Definition
A term from French law meaning lack of assets or insolvency. In French legal practice, carence denotes the condition of a judgment debtor who has no attachable property against which execution can be enforced.
The term appears most concretely in the phrase procès-verbal de carence (also rendered procds-verbal de carence in older texts): a formal document prepared by a huissier — a French court officer responsible for executing judgments — recording that the officer attended at the debtor's location to levy on property pursuant to a judgment, but found nothing available to seize. The procès-verbal de carence is, in effect, the official written record of a failed execution. It functions as evidence of the debtor's insolvency or asset-lessness for subsequent legal proceedings.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not listed as a standard English word. In French, carence means deficiency, lack, or insufficiency — used in medical, nutritional, and general contexts (e.g., carence en vitamines, vitamin deficiency).
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. The term had no recognized English common meaning in the nineteenth century.
Editorial note: Carence is borrowed wholesale from French without anglicization. English-language legal sources use it only as a term of French law. Researchers encountering it outside a French-law context should treat it as a signal that the document or authority being cited is drawing on French or civil-law sources.
Common Confusion
The first edition of Black's Law Dictionary describes the procès-verbal de carence as a "verbal" document, which could mislead a reader into thinking the procedure was oral. The second edition corrects this to make clear it is a written document (procès-verbal in French always denotes a formal written record). Researchers working from the first edition entry should not infer an oral procedure.
Why It Matters in Research
Carence is a narrow, transplanted term that surfaces primarily in two contexts within the Law Mind corpus: (1) American and British treatises on French or civil commercial law, particularly nineteenth-century works on mercantile practice, and (2) comparative law discussions of execution procedure and insolvency.
The key navigational point is the source citation both Black's editions rely upon: Arg. Fr. Merc. Law (Argou's or a similar digest of French mercantile law). Researchers tracing the term should look to that source tradition rather than to common law authorities. The term will not appear in English common law case reporters or domestic statutes.
For researchers working in historical insolvency or judgment-enforcement materials, carence and its associated document offer a useful point of comparison with common law analogues such as the return of nulla bona — the sheriff's formal return stating that no goods were found to satisfy a writ of fieri facias. The functional parallel is close, though the procedural frameworks differ. Recognizing this equivalence helps when comparing French and Anglo-American execution practice in nineteenth-century commercial law scholarship.
The term's appearance in an American legal dictionary reflects the broader nineteenth-century project of cataloguing civil-law and foreign commercial-law vocabulary for American practitioners engaged in transatlantic trade and litigation. Its presence does not indicate that carence was ever adopted into American domestic law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's editions agree on the core meaning and the procès-verbal de carence usage, citing the same source. The second edition adds the explicit gloss "lack of assets; insolvency," which clarifies what the first edition left implicit. Neither edition provides additional doctrine beyond the single illustrative use. The historical record is thin by design: this is a reference entry pointing practitioners toward a foreign-law concept rather than an exposition of a developed body of doctrine.
No other major historical English-language legal dictionaries (Bouvier, Burrill, Tomlin) appear to have carried this term, which underscores its status as a civil-law borrowing rather than a naturalized legal term.
Jurisdictional Note
Carence is a term of French civil law and has no operative meaning in common law jurisdictions. In American or English legal research, it appears only in comparative or historical contexts. Researchers encountering it in a domestic pleading or contract should treat that usage as either an anomaly or a deliberate civil-law reference requiring explanation.