Definition
In French law, a judicial officer attached to the imperial court (cour impériale) responsible for prosecuting persons accused of crimes in accordance with French legal procedure. The perial functioned as a public prosecutor within the French criminal justice system, acting either personally or through a deputy. His duties were procedural and representational: preparing the matter for trial at the assizes, participating in the trial itself, formally demanding the sentence upon conviction, and attending the pronouncement of judgment.
The role is broadly analogous to a public prosecutor or attorney general in common law systems, though it operated within a distinctly civil law framework characterized by inquisitorial rather than adversarial procedure.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in nineteenth-century American and English legal dictionaries as a borrowed French term, and researchers are unlikely to encounter it in domestic case law or statutes. Its significance lies in comparative law research, particularly scholarship examining French criminal procedure during the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic imperial periods.
The term surfaces when common law treatise writers and lexicographers attempted to translate or explain French legal institutions for English-speaking audiences. Because the term is a transliteration or anglicization of a French office title rather than a term of art in English or American law, its spelling and usage are inconsistent across sources. Researchers working with nineteenth-century comparative law texts, international criminal law commentary, or historical materials touching on Louisiana (whose civil law heritage drew on French procedural traditions) should be alert to variant spellings and incomplete definitions—all three dictionary sources reproduced here appear to have truncated the original entry, likely due to printing or transcription error, cutting off the description of the perial's "general" supervisory or oversight function before it is completed.
Researchers relying solely on these dictionary entries will not obtain a complete picture of the office. French primary sources on the Code d'instruction criminelle (1808), which governed criminal procedure under the Napoleonic system, provide the authoritative account of this and related prosecutorial functions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence present nearly identical definitions, suggesting a common source or direct borrowing among the compilers—a typical pattern for foreign-law terms in nineteenth-century American legal dictionaries. All three entries are incomplete as reproduced, each terminating mid-sentence with reference to the perial's "general" authority or function. This truncation is significant: it means the surviving dictionary record does not fully capture the scope of the office.
None of the three sources identifies the precise French title being anglicized, nor cites the French statutory basis for the office. The consistent phrasing across all three dictionaries—nearly word for word—suggests the definition was established early and simply carried forward without independent verification or expansion. Researchers should treat these entries as a starting point for comparative inquiry rather than a complete account.
Jurisdictional Note
The perial is a French civil law office with no direct equivalent in American or English common law systems. Its relevance to U.S. legal research is largely confined to Louisiana legal history and to comparative or international law scholarship. It has no operative meaning in any U.S. jurisdiction.