Definition
In French law, the act of abandoning a child who is unable to care for itself, leaving the child in a public or private place. The term describes the deliberate desertion of a helpless infant or young child by a parent or caretaker. Where the exposure resulted in the child's death — for example, by starvation or being killed by animals — the person responsible could be charged with and convicted of murder under French criminal law.
The term is drawn directly from French and appears in English legal sources primarily as a borrowed term of art when discussing civil law or comparative criminal law. It has no direct English-law equivalent as a single term, though the underlying conduct maps closely to concepts of child abandonment and, in lethal cases, criminal homicide.
Common Confusion
Exposition de part should not be confused with the broader concept of child abandonment as understood in modern Anglo-American law. Modern abandonment statutes address a wide spectrum of conduct, from failure to provide support to physical desertion, and do not require that the child be left in a specific location or in circumstances of immediate physical danger. Exposition de part is a narrower, more precisely defined act — physical exposure of a helpless child to the elements or to harm — and carries the specific criminal consequence that death resulting from the exposure constitutes murder, not merely a lesser offense of neglect or endangerment.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in English-language legal sources as a comparative or historical reference, not as an operative term in common law jurisdictions. Researchers will encounter it primarily in:
1. Nineteenth-century treatises and digests discussing French or civil law criminal doctrines, particularly those comparing homicide law across legal systems. Bouvier's citation to Roscoe's Criminal Evidence confirms this comparative function.
2. Historical discussions of infanticide and child homicide law, where Anglo-American writers imported French terminology to describe conduct that English law addressed under different doctrinal headings (murder by omission, manslaughter, or separate infanticide statutes).
3. Sources predating the codification of child protection law in most American states. The mid-to-late nineteenth century saw the enactment of foundational child welfare statutes; before that period, courts and treatise writers reached for civil law vocabulary to describe situations that common law doctrine handled imperfectly.
The key research trap: do not expect to find this term in case law or statutes of common law jurisdictions. Its presence in a source almost always signals a comparative or doctrinal aside, not a statement of operative local law. A researcher encountering the term in a brief or opinion should treat it as a signal that the author is drawing on French or Louisiana civil law sources, or engaging in cross-system comparison.
Louisiana is the one American jurisdiction where the term might carry more than comparative weight, given the state's civilian heritage, though even there modern child welfare and criminal codes have superseded any direct application of the French doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (both editions) and Bouvier agree precisely on the core definition: abandonment of a helpless child in a public or private place. This uniformity is unsurprising — the term is borrowed wholesale from French law and the English-language dictionaries are reporting a foreign doctrine rather than describing a contested domestic concept.
Bouvier adds the most substantively useful gloss: the criminal consequence. His entry states that if the exposed child is killed as a result — devoured by animals is his example — the person who exposed the child is guilty of murder. Bouvier cites Roscoe's Criminal Evidence at page 591 for this proposition, which grounds the entry in English-language criminal law scholarship of the period. This is the detail most relevant to any researcher using the term in a criminal law or homicide context.
Black's entries, by contrast, offer only the definitional core without the criminal consequence, making Bouvier the superior starting point for any research touching on the homicidal dimension of the doctrine.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the procedural or evidentiary dimensions of proving exposition de part, the age or capacity threshold for the child, or how French law distinguished the offense from related crimes. For those questions, researchers must go beyond the English-language legal dictionaries to French criminal law sources directly.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is a doctrine of French law. In American jurisdictions, the closest operative equivalents are found in state criminal codes (child endangerment, criminal abandonment) and in the common law of homicide by omission where a duty of care exists. Louisiana's civil law heritage makes it the most likely American jurisdiction to have directly received French doctrine, but contemporary Louisiana criminal law addresses these facts through statutory rather than French common law channels.