Definition
A term drawn from French law denoting the condition of a person who commits a crime or misdemeanor after having already been convicted of a prior crime or misdemeanor. In essence, recidive is the formal legal state of relapse into criminal conduct following a previous judicial condemnation. The concept is the doctrinal foundation for enhanced punishment of repeat offenders: the second or subsequent offense is treated not merely as a new wrong but as an aggravated one, warranting increased sanctions. As a practical matter, to establish recidive as a charging element, the prior conviction must precede the commission of the new offense — conviction for the first offense must be established before the second act occurs, not merely before trial.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A synonym of "recidivate," meaning to fall back into prior habits or criminal behavior.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed as a common English word; the term entered English usage primarily through legal and medical contexts.
The gap here is primarily one of register and precision. In ordinary usage, recidivate describes a behavioral tendency or pattern — a person who keeps reoffending. In its French-law legal sense, recidive is a defined legal status that attaches only when a prior conviction has been formally entered and a new offense is subsequently committed. The behavioral fact of reoffending and the legal status of recidive are not the same thing: the legal status triggers specific procedural and sentencing consequences that mere repeated criminal conduct does not.
Common Confusion
Recidive is frequently conflated with recidivism, and the two are closely related but not identical in usage. Recidivism is the broader, more modern English term describing the general tendency or statistical phenomenon of repeat offending. Recidive, by contrast, is a term of art from French civil law tradition denoting a specific, formally cognizable legal status with procedural consequences — most importantly, that the charging instrument (indictment or information) must affirmatively plead the prior conviction as a predicate fact. Researchers encountering recidive in historical sources should not assume it maps cleanly onto modern American recidivism doctrine, which varies considerably by statute and jurisdiction.
Why It Matters in Research
Structural pattern: This is a historical evolution term — recidive is largely a French-origin legal artifact that appears in Anglo-American legal dictionaries primarily as a borrowing, not as a term with independent common-law development. Researchers need to approach it accordingly.
Several traps await the unwary researcher. First, recidive appears in English-language legal dictionaries (both editions of Black's, Bouvier, Burrill) not as a term of English or American law but as an entry explaining French doctrine. Its presence in these dictionaries reflects the encyclopedic ambition of 19th-century legal lexicography, not the term's adoption into common-law practice. Do not treat a dictionary entry as evidence that American courts used this term as a term of art.
Second, the procedural requirement embedded in the Bouvier entry is significant and often overlooked: the second offense must have been committed after the conviction for the first. This sequencing requirement is the same logic that underlies habitual offender statutes in American law, but American sources rarely use the word recidive to describe it. When tracing the intellectual lineage of habitual offender or recidivist statutes in U.S. law, recidive is a useful upstream concept even if the downstream legal instruments use different vocabulary.
Third, researchers working in Louisiana legal materials will encounter recidive and its cognates more naturally than in other American jurisdictions, given Louisiana's civilian heritage. French-law terminology embedded in Louisiana's criminal law tradition may use recidive or its derivatives where other states use "habitual offender," "repeat offender," or "prior conviction enhancement."
Finally, corpus researchers should note that Burrill's entry briefly pivots mid-definition to describe an entirely separate Scottish practice (a bill stating grounds to alter a judgment of the Lord Ordinary) — an artifact of how Burrill's dictionary sometimes chains entries. Do not attribute that secondary definition to recidive itself.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries are in substantial agreement on the core definition: recidive is the French-law term for the legal state of a person who reoffends after prior conviction. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier track each other closely, drawing on Dalloz as the French authority. Burrill cites Bouvier and adds nothing substantive beyond the citation chain.
Bouvier's entry is the most practically useful because it supplies the procedural dimension: the indictment must plead the offense as a second offense, and the sequencing of conviction-then-new-offense is essential. This is the kind of operational legal information the other dictionaries omit.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any engagement with how recidive doctrine was or was not absorbed into American practice. Their treatment is purely descriptive of French law. No historical dictionary entry traces the term's influence on American habitual offender legislation, leaving that work to the researcher.
Jurisdictional Note
Recidive as a term of art is specific to French civil law and its derivatives. Louisiana is the American jurisdiction most likely to produce primary sources using this term or its cognates. In all other American jurisdictions, the functional equivalent is found under habitual offender statutes, recidivist enhancement provisions, or prior conviction pleading requirements — none of which typically use the word recidive.