Paper's abstract

J.-H. Robert, The Obligation to Do Penally Punished
The writers of the French Code Pénal, when describing the material element in crimes and offenses, took great care to distinguish between punishable omission and commission and judges scrupulously refrain from mistake them, even when they end with the same prejudicial result. However persons vested with a private or public authority are, through precedents, made responsible for a great number of offenses committed under their authority for the one motive they did not implement everything to prevent them. This paper explains the historical origin of this paradox. The responsibility of decisionmakers was primitively confined to the field of contravention, conceived as violation of the rules of administrative police and punished with mild fines, precisely called "police" ones. Modern laws have slowly destroyed the specificity of contravention and its link with administrative police. The mode of charging that was formerly typical of contravention has shifted into the field of offenses and concerns all those where the moral element is made of a feebly characterized intention or of a negligence.

Key Words : obligation, penal, criminal, crime, omission
t. 44, 2000 : p. 153-161