MORT CIVILE

3 definitions found across Law Mind sources

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MORT CIVILEAuthored
The Law Mind • 901 words
Definition
Mort civile (French: "civil death") is a doctrine of French law under which a person convicted of a serious felony was treated as legally dead for civil purposes, even while remaining physically alive. Upon the declaration of mort civile, the condemned person lost all civil rights — the capacity to own property, to inherit, to contract, to sue, to marry, and to maintain existing legal relationships. Property held at the time of conviction passed immediately to the condemned's legal heirs as though the person had died intestate. Any property subsequently acquired reverted to the state. The doctrine was formally abolished in France by the law of May 31, 1854, though its practical effects were not entirely eliminated. Post-abolition, a convicted person's existing property still passed to heirs upon conviction, and future-acquired property fell to the state — outcomes that closely paralleled the civil death regime even after the formal doctrine was discarded. ---
Common Confusion
Mort civile is the French civil law form of the broader concept known in common law as civil death. The two terms describe the same general phenomenon — legal annihilation of a living person — but arise from distinct legal traditions. Researchers should not assume that English-language sources on "civil death" accurately describe the French doctrine, or that the specific property rules applicable under mort civile translate directly into common law jurisdictions. The abolition history also differs: many common law jurisdictions retained attainder and civil death mechanisms well beyond 1854, and some vestigial forms survived into the twentieth century. ---
Why It Matters in Research
Mort civile is primarily a historical doctrine, and researchers will encounter it most often in three contexts: (1) French legal history and the development of civil law, (2) comparative law discussions contrasting civil and common law approaches to criminal punishment and civil capacity, and (3) American and English sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that use the French term when discussing analogous common law concepts such as attainder, corruption of blood, or civil death. The abolition date — May 31, 1854 — is a critical threshold in French primary sources. Documents referencing the property status of convicted persons in France before that date operate under a different legal framework than those after it. The post-1854 regime was functionally similar but not identical, and conflating the two periods will produce errors in property chain analysis or succession research. In English-language legal dictionaries and treatises from the nineteenth century, mort civile frequently appears as a reference point when common law writers discuss the limits of attainder or the civil consequences of felony conviction. These passages use the French term as a term of art, but they are describing a foreign doctrine for comparative illustration, not applying it as binding law. Researchers working in American legal history should be alert to this usage pattern. The corpus connection between mort civile and civil death is strong — entries on one almost always reference the other. Researchers who need to trace the development of civil incapacity doctrines should work both terms together. ---
Historical Dictionary Support
Both the first and second editions of Black's Law Dictionary carry nearly identical entries, and the text appears to have been carried forward without substantial revision. Both editions describe the doctrine accurately at a high level — felony conviction, civil death, property passing to heirs as on intestacy, future property going to the state — and both note the formal abolition of 1854. Both editions are careful to note that something "very similar" remained after abolition, which is an important qualification that later summary treatments sometimes drop. Neither edition provides the full text of what happened to future-acquired property after the 1854 reform; the entries in the available source material are truncated at that point. Researchers relying on Black's alone will have an incomplete picture of the post-abolition regime. For the complete doctrine and its post-abolition modification, civil law treatises on French criminal law and succession from the mid-to-late nineteenth century are necessary supplements. Neither edition connects mort civile to its closest common law analogues — attainder, corruption of blood, and the English doctrine of civil death — in any systematic way. That comparative work falls to the researcher. ---
Jurisdictional Note
Mort civile as a formal doctrine is specific to French civil law and its derivative systems. Common law jurisdictions developed parallel concepts under different names and with different scope. Researchers working in Louisiana, Quebec, or other mixed civil-common law jurisdictions should examine whether French-origin civil death concepts entered local law and, if so, whether they survived subsequent statutory reform. ---
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The available encyclopedia match — Fraud Penalty Civil (The Law Mind Tax Encyclopedia) — is not substantively related to mort civile. No encyclopedia cross-reference is applicable here. ---
Related Terms
Civil death — the common law analogue; the preferred term in English-language sources Attainder — English doctrine imposing civil and property consequences upon conviction for treason or felony Corruption of blood — common law consequence of attainder preventing inheritance Intestacy — the succession regime that governed property distribution upon mort civile Civil capacity — the broader category of legal ability that mort civile extinguished Forfeiture — partial overlap with state acquisition of post-conviction property Felony — the triggering offense category under both mort civile and common law civil death doctrines
MORT CIVILEmain
Black's Law Dictionary • 1891
In French law. Civil death, as upon conviction for felony. It was nominally abolished by a law of the 31st of May, 1854, but something very similar to it, in effect at least, still remains. Thus, the property of the condemned, possessed by him at the date of his conviction, goes and be- longs to his successors, (héritiers,) as in case of an intestacy; and his future acquired prop- erty goes to the state by right of its preroga- tive, (par droit de déshérence,) but the state may, as a matter of grace, make it over in whole or in part to the widow and children. Brown.
MORT CIVILEmain
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) • 1910
In French law. Civil death, as upon conviction for felony. It was nominally abolished by a law of the 31st of May, 1854, but something very similar to it, in effect at least, still remains. Thus, the property of the condemned, possessed by him at the date of his conviction, goes and be longs to his successors, (héritiers,) as in case of an intestacy; and his future acquired property goes to the state by right of its pre rogative, (par droit de déshérence,) but the state may, as a matter of grace, make it over in whole or in part to the widow and children. Brown. MORT D’ANCESTOR. An ancient and now almost obsolete remedy in the English law. An assize of mort d’ancestor was a writ which lay for a person whose ancestor died seised of lands in fee-simple, and after his death a stranger abated; and this writ directed the sheriff to summon a jury or assize, who should view the land in question and recognize whether such ancestor were seised thereof on the day of his death, and whether the demandant were the next heir.

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