ABSTRACT
It has already been mentioned that there are three types of criminal offence under French law, crimes, délits and contraventions. The general term which covers all three categories is infraction (which in this chapter will be invariably translated as ‘offence’). An infraction could be defined as any positive or negative action whose perpetrator will be subjected to corrective measures – in the form of either a penalty or a safety measure. For any action to qualify as an offence under this definition, it must meet two sets of criteria: (a) the four general conditions which must be met by any offence, ie a statutory basis, a substantive element, a moral factor and the injustice criterion, and (b) the specific conditions which every particular type of offence must satisfy. We will deal here with the general conditions only; the specific elements will emerge from the discussion of the ‘special’ criminal law (infra, p. 160).
