What does it take to make a deliberative and sovereign assembly live? A roof, walls, a palace, a hall, works of art. Linen, men of sorrow, clerks, Swiss guards. But what else? A sanctuary, a military force, prerogatives, an internal police force, regulations, a dedicated staff, ritual and codified procedures. And above all, the desire and the possibility to last. Far from the disembodied visions of political philosophy, this book offers an unprecedented historical and anthropological journey into the foundations of the National Assembly. A close reading of the archive, this dive into the daily life of the Palais-Bourbon looks at how legislative assemblies have organized themselves to exist from the French Revolution to the present day. How to produce an autonomous and sovereign body that is not the State? How to make it capable of surviving the vagaries of the street and the executive? How to make live this new place, this counter-location, this heterotopia? The linen, metaphor and reality, is the means to question the tessitura of the contemporary western democratic institutions reputed to be neutral and universal. The investigation gives an account of the material and social manufacture of an institution whose aristocratic and domestic features continue in the republican framework. It then questions the masculine culture that reigns permanently in the Assembly and the gender relations that prevail there. What to think, finally, of the political anatomy of republican parliamentarism?