Le fonti del diritto e le diverse risposte ad una emergenza simmetrica: qualche lezione francese sul “rendimento” delle clausole di emergenza costituzionale

This article starts from the fact that the Italian Constitution does not provide for a clause governing states of emergency, although the constitutional and administrative rulings has defined over time the constitutional dimensions of the emergency in our system. The absence of a constitutional clause on the emergency has often been assumed as one of the reasons that caused - during the 2020 health emergency - a certain degree of confusion in the source system and an excessive centralization of powers in the hands of the government. That said, the article examines the reaction of the French legal system to the emergency induced by the Covid-19 epidemic with the aim to verify whether and to what extent the presence of explicit constitutional provisions on the emergency has affected the regulatory management of the emergency itself. The paper concludes that the presence of constitutional clauses does not always seem able to prevent the emergence of special emergency regimes, rising from the specificity of the particular emergency.