Direct presidential election became possible only after imperial subjects lost citizenship.

Evidence

In the fall of 1962, a referendum, widely seen as violating the Constitution, authorized the direct election of the President of the Republic. Former Prime Minister Michel Debré, explaining why he had not included this proposal in the 1958 text, which he had largely authored, closed the circle that Edouard Hérriot had opened in 1946: in 1958 ‘the body of electors was the body of electors of the French Union, with all the African peoples and the Muslims of Algeria’. Under those conditions, he continued, ‘election by universal suffrage was impossible’. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 302

Categorization

• SEED: A striking institutional case of how a polity’s membership boundary quietly determines its democratic architecture — could feed an essay on who counts as ‘the people’ when constitutions define voters.