Circumstanțele atenuante și agravante în dreptul penal francez
Mitigating and aggravating circumstances in the French criminal law

Summary/Abstract: The institution of mitigating and aggravating circumstances represents one of the main pillars of the judicial individualization of the criminal sanction in any modern criminal law system, to which the European law is not an exception. A representative system is that of the French criminal law, which combines a pragmatic thinking developed and verified over time with the help of jurisprudence, through the manner of regulating the circumstances of personalizing the punishment, succeeding in harmonizing the need for criminal repression with the exigences associated with this mission – legality, humanism and sufficient freedom for the courts in the reasoned choice of the most suitable sanction, in terms of nature and amount, adapted to the circumstances of commission specific to each case and to the person of the perpetrator.Unlike the Romanian criminal law, in the French law there are noted a few differences, among them being the fact that, as a result of the suppression of the special minimum of punishments, the mitigating and aggravating circumstances are no longer regulated separately in the Code, but only specifically in the general and special part, similarly to the legal causes for mitigating the punishment, respectively the relapse, considered the main aggravating circumstance. In essence, the personalization of the punishment is achieved mainly through the individualization criteria regulated in Article 132 of the Code, the French legislator autonomously also regulating the restorative purpose of the punishments, achieved through the institution of the reparative punishment (sanction-réparation), with a predilect echo in the phase of pronouncement and execution of the judgement.

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