Cour d'Appel, Paris

The Court:

On the appeal by Mme Olejniczak and the cross-appeal by Savin and his insurer, La Baloise Transports, from a decision of the Tribunal de commerce of the Seine on 12 January 1961, holding the cross-appellants liable to pay the appellant the sum of 18,716 francs and dismissing the appellant’s claim for a further sum …

Given that the appellant asks the court to hold that the sum of 18,716 francs which Savin and La Baloise Transports were ordered to pay constitutes a supplementary award to be paid over and above the payments made to her by the Sécurité sociale as a result of the accident which injured her late husband on 18 June 1957; given that Savin and La Baloise Transports ask the court to hold that the 18,716 francs represents the total amount due from them, everything being taken into account, that is, the total harm and not just supplementary harm, to hold that as Savin was not guilty of any fault the appellant should have her claim under article 1382 Code civil dismissed, to hold that as the appellant has adduced no proof that at the time of the accident Savin was gardien of the block of ice which fell on her husband so that therefore her claim under article 1384 Code civil should be dismissed, and to hold that as Olejniczak died from delirium tremens there is no causal link between the accident of 18 June and his death on 24 June, and thus to dimiss all Mme Olejniczak’s claims and make her liable in costs;

Given that it is agreed that Olejniczak, a waiter at the Hotel Lotti in Paris, was injured at work on 18 June 1957 and was taken to hospital where he died on 24 June, that his widow brought suit against Savin and his insurance company, La Baloise Transports, before the Tribunal de commerce of the Seine, for compensation for the harm resulting to her from the accident to her husband, and that this was the suit in which the judgment under appeal was given;

Given … that it emerges from information and documents properly submitted and from the arguments before the court that at 6.30 a.m. on 18 June Savin, with an assistant, was delivering to the Hotel Lotti some blocks of ice which he was himself, as usual, to cut before placing them the ice-box, and that during the cutting operation one of the bocks of ice he had placed on the ice-box slipped for a reason still unclear and fell on the foot of Olejniczak, a waiter, who was taking a glass of wine near the ice-box, and injured him;

Given that as no fault was established against Savin he could not be held liable under article 1382 Code civil, but that as it emerges from what has been said that he was still in control of the ice which he had not yet finally delivered, the garde not passing to the hotel until the moment he placed it in the ice-box; he is legally liable under article 1384 Code civil in the absence of any force majeure or external event for which he was not responsible;

Given that Savin and his insurer maintain that there was no causal link between the accident and Olejniczak’s death from delirium tremens , but given that it appears from the medical evidence and the report of the post mortem examination that the accident of 17 June triggered the crisis of delirium tremens and that the death was therefore connected with the accident, the condition resulting from his employment forming an indivisible whole with the trauma resulting from the accident, so that the accident, if not the direct and immediate cause of the death, nevertheless precipitated and worsened his clinical condition, thus establishing a causal link between the accident and the death;

Given that, contrary to the contention of Mme Olejniczak and her attorney that the judges below intended their award to her of the sum of 18,716 francs as compensation for the harm suffered as a result of the death of her husband to be a supplementary sum over and above the annuity she receives from the Sécurité sociale, it appears that they took care to state that their award took everything into account, so that there is no room for a supplementary award, especially as it appears to the Court that in assessing the total damage at 18,716 francs they reached a fair sum bearing in mind that it was right to take account of the pre-existing clinical condition of the deceased and of the letter from the Caisse primaire of the Sécurité sociale for the Paris region stating that the capital value of the annuity being paid to the widow as of 1 March, when the last statutory increase took place, is 21,669.36 francs;

For these reasons and the other reasons given below which are consistent with them and which this court adopts, dismisses the appeal by Mme Olejniczak, allows the cross-appeal in part but confirms the judgment of 12 January 1961 given by the Tribunal de commerce of the Seine, adding that the sum of 18,716 francs awarded represents the whole of the harm in question; dismisses the claimant’s suit in so far as it is based on article 1382 Code civil; and rejects all other demands of the parties.

Subsequent Developments

Doctrine upheld. A decision of the Chambre Sociale dated 6 March 1980 (Bull. No. 236) is slightly similar to the position adopted by the Court of Appeal of Paris: “Where an employee, who had been the victim of an accident at work, dies as a result of respiratory failure occurring during an operation carried out under general anaesthetic a few hours after the accident, his death must be considered as being in the course of his profession, since the respiratory incident, which was the direct cause of the death, happened during the surgical operation necessitated by the injuries and cannot therefore be detached from the accident itself; in this respect it matters little that these consequences may have been provoked or aggravated by a medical fault, which, being indistinguishable from the treatment, has no effect on the chain of causality which exists between the accident, the treatment of the injuries and the death which followed upon such treatment”. Similarly, a decision of the Criminal Chamber dated 10 April 1973 (Bull. No.185), confirmed by a decision dated 12 April 1994 (Bull.No.147) holds that “a victim’s right to indemnification cannot be reduced by reason of a pathological predisposition if the abnormality arising therefrom was revealed or provoked only by reason of the wrong-doing itself”. Again, (Crim., 14 February 1996, Bull. No. 78) “Neither the former Article 319 nor the new Article 221-6 of the Penal Code require that there should exist a direct and immediate chain of causality between the fault of the accused and the death of the victim; it is sufficient that the existence of a chain of causality be certain. Consequently, the Court quashes a judgement which, holding that there existed between the accident and the death of the victim only an “indirect chain” by reason of prior damage, which had nothing to do with the accident, dismissed the intervening parties (“parties civiles”) who claimed indemnification for the death of the victim”. A recent decision handed down by the Second Civil Chamber (10 June 1999, Bull. No. 116), also holds that “The right of a victim to obtain indemnification for bodily injury cannot be reduced by reason of a pathological predisposition if the abnormality arising therefrom has been provoked or revealed only by the event causing the damage”.

But above all, the Second Civil Chamber, for its part, had already made known its position, by a decision dated 13 January 1982 (Bull. No. 9). The interest of this decision is that it deals precisely with a case of “delirium tremens”: the victim of an accident, according to the findings of the lower court, did not die in his state of alcoholic impregnation. The application for review criticised this decision for not having taken this alcoholism into account in order to conclude that the latter was, at least partially, the cause of the death, and argued further “that the state of chronic drunkenness of the victim flowed from a voluntary and faulty way of behaving”, as a result of which, according to the application for review, the victim, “by continuing to abandon himself to excessive drinking” had “accepted the risks inherent in his intemperate fault and had thus participated in the production of the damage”. The application for review is rejected on the grounds that “If a decision finds that the traumatism following an accident was the element which set off mortal complications which would not have arisen without such accident, and adds that the accident was thus the only cause of the accident, the argument based upon the pathological predisposition of the victim is irrelevant”. This analysis is approved by Messrs. Roland, Starck and Boyer (“Responsabilité Dilictuelle, op.cit., 1996). Concerning predisposition of the victim “the traditional theory is that there is no reason to take into account any predisposition of the victim if the pre-existing state was revealed only by the accident. No doubt, this was one of the causes of the damage, but since it is not a cause based on fault, the victim must not be deprived of indemnification. (….) the predisposition of the victim, which cannot be held against him as a fault, and which incontestably helped to produce the damage, is not taken into account as an element which should bring about only partial liability for the accident”.