Definition
In French marine law, a vessel or ship. The term is drawn directly from French maritime practice and appears in legal contexts involving admiralty matters, shipping contracts, and naval regulations originating under the French legal system. It carries no technical distinction from "vessel" or "ship" in substance — its significance is terminological and jurisdictional, marking the source of the legal rule or instrument being interpreted.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In contemporary French, bâtiment means "building" or "structure" generally, and also retains the nautical sense of "vessel" or "ship" in maritime contexts.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not entered as an English word; recognized as a French term meaning vessel or ship, primarily in the maritime sense.
The critical gap for legal researchers: in modern general French usage, bâtiment most readily suggests a building or structure on land. A researcher encountering the word in historical French legal or admiralty materials must not carry that modern association into the text. In the marine law context from which this dictionary term derives, bâtiment refers exclusively to a floating vessel, not any structure ashore.
Why It Matters in Research
This term surfaces almost exclusively in historical admiralty and maritime law research, particularly in materials touching French marine law and the influence of the Ordonnance de la Marine of 1681 on civil law jurisdictions. Researchers working in Louisiana law, Quebec law, or tracing the French maritime tradition through American admiralty cases will encounter this term in its original French context.
The principal research trap is the modern semantic drift noted above: French legal instruments using bâtiment in a maritime context must be read in that register, not the contemporary "building" sense. A misreading could produce serious errors when interpreting the scope of a historical French maritime ordinance or a contract governed by French marine law.
Corpus connections to watch: any Law Mind materials touching the Ordonnance de la Marine, French colonial maritime practice, or the civil law roots of American admiralty doctrine may use this term without translation or gloss. It should be treated as a functional synonym for "vessel" in those materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries are in close agreement. Burrill's Law Dictionary is the most precise, citing specifically to the Ordonnance de la Marine, Book 1, Title 14, Article 2 — the foundational French maritime codification that organized the law of vessels, mariners, and shipping under Louis XIV. Black's Law Dictionary (both the base edition and the Second Edition supplement) confirms the definition as "vessel or ship," with the base edition's entry appearing to contain a printing artifact ("A mill, etc., so that the wheel of the mill may") that is clearly corrupt text — likely a typographical error or page-bleed from an adjacent entry — and should not be treated as part of the substantive definition. The Second Edition supplement's cleaner entry controls.
None of the historical sources draw any distinction between bâtiment and synonymous terms like navire (the more common French word for ship in modern usage), which is consistent with the Ordonnance de la Marine's broad use of bâtiment as the general term for any sea-going vessel.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is most legally operative in jurisdictions with French civil law heritage — principally Louisiana and, in the Canadian context, Quebec. Researchers in common law admiralty traditions may encounter it only in historical sources or comparative law materials. It has no independent significance in federal admiralty law as a term of art.