Opinion ID: 1670605
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Heading: French Jurisprudential Development

Text: The original delictual responsibility provisions of the French Civil Code of 1804 are virtually identical to the corresponding articles of the Louisiana Civil Code that are based primarily upon them. The lead article proclaims the fault principle: Every person must repair the damage done to another by his fault. Code Civil article 1382. The next article defines fault to include not only intentional acts but also negligence. C.Civ. art. 1383. The remaining articles impose liability based on the defendant's relationship to some other person or thing. The first relational liability provision, which may have been intended only as an introductory statement, provides generally that every person is responsible, not only for the damage occasioned by his own act, but also for damage caused by the act of persons for whom he is answerable and the act of things in his custody. C.Civ. art. 1384. The following provisions define specific situations in which a person is liable for injuries caused by another, i.e., by one's child, employee or pupil, C.Civ. art. 1384, by one's animals, C.Civ. art. 1385, and by the collapse of one's buildings. C.Civ. art. 1386. These texts thus adopted a dual approach: Liability was either fault-based or based on the defendant's relationship with the injury causing person or thing. See E. Tomlinson, Tort Liability In France For the Act of Things: A Study of Judicial Lawmaking, 48 La.L.Rev. 1299, 1300 (1988). During the nineteenth century article 1385 generated many law suits because work animals were a major cause of personal injuries. Tomlinson, supra at 1314. The Court of Cassation, in Montagnier v. Leydon, Cass. civ., 27 Oct. 1885, 1886 D.P. Jur. I 207, 1886 S.Jur. I 33, interpreted article 1385 to establish a presumption of fault imputable to the owner or guardian of an animal which has caused injury and to provide that the presumption only yields before proof of an unforeseeable event [cas fortuit] or of a fault committed by the injured party. In that case the injury caused the plaintiff Montagnier arose from the fall of stones which a mule, belonging to Leydon and kept under his garde, had knocked from the top of a wall as to strike Montagnier. (An English translation of the Montagnier case can be found in Tomlinson, supra at 1365, Appendix 3). The Court of Cassation repeated this interpretation of article 1385 until it became fixed and beyond challenge. Tomlinson, supra at 1320. See also 2 M. Planiol, Treatise on the Civil Law, part 1, Nos. 918-920 (LSLI translation 1959); 2 H. Mazeaud, L. Mazeaud and J. Mazeaud, Traite theorique et pratique de la responsabilite civile 1133 at 188 n. 6 (6th ed. 1970); Holland, 305 So.2d at 118. Evidently, the court was influenced by the argument that the Code, like the pre-Code law, contained a special provision on animals because the legislature believed owners and users were at least presumptively at fault for injuries inflicted by their animals and that the inclusion of article 1385 in the Code made no sense unless the legislature intended to establish some special rule more favorable to the injured party than the otherwise applicable general rule of articles 1382 and 1383, which required the accident victim to prove the owner's fault. Tomlinson, supra at 1316-1317. Article 1386, on the other hand, had a very limited scope but imposed a stricter form of liability. It provided a right of recovery to persons damaged by the ruin or collapse of buildings against its owner when caused by lack of maintenance or vice of construction. If the plaintiff proved that his damage resulted from one of these two causes, the owner was necessarily liable regardless of his ignorance of the bad condition or his inability to prevent the ruin. Planiol, supra at No. 924. See also F. Stone, Louisiana Civil Law Treatise, Torts § 358 at 461 n. 14. It does not appear, however that liability in France under article 1386 was absolute, as sometime in the jurisprudential or doctrinal development thereunder, the owner was allowed to defend himself by proving that the damage was attributable to either an irresistable force, or a cause not imputable to him. Stone, supra § 350 at 454 n. 69, 72. Cf. Loescher v. Parr, 324 So.2d 441 (La. 1976); Olsen v. Shell Oil Co., 365 So.2d 1285 (La.1979). The broad general statement at the beginning of French Civil Code article 1384, stating that each person is responsible for the acts of things in his garde, was ignored for nearly a century after the adoption of the Code in 1804. See Planiol, supra at No. 917; D. Verlander, We Are Responsible...., 2 Tulane Civil Law Forum, No. 2, p. 31 (1974). After the turn of the century, work animals, a major cause of personal injuries during the 1800's, gradually disappeared from factories and city streets, and article 1385, therefore, received fewer and fewer applications. Tomlinson, supra at 1322. On the other hand, the need to find a new basis for compensating workers injured by industrial accidents had become acute. Factory owners and other employers who profited from the labor of their employees, but refused to compensate them for on-the-job injuries that inevitably resulted, were too often shielded from liability by the difficulty of proving that the employees' machine-related accidents had been caused by the employers' fault as interpreted under articles 1382 and 1383. In 1896, the Court of Cassation discovered in article 1384 a basis for holding employers liable for workplace injuries to employees caused by defective machinery even in the absence of the employer's fault. Guissez, Cousin et Oriolle v. Teffaine, 16 June 1896, 1897 D.Jur. I 433 (note Saleilles), 1897 S.Jur. 117 (note Esmien). (For an English translation of the noted case, see, A. von Mehren & J. Gordley, The Civil Law System, An Introduction to the Comparative Study of Law, 608 (1977)). In the Teffaine case a boiler aboard a tugboat had exploded killing a mechanic named Teffaine employed by the boat's owner. An official investigation established that a defect attributable to the manufacturer had caused the explosion. Teffaine's widow sued the boat owner, who in turn sued the manufacturer in warranty. The court of appeal, by analogy to article 1386 under which the owner of a collapsing building could be held strictly liable for resulting injuries, held that the owners of the exploding boiler were responsible. Further, the court decreed that the manufacturer was contractually obliged to indemnify the owners for their loss. The Court of Cassation affirmed, but on a different, and new, legal basis: Article 1384's provision that a person is responsible for the act of things under his garde. According to the high court, the fact that a defect in construction caused the explosion excluded any possibility of cas fortuit or force majeure, making the owners, who were also guardians of the boiler, liable for Teffaine's death. Moreover, the court held that the owners could not avoid liability by proving the manufacturer's fault or the hidden nature of the defect. In 1898, however the practical importance of Teffaine was reduced when France adopted its first worker's compensation law, requiring employers to compensate employees for work-related injuries and barring industrial accident suits based on articles 1382-1386 of the Civil Code. See Planiol, supra at No. 931(1); Verlander, supra at 35. In the early 1900's the Court of Cassation and other French courts retreated from the Teffaine interpretation and, in effect, construed article 1384 to merely shift the burden of proof of absence of fault to the defendant, thus allowing him to avoid liability by showing that he had exercised due care. Tomlinson, supra at 1331. See also F.H. Lawson, Negligence in the Civil Law 46 (1962). The courts also tended to limit article 1384 by applying it only to things that had within themselves some inherent quality that unleashed a destructive force, (e.g. exploding boilers) and not to things that caused injuries while being operated by the hand of man (like automobiles). Tomlinson, supra at 1331. By the 1920's, however, the growing numbers of motor vehicle accidents caused the bench and bar to look for a new basis upon which to compensate tort victims. The special code provisions which covered the most common causes of personal injury in 1804, i.e., animals and collapsing buildings, by plainly favoring plaintiffs injured in such accidents, had become obsolete with the coming of age of the automobile. In Jand'heur v. Les Galeries Belfortaises, Cass, civ., 13 February 1930, 1930 D.Jur. I 57 (note Ripert), 1930 S.Jur. I 121 (note Esmein), finally decided in 1930, the Court of Cassation announced its fully developed interpretation of article 1384 providing for the essential ingredients of a guardian's liability for injury caused by a thing under his garde. In that case, a delivery truck driven by an employee of a local department store had struck and permanently crippled a young girl. Her widowed mother sued the department store as guardian of the truck and as the employer of its driver. In its final decision, favoring the plaintiff, the Court of Cassation expanded and significantly modified the basis of a guardian's responsibility. First, a presumption of liability (rather than just a presumption of fault) is established by article 1384 against the guardian of an inanimate thing (not just a movable thing) which has caused injury to another. Second, the court deleted any reference to the dangerousness of the thing. Third, the guardian's liability may be rebutted only by proof of an unforeseeable event [cas fortuit] or of an irresistible force [force majeure] or of an external cause not imputable to the guardian; and it does not suffice to prove that he committed no fault or that the cause of the damage remains unknown. Fourth, for the plaintiff to recover, it is not necessary that the thing have an inherent defect susceptible of causing the injury, as article 1384 attaches liability to the garde of the thing, not to the thing itself. (An English translation of the Jand'heur case can be found in Tomlinson, supra at 1367, Appendix 5 and von Mehren & Gordley, supra at 629.) Consequently, the Jand'heur decision extended to a much larger class of accident victims, viz., persons caused harm by inanimate things, the special advantages previously reserved to those injured by an animal or the collapse of a building. Tomlinson, supra at 1352. See also Verlander, supra at 36. To summarize in rough, the French court decided that the opening statement of article 1384 must be treated as a general principle of law controlling the liability of the guardian of a thing, rather than as a mere introductory provision, because the 1804 Civil Code had failed to anticipate the industrial revolution or the automobile age and therefore its more specific provisions relating to animals and collapsing buildings no longer could serve as precepts to be applied directly in the adjudication of the most common types of personal injury cases in the twentieth century. The provisions relating to liability for animals and collapsing buildings, however, may be regarded as early specific examples of application of the general principle of liability set forth in article 1384. Consequently, the court concluded that the formula of presumptions and defenses developed under the special provisions should be borrowed or applied by analogy in deciding whether a person is liable for the damage caused by a thing in his garde as provided by article 1384.