Natural person in French law

[2] A human being with personnalité juridique (personhood) is accordingly the holder of legal rights and obligation towards other persons and towards society as a whole.

A physical person may be compared to a personne morale, in which a group of people in some circumstances is granted a more or less complete judicial capacity (personnalité juridique).

The Institutes book in the Compilations of the Emperor Justinian I enunciated a fundamental principle: the primary distinction in the law of persons is that all men are either free, or slaves.

While the master could freely dispose of him, he had an interest in maintaining his slave and providing him with satisfactory working conditions so that he would be productive.

For example, Constitution of the Duchy of Warsaw abolished serfdom as a reflection of the ideals of the French Revolution, but it did not promote land reform.

[12] In 1685, Louis XIV, king of France, promulgated the first Code noir, regulating the treatment of slaves and maroons in the French Antilles.

[18] On 4 February 1794, the Convention nationale decreed the abolition of slavery in the Guadeloupe archipelago, but not in Martinique, then occupied by the British, or La Réunion or Mauritius, due to the refusal of the local authorities.

Until the middle of the 19th century, individuals who were physiologically alive, could be considered "dead to the world" and treated in law as if they were.

An individual pronounced legally dead lost his rights of succession, and his assets were seized and distributed to his children.

Spouses who continued to live with the legally dead did so as concubines, and any future children the couple might have were illegitimate.

While Article 25 did not mention this, anyone who was civilly dead could not be a voter, candidate, functionary, jury member, or expert or fact witness.

In France, the law of 8 June 1850 abolished civil death, only for political prisoners sentenced to deportation.

The thirteen British colonies in North America, when they declared their independence from Great Britain, to justify their secession, affirmed the universality of the rights and liberties of Man.

[21] In June 1776, Virginia created for itself a constitution that gave it the structure of a state: That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.Not content to say that all men have this "emerging legal personhood", this Constitution also enunciated the subjective rights that attach to it, without however precisely delimiting them.

[22] The United States Declaration of Independence, dated 4 July 1776, of the thirteen colonies become states, affirms the same values: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.The ten Amendments to the Constitution of 1787 guaranteed the rights of Man: freedom of expression and of religion, to carry arms, to safety of the person, an independent judiciary (jury of peers), freedom from self-incrimination in criminal proceedings, the requirement for a single conviction only for the same crime (non bis in idem), a requirement for a legality of procedure (process of laws) in any jeopardy to liberty or to assets.

The Supreme Court of the United States, which in an 1803 decision (Marbury v. Madison) assigned itself the power to review the constitutionality of legislation, had as its mission the protection of individual liberties from the public authorities.

At times difficulties have arisen in defining precisely, legally and in the abstract, either birth or death, which have required the intervention of the legislative or judicial powers to refine these definitions.

These principles have been enunciated by the World Health Organization,[citation needed] with the possibility for member states of the United Nations to incorporate them into their own positive law, taking into account local particularities and ethical points of view that may diverge.