE would adopt a highly sceptical stance towards European law and claim that it could easily interpret the meaning of European law itself (acte clair doctrine), thereby bypassing the preliminary reference system set up in Article 177 of the Treaties of Rome.Footnote ⁸¹ In spite of the fact that the Cour de Cassation was more sympathetic towards international and European law than the CE, it found it difficult to exert much influence on the point. The usual practice of lower civil courts would – if questions of European law were part of a case – follow the Matter doctrine and enact subsequent national law even if it was in breach of European law. If there were any doubts of interpretation, judges would refer them not to the ECJ by the means of Article 177, but instead to the justice ministry.Footnote ⁸²

The most pro-European French court of some stature was obviously the Paris Cour d'Appel, the original home of the AJE. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the AJE enjoyed a special relationship with this court, as the majority of the members of the AJE, including future ECJ judges Lecourt (1962–76) and Touffait (1976–82), came from it.Footnote ⁸³ However, restricted by jurisdiction to European questions concerning only customs, labour and social legislation, the doctrinal impact of its case law was limited.Footnote ⁸⁴ Having served as councillor at the Cour de Cassation in 1961, Touffait was aware of these difficulties. As a result he used his leadership of the Paris Cour d'Appel to try to address the issue in a case in June 1962 concerning a decision from the Paris Tribunal de Commerce which overtly infringed EEC Regulation 17, stating that agreements liable to affect trade between member states had to be notified to the Commission.Footnote ⁸⁵ In a ruling on 26 January 1963, the Cour d'Appel controversially went against the Matter doctrine and reinterpreted the monist Article 55 to reverse this decision, stating that European law was binding on national courts with the same force as domestic law.Footnote ⁸⁶

In an AJE meeting held at the Centre de Droit Comparé on 23 February 1963, the attorney general at the Cour de Cassation and AJE member Maurice Aydalot lauded the ‘good European kinship spirit’ of the Paris Cour d'Appel for having shown the way to other national courts.Footnote ⁸⁷ Having been the first under the Fifth Republic to question the traditional doctrine of French monismFootnote ⁸⁸ and at the same time contribute to the doctrinal understanding of the new Article 55, the Paris Cour d'Appel was the only significant French court which actively promoted the case law of the ECJ in France. But as it had enforced the treaty by the means of the French constitution instead of the special character of European law, the ECJ never considered the court as ‘a key player in the process of doctrinal change’ in the 1960s.Footnote ⁸⁹ Nevertheless, the ruling opened a window of opportunity for lower courts such as the Colmar Cour d'Appel, which became the first French jurisdiction to make use of the preliminary ruling mechanism in 1965.Footnote ⁹⁰ After the Conseil Constitutionnel's decision to abstain from examining the conformity of international treaties with national laws in 1975, it also served as a template for the Cour de Cassation to abandon the Matter doctrine and ultimately to comply with the ECJ supremacy doctrine the same year – a paradigm shift in which Touffait and Aydalot also played crucial roles.Footnote ⁹¹

It would, however, take several years for the CE to do the same. The ties linking the AJE, the CE and the ECJ were very complex. Indeed the CE had played a key role in the formation of the ECJ during the Treaty of Paris negotiations. Its then President René Mayer intervened strongly in favour of a more narrowly construed administrative court.Footnote ⁹² At the same time, key European officials, such as Lagrange and Gaudet, came from the ranks of the CE, a pattern that continues to the present day.Footnote ⁹³ The CE is a double-headed institution comprising four administrative departments on the one sideFootnote ⁹⁴ and the administrative claims department on the other side. The latter can be joined either directly after graduating from the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA) or by completing the ‘external tour’ which is less politically oriented and arguably provides a somewhat broader outlook.Footnote ⁹⁵ In the 1960s, most of the AJE members originating from the CE came from the ‘external tour’ with the exception of ENA graduate Nicole Questiaux, who would prove faithful to the traditional legal ‘tools’ of the CE (among others the acte clair doctrine) when dealing with cases related to Community law.Footnote ⁹⁶

There were several attempts to reconcile the ECJ and the CE. This was, for instance, the purpose of the AJE General Assembly conference entitled ‘Article 177 of the Treaty of Rome and the CE jurisprudence’ held on 20 March 1965. Gaudet hoped this was going to represent the starting point for a wider and more active participation of CE members in the AJE.Footnote ⁹⁷ It was a wasted effort. The vice-president of the CE's administrative claims department, Raymond Odent, faced a coalition of law professors,Footnote ⁹⁸ members or former members of the European institutionsFootnote ⁹⁹ and magistrates.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In his speech, Odent recapitulated the nature of the doctrine of the acte clair, triggering a cascade of counter arguments.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In the next three years, Commissaire du gouvernement Questiaux would twice reiterate her refusal to ask the ECJ in case of doubt regarding an interpretation of European law.Footnote ¹⁰² In early 1968, the CE followed her recommendation, arguing that the Conseil Constitutionnel alone was able to enforce European legal supremacy by verifying the constitutionality of laws.Footnote ¹⁰³ Questiaux invited her peers to give primacy to national law subsequent to a Community regulation, thereby bypassing Article 55 of the Constitution. A short time later, this decision formed the object of private discussions between Gaudet and Parodi, during which they agreed on its erroneous reasoning.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The CE continued to make all efforts to treat the ECJ as an external court with limited competences for the next two decades.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Given the difficult national context in which the AJE evolved in the 1960s, the association still managed to develop extensive activities. While it also showed some ability in securing important connections with members of the magistracy, the CE and some important figures of the Gaullist government, the AJE's influence however remained within certain limits and its impact throughout the 1960s in France does not seem therefore to have been as great as Alter believes.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ First, the special relationship between the AJE and the Paris Cour d'Appel would offer only a minor breakthrough for lower civil courts, allowing them to use Article 177, which they only did to a limited extent. Second, while the establishment of the constitutional practice doctrines led to the rallying of parts of the academic contingent in the AJE, the difficulties caused by this revolutionary jurisprudence for the relationship between the CE and the ECJ proved much more long lasting. This was despite the benefit of AJE members’ influence at the ECJ (Lagrange, Lecourt and Advocate General Joseph Gand) and the CE (Cassin and Parodi, successive vice-presidents). Indeed, the ambiguous relations between the AJE and the ministry of justice show how difficult it was for the association to win any favour in a predominately Gaullist French administration.