Definition
In French civil and criminal procedure, recolement is the formal process by which a witness reviews a previously recorded deposition, confirms its accuracy, and either affirms it as correct or corrects it based on better recollection. The procedure requires the witness to read (or have read to them) the written record of their testimony, then formally attest to its contents. Under French procedural law as reflected in historical sources, completion of this step was not optional — a deposition taken without recolement was void.
The term describes a discrete procedural act with two components: (1) the re-reading of the deposition to the witness, and (2) the witness's formal response, either persisting in the original statement or making alterations. The record of that response became part of the evidentiary record.
Common Confusion
Recolement is sometimes loosely translated as "re-examination" (as in Rapalje & Lawrence), but this understates its formal character. Modern common-law practitioners may equate it with redirect examination or a deposition correction sheet, but neither is accurate. Redirect examination occurs in open court and is conducted by counsel. A deposition correction (errata sheet) under modern civil procedure is a party mechanism, not a court-supervised formality with validity consequences. Recolement was a court-supervised, procedurally mandatory step whose omission rendered the underlying deposition legally void — a consequence with no direct common-law analogue.
Why It Matters in Research
Recolement appears almost exclusively in sources dealing with French law, civil law systems, or Louisiana practice. Researchers encountering the term in nineteenth-century American materials should immediately consider whether the underlying proceeding arose in Louisiana or involved a civil-law jurisdiction, as the term was not transplanted into common-law procedural vocabulary.
The voiding consequence is the critical research trap. Historical sources that discuss French criminal procedure — particularly those citing Pothier's Procédure Criminelle — treat recolement as a validity requirement, not a mere formality. A researcher reading older Louisiana appellate decisions that touch on evidentiary challenges to depositions should check whether recolement was at issue, since the omission of the step could have dispositive procedural effect entirely distinct from substantive evidentiary objections.
The fragmentary condition of the Black's entries in the corpus (both the 1st and 2nd edition entries appear to have survived in partial form, with surrounding text from adjacent entries intruding) means researchers should weight Bouvier's as the more complete and reliable source for this term. Bouvier draws explicitly on Pothier and gives the clearest account of both the procedure and the voiding consequence.
The term has no meaningful modern American procedural counterpart and will not appear in post-nineteenth-century American practice materials outside of civil-law comparative scholarship.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's is the authoritative source here and provides the most complete definition: the reading and re-examination of a deposition by the witness, followed by persistence in or alteration of the original statement, with the explicit consequence that a deposition taken without this step is void. Bouvier's citation to Pothier's Procédure Criminelle grounds the definition in a specific treatise authority.
Rapalje & Lawrence offer the most compressed treatment — "reexamination" — which is accurate as far as it goes but omits the formal validity dimension that Bouvier's captures. The compression is typical of Rapalje & Lawrence's approach to civil-law terms treated as peripheral to Anglo-American practice.
The Black's entries (both editions) are unreliable for this term as they appear in the corpus. The surviving text is fragmentary, with adjacent entry material — including text about recognitors and French petitions of review — interrupting the recolement definition mid-sentence. What can be recovered from Black's aligns with Bouvier's account ("the process by which a witness, who has...") but the entry cannot be read as complete. Researchers should not rely on the Black's text for this term without consulting a clean physical copy.
No historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus disagrees on the core procedural meaning. The variation is only in completeness.
Jurisdictional Note
Recolement was a procedure of French law and civil-law systems derived from it. In American legal history, Louisiana is the jurisdiction most likely to present this term in operative legal contexts, given its civil-law heritage. The term does not appear in common-law procedural codes and carries no statutory definition in American jurisdictions outside the civil-law tradition.