France: Sources and Notes

This page holds the full record behind the France guide: what was read, who published it, where it was fetched from and on what day. Six entries, of which five are stored documents and one is a note about a document that could not be stored.

The point of putting the apparatus at its own address is that a citation deserves to be checkable without reading the essay it supports.

The guide these records were gathered for, which sets out how the French services fit together, is Researching the Law of France.

Which text governs

Two propositions carry most of the weight, and both come from the publisher of the gazette rather than from a commentary about it. A text appearing in the Journal officiel takes effect, save exception, on the day after it appears. And from 1 January 2016 the Journal has been digital only, accessible from legifrance.gouv.fr.

Both are taken from the gazette publisher's own statement of its mission, named in full in the list below, and that statement is cited here for a reason: a publisher describing what its own act of publication does is primary material about the point at issue, in a way a commentary on it is not.

A citation deliberately split in two

The record for the Conseil constitutionnel's text of the Constitution carries a negative assertion beside its quotations: the name of the March 2024 constitutional act does not appear anywhere on that page. That absence is the whole reason the act is cited from the Conseil's separate list of revisions and not from the page carrying the text.

It is written as an assertion rather than as a remark because an assertion can fail. If the Conseil ever adds the act name to the page holding the text, the next check reports it, and the two citations can be collapsed into one on purpose rather than by accident.

The entry that is not a document

legifrance.gouv.fr answered every direct request with HTTP 403 while this material was gathered, including requests shaped exactly like a browser's. A tool that renders a page rather than returning its bytes did reach it, and that distinction is the whole point: a rendering is not a document this project holds. What is filed under the Code civil is therefore a note recording what was tried and what came back, and no statement in the France guide is traced to it.

The site works normally for a person with a browser. An inability to fetch a page is a fact about this project's tooling, not about French law, and the honest way to record it is a note that says so rather than a citation that implies the page was read.

Translations

Nothing in the list below is an English rendering of French law, and the France guide cites no translation at all. The free state services publish in French, the fact block rests on French text, and there was no occasion to reach for a version in another language. Anyone working from an English edition of a French code should treat it as a finding aid and cite the French.

Reading the access dates

The date on each entry is the local calendar date of the working session that fetched the document. The provenance file stored beside the cached copies records the UTC timestamp of the fetch itself, and the two can differ by a day for the ordinary reason that an evening in one time zone is the next morning in another.

Reviewed 2026-08-31. 6 sources cited on this page.