France: Le Pen, Ferrand and the 1962 Referendum Ruling

Opinion. Every figure below is sourced in the box at the end; the conclusions are the author's.

In France, Marine Le Pen said on Wednesday, October 14, 2026, that Richard Ferrand should leave the presidency of the Constitutional Council. On Thursday, her party went further and asked for the departure of the governor of the Banque de France too. Two unelected referees under fire, months before the 2027 presidential election.

The trigger was one sentence. Ferrand, speaking on a legal podcast, dismissed the heart of her program: changing the Constitution by referendum under Article 11, without going through Parliament. “Vouloir réformer la Constitution par l'article 11, ça n'existe pas. C'est l'article 89,” he said, according to LCP. In plain English: it does not exist, read the text.

The referee who talks before the match

Le Pen's answer was that Ferrand broke his duty of neutrality by ruling, in public, on a case that has not been brought before his court. She told him to listen to General de Gaulle, who used Article 11 in 1962 to have voters approve the election of the president by direct universal suffrage.

On the law, Ferrand has a point that many constitutional lawyers share: Article 89 is the procedure the Constitution writes down for revisions, with both chambers voting the same text first. On the politics, a sitting president of the Council telling a candidate what will not be allowed, before any text exists, is a strange way to stay above the fight.

The ruling nobody is quoting

Here is the fact both camps skip. On November 6, 1962, after the referendum de Gaulle won, the president of the Senate asked the Constitutional Council to review the new law. The Council refused. In decision 62-20 DC it declared itself without jurisdiction, because a law adopted by the people in a referendum is “the direct expression of national sovereignty.”

The Council's own case summary applies the same reasoning to the 1992 referendum that ratified the Maastricht treaty. So the court Ferrand now presides over has said, twice, that once the people have voted, it has no power to review the result. The fight is therefore not about what happens after a referendum. It is about whether one can be called at all.

The RN's own problem

Le Pen wants Ferrand gone. Her deputies are the reason he got the job. On February 19, 2025, his nomination survived with 39 votes for and 58 against, one short of the 59 needed to block it, according to the National Assembly. The RN abstained. The left and Les Républicains called it complicity. The RN called it the least bad choice.

Twenty months later, the least bad choice is the man standing between Marine Le Pen and her referendum. Political memory in Paris is short. Voters' memory is not.

Verdict

A Constitution belongs to the French people, not to nine appointed members in the Palais Royal, and not to the party that waved one of them through. Ferrand should have kept his reading of Article 11 for the day a real text reaches his desk. Le Pen should explain why her group handed him the chair.

The Council said in 1962 that the people's vote is final. The real question for 2027 is who gets to decide whether the people vote at all.