[ad. L. tribūnāt-us, f. tribūnus TRIBUNE sb.1: see -ATE1. Cf. F. tribunat.]
1. The office of tribune; tribuneship; government by tribunes.
1546. Langley, Pol. Verg. De Invent., II. iii. 38 b. During that office [dictatorship] all other magistrates were abrogated except the Tribunate or Prouostship of the commons.
1603. Holland, Plutarch’s Mor., 877. The Tribunate was an empeachment, inhibition, and restraint of a magistracie, rather than a magistracie it selfe.
1746. Melmoth, trans. Pliny’s Lett., VII. xxii. (1748), II. 410. I so strongly pressed you to confer the Tribunate upon my friend.
1869. Seeley, Lect. & Ess., ii. 35. The great Roman Revolution which began with the tribunate of Gracchus and ended with the battle of Actium.
2. French Hist. A representative body of legislators established under the constitution of the year 8 of the Revolutionary calendar (1800–1).
[1804. Ann. Rev., II. 85/2. Our author was present at a sitting of the tribunat, in the Palais Royal.]
1827. Scott, Napoleon, xv. A Tribunate of one hundred deputies.
1861. M. Arnold, Pop. Educ. France, 136. Both in the Tribunate and in the Legislative Body, his measure encountered strenuous resistance.
1905. Edin. Rev., July, 90. Benjamin Constant and nineteen others were turned out of the Tribunate.
attrib. 1802. in Spirit Pub. Jrnls., VI. 394. [Bonaparte] planted the hedges with legislative and tribunate shrubs, and apparently gave them a good root in the earth.
