LASSERRE J Rapport à M. le Gouverneur de la Nouvelle Calédonie sur la liquidation des successions.

The arrival of a large number of deportees in New Caledonia after the Paris Commune led the legislator to make special provisions for the succession of people deported “to this country, where fortune sometimes so quickly fills with goods those who the day before despaired of their fate”.

Lasserre, President of the Superior Court, set out in this report the measures he proposed to adapt the legislation to local conditions: the inventory of the deceased’s property and the sealing of the estate should be entrusted to the local administration officer instead of the Justice of the Peace, as most of the localities on Grande Terre where deportees are interned are too far from the main town. The wife of a deceased deportee will have six months to assert her right to inheritance, on presentation of the marriage certificate and a notarized deed to prove that she was living with her husband at the time of death. The rapporteur points out that in no other colony where he has worked (French Guiana, Martinique and Guadeloupe) are requests for separation as numerous as in New Caledonia, where the number of such requests is more considerable than in the three successful colonies… it is almost always the wife who first tries to shake off the conjugal yoke in order to be able to indulge her pleasures more easily”.

A certain number of women, coming to join their deported husbands, perhaps not having at first sight all the misery and trouble, prefer to settle in Nouméa.

Fine, legible document, a little frayed in the margins.