Definition
An ordonnance is a French-origin legal term with two distinct but related senses used in historical and comparative legal research:
1. A formal order or decree issued by a court or sovereign authority in the French legal tradition — analogous to an ordinance or edict in English-speaking legal systems.
2. A compiled or systematized body of law organized around a particular subject matter, issued under royal or governmental authority in pre-Revolutionary and early modern France. The most significant examples include the Ordonnance de la Marine (1681), governing maritime law, and the Ordonnance du Commerce (1673), governing commercial transactions. These compilations preceded and heavily influenced the Napoleonic Codes.
In the context of prize law and admiralty research, ordonnance refers specifically to the French regulatory framework governing prizes and captures at sea — the body of rules determining the rights of belligerents to seize enemy or neutral vessels and their cargoes.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The disposition of the parts of any composition with regard to one another and the whole — primarily an art and architecture term describing compositional arrangement.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The same compositional sense, illustrated in aesthetic criticism: "Their dramatic ordonnance of the parts." — Coleridge.
The gap here is complete. In ordinary English, ordonnance is an art-criticism term about visual or literary arrangement. In legal contexts, it refers to sovereign legislative instruments and codified law in the French tradition. A researcher encountering the word in a legal source should not import the compositional meaning; the legal usage is borrowed directly from French administrative and legislative vocabulary with no overlap in substance.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
The term encompasses several recognized categories in historical French law:
- Royal Ordonnances: Decrees issued under direct royal authority, functioning as primary legislation in the Ancien Régime.
- Ordonnances de réformation: Systematic reform compilations reorganizing existing law across subject areas.
- Ordonnances de la Marine (1681): Colbert's maritime code, one of the most influential pre-modern attempts to systematize admiralty and prize law. Widely cited in English and American admiralty cases as evidence of the law of nations regarding captures at sea.
- Ordonnances du Commerce (1673): The precursor to modern commercial codes, covering bills of exchange, partnerships, and merchant obligations.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in admiralty, prize law, or the history of commercial law will encounter ordonnance as a primary source reference, not merely a descriptive term. American courts in the early republic frequently cited the Ordonnance de la Marine when resolving prize cases, because French maritime practice was treated as persuasive evidence of the law of nations. Cases involving captures during the quasi-war with France or Revolutionary-era seizures routinely engaged this body of law.
The trap for modern researchers is treating ordonnance as a loose synonym for "ordinance" in the American municipal sense (a local legislative enactment by a city or county). The two words share a root but refer to entirely different legal instruments at different levels of legal authority. An ordonnance in the French tradition is typically national or royal in origin and often has the force of a code; an American ordinance is local and subordinate legislation.
Historical sources written before the Napoleonic codification (the Code de Commerce, 1807; the Code Civil, 1804) will use ordonnance to refer to the operative law of France on commercial and maritime subjects. After codification, the ordonnances they replaced are primarily of historical interest, but they remain essential for understanding the sources the Codes drew upon.
Researchers in Louisiana law, which retains a civil law tradition, may encounter ordonnance in colonial-era documents and early state jurisprudence, where French and Spanish legislative instruments directly shaped the law in force.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) gives the term fair treatment for its era, identifying both the decree sense and the compiled-law sense and flagging its specific relevance to prize law. The citation to Coolidge v. Inglee, 13 Mass. 43 — a Massachusetts case involving marine insurance and the law of captures — correctly illustrates how American courts engaged the French ordonnances as authoritative sources on maritime law of nations questions.
What Black's does not capture is the broader significance of the ordonnances as proto-codifications that shaped the structure of modern civil law systems. Researchers approaching ordonnance purely through Black's may underestimate how foundational these instruments were — not merely historical curiosities, but the direct ancestors of the commercial and maritime codes that influenced Louisiana law, Quebec law, and much of Latin American commercial law.
No major English-language historical dictionary gives this term sustained treatment, which reflects its status as a term of art transplanted from French legal culture rather than a native feature of common law vocabulary.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is primarily relevant in French, Louisianan, and comparative civil law research. In Louisiana, colonial-era ordonnances issued under French and Spanish rule have occasionally been examined by courts interpreting the origins of civilian doctrines. In federal admiralty practice, the Ordonnance de la Marine retains historical significance as a source on prize and capture law.