Abstract
The German and the French constitutions provide different lessons when it comes to the importance of institutional design in preventing the slide of a constitutional democracy toward authoritarianism or even totalitarianism. Whereas the German Basic Law adopted after World War II contains an abundance of constitutional safeguards designed to protect Germany against the recurrence of totalitarian rule in response to the experience of the demise of the Weimar Republic in the interwar period, such safeguards are almost completely absent in the French tradition of republican constitutionalism, which since the establishment of the Third Republic has often been threatened by, but never succumbed to, the enemies of republicanism. The success and stability of German postwar constitutional democracy, on the other hand, are due to a large variety of factors, of which the existence of institutional safeguards against authoritarianism in the Basic Law is only one factor, and quite plausibly not the most important one.