Are octroyed constitutions of the 19th century to be considered as 'imposed constitutions'?

The paper considers ‘octroyed’, ‘conceded’ or ‘granted’ constitutions of 19th century Europe whose common roots are to be found in the French ‘Charte constitutionnelle’ of 1814.
These Charters stem from a paternalistic process of domestic constitution-making engaged unilaterally by a monarch possessing the de facto constituent power and exercising it without the direct involvement of a body representing the people.
Such octroyed constitutions, which are of course to be opposed to democratically established ones, show nevertheless a number of specific characteristics which distinguish them also from ‘imposed constitutions’ in the usual sense.
The expression ‘constitutional octroy’ should not be used as a synonym for any process leading to an ‘imposed Constitution’. The contribution aims to develop and to validate or invalidate the value of a series of distinctive criteria and possible elements of a definition of ‘octroyed’ or ‘granted’ constitutions in order to underline their specificity.