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]