DROIT D’AUBAINE

droit  d’aubaine  (drwah  doh-ben),  n.[Law  French  “right  of  alienage”]  Hist.  With  certain

exceptions, a sovereign’s right to a deceased alien’s property, regardless of whether the alien had a

will.  •  This  right  was  primarily  exercised  in  France,  where  it  was  revived  in  some  form  by Napoleon after its initial abolishment in 1790. It was ultimately abolished in 1819. — Also spelled

droit d’aubaigne; droit d’aubenage. — Also termed jus albanagii; jus albinatus.

“Under the French rule of law, known as the droit d’aubaine…, the whole property of an alien

dying in France  without leaving  children born in that country  escheated to the  crown. The royal

right was not universally exacted, and at a very early period special exceptions were introduced in

favour of certain classes. Thus Louis XI exempted merchants of Brabant, Flanders, Holland, and

Zealand  from  the  operation  of  the  law,  and  a  similar  privilege  was  extended  by  Henri  II  to

merchants of the Hanse towns, and from Scotland.” 1 R.H. Inglis Palgrave, Palgrave’s Dictionary

of Political Economy 68 (Henry Higgs ed., 2d ed. 1925).

“In  France  by  the  fourteenth  century  it  was  accepted  that  a  stranger  might  acquire  and

possess but not inherit or transmit by will or on intestacy.  In 1386 the French  king assumed the

seigneurial  droit  d’aubaine  or  right  to  inherit.  In  treaties  in  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth

centuries  the  right  was  frequently  renounced.  Louis  XVI  in  1787  abolished  the  right  as  against

subjects of Great Britain without reciprocity. The constituent Assembly abolished the right in 1790

and it was commonly abolished elsewhere in the early nineteenth century.” David M. Walker, The

Oxford Companion to Law 378 (1980). [Blacks Law 8th]