Short answer. No. Article 2012 says a person who cannot receive a donation under Article 739 cannot be named your life-insurance beneficiary either. Article 739 voids donations between persons guilty of adultery or concubinage at the time. A partner in an affair falls squarely within that bar, so the designation fails.
What the law says
Any person who is forbidden from receiving any donation under article 739 cannot be named beneficiary of a life insurance policy
Civil Code, Article 2012 — Life-Insurance Beneficiary Disqualification. Read the full provision →
What the law says
Those made between persons who were guilty of adultery or concubinage at the time of the donation
Civil Code, Article 739 — Donations That Are Void. Read the full provision →
The insurance rule borrows the donation rule
Article 2012 does not spell out its own list of forbidden beneficiaries — it points to the law on donations: Any person who is forbidden from receiving any donation under article 739 cannot be named beneficiary of a life insurance policy by the person who cannot donate to him. Naming someone your life-insurance beneficiary is treated as a gift of the proceeds, so the same people the law stops you from giving to during your life, it stops you from enriching through your policy at your death. To answer the insurance question you therefore read Article 739.
What Article 739 forbids
Article 739 makes void, among others, donations Those made between persons who were guilty of adultery or concubinage at the time of the donation. That is exactly the situation of a paramour: a designation in favour of a partner in an ongoing affair is a gift the donor could not lawfully make, and so the person could not be validly named. The disqualification looks to the relationship at the time the designation is made, not to some later change of heart, and it applies whether or not the marriage it offends has ever been formally disturbed.
No prior criminal conviction is needed
A common misunderstanding is that the bar only bites if the affair was first proven in a criminal case. Article 739 says otherwise: the guilt of the parties may be proved by preponderance of evidence in the same action, the ordinary civil standard, and the challenge itself may be brought by the offended spouse of either. So a widow or widower confronted with a paramour named on the policy can attack the designation directly, without waiting on a criminal prosecution that may never happen, and prove the relationship on the balance of evidence.
What happens to the proceeds
Because the designation is void rather than merely voidable, the disqualified person takes nothing, and the proceeds do not simply stay with them by default. They pass instead as though no valid beneficiary had been named, going to whoever is entitled under the policy's own terms or, failing that, to the insured's estate and heirs. If your intention is to provide for someone outside the marriage, this is the wall you run into, and it is worth understanding before the premiums are paid rather than after, when it is the family that raises it.
Related provisions
- Civil Code, Article 2012 — Life-Insurance Beneficiary Disqualification
- Civil Code, Article 739 — Donations That Are Void