Definition
A formal written instrument used in French (civil law) criminal procedure that records both the interrogatories — questions put by a judge to a criminal accused — and the accused's answers to those questions. The interrogatoire is at once a procedural act and a documentary record: it formalizes the judicial examination of the accused as an official instrument of the criminal process.
The term is French in origin and belongs to the civil law tradition. It does not describe informal questioning; it describes the official act that captures the exchange, giving it legal effect within inquisitorial criminal proceedings.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Interrogatoire" does not appear as an established English-language entry. In French, it means an interrogation or questioning, particularly in a legal or official context.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. The term was treated as a foreign legal term, not naturalized English.
The gap here is procedural rather than semantic. An English speaker encountering "interrogatoire" might read it as simply meaning "interrogation" or "questioning." In its legal context, however, the term refers specifically to the formal written instrument — the document — produced by that examination, not merely the act of asking questions. The record and the proceeding are fused into a single legal artifact in a way that has no precise common-language equivalent.
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Common Confusion
Researchers should not conflate interrogatoire with interrogatory in the common law sense. An interrogatory in Anglo-American procedure is a written question submitted to a party in civil discovery. An interrogatoire is a judicial examination of a criminal accused in an inquisitorial system, reduced to a formal written act. The procedural posture, the system of law, the officer conducting the examination, and the legal function of the resulting document are all different. The orthographic resemblance is misleading.
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Why It Matters in Research
The interrogatoire is a marker of civil law influence. When the term appears in Anglo-American legal sources — particularly in Louisiana materials, early American treatises, or cases touching on French or Spanish colonial law — it signals that the author or court is working within, or translating from, a civil law procedural framework. Researchers encountering the term in U.S. sources should ask what system of law was operative at the time and place in question.
In historical Louisiana legal records, interrogatoires may appear as actual instruments — archived documents from territorial and early statehood criminal proceedings — distinct from anything produced by common law courts. A researcher treating them as analogous to common law examinations or depositions risks misreading both the procedural context and the evidentiary weight the instrument carried.
The term also appears in English-language treatises and law dictionaries as a purely expository entry — a window into civilian procedure for common law practitioners who encountered French legal materials, whether in comparative study, admiralty practice, or the administration of territories formerly under French or Spanish governance.
Note that Black's 1st edition entry as reproduced contains an artifact: text from a separate entry on "extravagant interpretation" appears to have run into the interrogatoire definition in some printings. Researchers using that edition should be aware of this typographical bleed-through and verify against the 2nd edition or Bouvier.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Bouvier — offer substantively identical definitions, each tracing the concept to Pothier's Procédure Criminelle (section/chapter 4, article 2, §1). This convergence is notable: the three dictionaries are in complete agreement, suggesting the term's legal meaning was stable and uncontested in the Anglo-American secondary literature. There is no recorded evolution or disputed interpretation across the sources.
Bouvier adds the small but meaningful word "instrument" ("an act, or instrument"), reinforcing the documentary character of the interrogatoire — it is not merely a procedure but a written legal act with formal standing.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is how the interrogatoire functioned within the broader architecture of inquisitorial criminal procedure: the role of the examining magistrate, the relationship between the interrogatoire and confession, or the evidentiary treatment of the accused's answers at trial. Researchers needing that depth will need to go beyond dictionary sources to Pothier directly or to comparative criminal procedure scholarship.
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Jurisdictional Note
The interrogatoire is a creature of civil law criminal procedure and has no direct counterpart in common law systems. Its practical legal relevance in U.S. research is concentrated in Louisiana, where civil law tradition persisted through statehood, and in historical materials from French colonial territories. Courts and practitioners in common law jurisdictions who referenced the term did so descriptively, not as operative law.
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