Definition
A French-origin legal term meaning "man" or "a man," used in civil law jurisdictions and legal instruments influenced by French or Spanish civil law traditions. In Louisiana civil law specifically, the term carried a statutory definition broader than its literal meaning: the Civil Code of Louisiana expressly defined *homme* to include a woman, making it a gender-neutral term of legal construction within that system despite its masculine form in French.
The term appears most often in older Louisiana legal documents, French civil law materials, and historical instruments drawing from the Napoleonic tradition. It is not a term of art in common law jurisdictions.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Primarily recognized in English as a surname.
Historical common usage: *Homme* is a standard French word meaning "man" or "human being," used in everyday French speech without legal connotation.
Editorial note: The gap between ordinary French usage and the Louisiana civil law definition is significant. A researcher encountering *homme* in a French text would reasonably read it as masculine and singular. In Louisiana legal instruments governed by Article 3522 of the Civil Code, that assumption is incorrect — the term was a legal term of construction inclusive of women. This is a classic false-friend problem for researchers moving between French-language sources and Louisiana legal records.
Common Confusion
*Homme* (French civil law) and *homo* (Latin, Roman and common law) share the same root concept — "man" or "human being" — and appear in overlapping historical sources. Burrill's cross-references the two explicitly. Researchers should not treat them as interchangeable: *homo* appears in Latin-language common law instruments and Roman law texts, while *homme* signals French civil law influence. The statutory gender-neutral construction applies specifically to *homme* in Louisiana's civil code; no equivalent statutory redefinition applies to *homo* in the same code.
Why It Matters in Research
The practical research issue is the Louisiana statutory override. A researcher reading nineteenth-century Louisiana succession records, conveyances, or testamentary instruments may encounter *homme* used in a context that appears to refer to or exclude a woman. The default French reading — masculine, singular — will mislead. Article 3522 of the Louisiana Civil Code and its annotations (notes 1 and 2) are the controlling interpretive authority and should be consulted before drawing conclusions about who is included in any instrument using this term.
The term also signals document origin. Its presence in a legal instrument is a reliable marker of Louisiana civil law drafting tradition or direct French-language source material. This has downstream implications for which body of law governs the instrument and which corpus materials — civilian treatises, French legal dictionaries, Spanish colonial records — are relevant to interpretation.
Researchers working backward through Louisiana legal history should note that the civil code definition does not necessarily apply to pre-codification instruments. French colonial and Spanish colonial-era Louisiana documents predate the Louisiana Civil Code and may use *homme* in its ordinary gendered sense. The statutory redefinition is a product of codification, not a reflection of universal historical usage.
*Homme* does not appear as a term of art in English common law sources. Its presence in a document is itself evidence that the document operates within a civilian framework.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement on this term: all three define it as the French word for "man" and all three note the Louisiana Civil Code's statutory expansion of the term to include women. The uniformity across sources reflects that this term had a narrow, specific legal significance — its only real legal interest was the Louisiana statutory definition, and the dictionaries capture exactly that.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the interpretive question raised by that definition: how courts actually applied it, whether the expansion was contested, or how it interacted with specific legal contexts (succession, contract, property). Researchers needing that depth will find the historical dictionaries a starting point only.
Burrill's addition of a cross-reference to *homo* is a useful navigational signal that researchers moving between Latin and French civil law sources should follow.
Jurisdictional Note
The gender-neutral statutory definition of *homme* is specific to Louisiana and derives from the Louisiana Civil Code. No equivalent construction applies in French law itself or in other American jurisdictions. Outside Louisiana, the term carries only its ordinary French meaning and has no independent legal significance in American legal sources.