# France — records retrieval dossier > EasyPassport knowledge base for citizenship-by-descent record retrieval. **General > guidance to confirm on the official pages listed under Sources — not legal > advice.** Fees, URLs, offices, and processing times change; verify before quoting. ## Vital records (birth / marriage / death) - **Holding office:** Two channels by place of the event: (1) births/marriages/deaths that occurred IN metropolitan France or the DOM — the mairie (town hall / service de l'état civil) of the commune where the event was registered holds the register and issues copies. (2) Events that occurred ABROAD to French nationals (including in the former colonies and Algeria pre-independence) — the Service central d'état civil (SCEC) in Nantes, part of the Ministère de l'Europe et des Affaires étrangères (44941 Nantes Cedex 9). Records older than ~75–100 years and pre-1792 registers migrate to the Archives départementales (see historicalRecords). - **How to request:** Free online via the unified portal on service-public.gouv.fr (procedure R1405), which routes to the correct mairie or to the SCEC Nantes. Also accepted: by post (letter to the mairie / SCEC) or in person at the mairie counter. Many communes are connected to the COMEDEC platform for dematerialized delivery. For an ancestor's record request always ask for the 'copie intégrale' (full copy with filiation), not the extrait, because a descent/CNF file needs the parentage shown. - **Online portal:** https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/R1405 - **Who may request:** For recent acts (within the 75-year restriction): a copie intégrale or extrait avec filiation may be obtained only by the person named (if of age), their légal representative, spouse/PACS partner, an ascendant or descendant, or a legally authorised professional (e.g. notary, lawyer). Anyone may get an extrait sans filiation. Once the 75-year (or 25-years-after-death, or 100-year for a minor) delay has elapsed, the act becomes a public archive and ANYONE may obtain a full copy — this is the route for most genealogical ancestor records. - **Cost:** Free of charge for civil-status copies (service gratuit) whether requested from a mairie or the SCEC. Beware paid third-party middleman sites that mimic the official portal — the .gouv.fr service never charges. - **Timeline:** Online/COMEDEC: often days. By post: roughly 2–4 weeks (service-public cites about 30 days by mail); the SCEC Nantes is frequently slower (several weeks to a few months) given its national volume. - **Language:** French. Requests to a mairie or the SCEC should be made in French. - **Notes:** Civil registration (état civil) began in France on 20 September 1792, replacing Catholic parish registers; anything earlier is a parish (paroissial) record held by the Archives départementales. Access restriction: birth and marriage acts are closed for 75 years from the date of the act (or 25 years from the person's death if sooner), 100 years if the act concerns a minor; death acts are immediately communicable. Records for people born abroad who are/were French are NOT at a mairie — they are at the SCEC Nantes. ## Historical & church records (before civil registration) - **Parish / church:** Pre-1792 registres paroissiaux (baptisms/marriages/burials, some running back to the 1530s–1550s) were kept by Catholic parishes and are now held by the Archives départementales of each department, classified in series E / E-dépôt. Almost every department has digitized both its parish registers and its post-1792 état civil and put them online for free on its own archives départementales website (e.g. archives.yvelines.fr, archivespasdecalais.fr). No account is usually needed; you browse by commune and year. Original registers are also consultable in the archive's reading room (salle de lecture). - **National / state archive:** FranceArchives (https://francearchives.gouv.fr) is the national interministerial portal that indexes and links to every department's holdings and explains the parish/état-civil sources. The Archives nationales hold central government records; for genealogy the Archives départementales are the primary repository. Naturalization decrees and some emigration files are at the Archives nationales (site de Pierrefitte-sur-Seine). - **Notes:** Online departmental coverage typically runs up to the ~75/100-year confidentiality cutoff (e.g. some departments post état civil only to ~1920); more recent acts must be requested from the mairie. Protestant and Jewish registers, and records from areas with border/jurisdiction changes (Alsace-Moselle, which was German 1871–1918), can sit in different series or archives. ## Apostille / legalization - **Competent authority:** The notariat (French notaries), acting under the Conseil supérieur du notariat, through the national 'apostille et légalisation' service. Since 1 May 2025 this REPLACED the parquets généraux of the 33 cours d'appel, which previously issued apostilles. (Legalisation of French acts also moved to the notariat on 1 September 2025, taking over from the Ministère de l'Europe et des Affaires étrangères.) - **URL:** https://apostille.notaires.fr/ - **Process:** Request online at apostille.notaires.fr (the dedicated notariat platform), or in person at a participating notary's office / a Centre d'apostille et de légalisation. You submit the original French public act; a notary verifies the signature/seal and affixes the apostille. The general information page is service-public.gouv.fr F1400 (procedure R71995). The apostille certifies the origin of a FRENCH document for use abroad — it is NOT used on French documents that stay in France. - **Cost:** Roughly €10 for up to 3 acts in the normal timeframe (delivery ~3 business days) and ~€20 for up to 3 acts in the fast (24-hour) timeframe, per the notariat/service-public tariff. Legalisation is a separate, higher fee. - **Notes:** France is a party to the 1961 Hague Apostille Convention. Important direction-of-travel point: for a French descent/CNF application filed IN France, it is the FOREIGN ancestor documents that must be apostilled by the issuing country's authority — French civil-status acts submitted to a French tribunal do NOT need an apostille. The apostille.notaires.fr route is what a descendant living ABROAD uses to get French acts recognised in another country. Within the EU, Regulation (EU) 2016/1191 exempts many public documents (incl. birth/marriage/death) from any apostille when moving between EU states, often needing only a multilingual standard form. > **Apostille authority — verification (✓ confirmed against HCCH, 2026-07):** Both facts hold at their core, but the apostille authority description has two inaccuracies worth correcting against the HCCH source (hcch.net/en/states/authorities/details3/?aid=321, updated 28 May 2025): (1) NAMING: the designated competent authorities are precisely the "conseils regionaux et chambres interdepartementales de notaires" (regional councils and interdepartmental chambers of notaries) — NOT "the Conseil superieur du notariat through a national 'apostille et legalisation' service." The CSN operates the portal (apostille.notaires.fr) but the legally designated authorities are the regional/interdepartmental notary bodies (~15 of them). (2) SCOPE: the notariat replacement is NOT universal. It covers metropolitan France plus Guadeloupe, Guyane, La Reunion, Martinique, Mayotte, Saint-Barthelemy, Saint-Martin, and Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon. For the remote overseas territories the OLD parquet/court authorities REMAIN competent: procureur general near the cour d'appel of Noumea (New Caledonia), Papeete (French Polynesia), the president of the tribunal de premiere instance of Mata Utu (Wallis-et-Futuna), and the procureur general at Saint-Denis de la Reunion (TAAF). Additionally, apostilles issued in criminal mutual-assistance cases are still issued by the procureur general. The "33 cours d'appel" figure is not confirmed by the HCCH page (unverified detail). The 1 May 2025 notary changeover and the apostille.notaires.fr URL are both correct. Portal URL R1405 is correct and live; note the canonical host is service-public.gouv.fr (the older service-public.fr also resolves). ## Translation - **Requirement:** Any foreign-language document submitted in a French descent/CNF file must be accompanied by a French translation done by a sworn/certified translator (traducteur assermenté). The translation into French is mandatory; a foreign act also generally needs an apostille or consular legalisation from its country of origin before it will be accepted. - **Notes:** A traducteur assermenté is an 'expert traducteur' registered as a judicial expert (expert judiciaire) on the list of a cour d'appel, or on the national list of the Cour de cassation. Official lists are searchable via service-public.gouv.fr (procedure R45936) and on the cours d'appel / Cour de cassation websites. From outside France, a translator accredited by the French consulate may be used. Only such sworn translators can certify a translation as conforming for an official procedure. ## Emigration & naturalization (the chain-break) - **Emigrant / exit records:** France has no single centralized emigrant 'exit register'. Traces of a departing ancestor are found in: passport applications and passenger/emigration files at the Archives départementales and Archives nationales; consular registration cards (inscription au registre des Français établis hors de France) held by the relevant consulate and ultimately the SCEC Nantes; and, if the person was born/married/died abroad while French, the SCEC Nantes civil-status records. Naturalization/denaturalization decrees of foreigners in France (the reverse case) are at the Archives nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine. - **Destination naturalization:** The chain-break question for French descent is whether the ancestor LOST French nationality by voluntarily acquiring the destination country's nationality. Under French law historically (and the pre-1973 rules), a French national who voluntarily naturalized abroad automatically lost French nationality — which severs transmission to children born AFTER the loss. So you must date the ancestor's foreign naturalization against each child's birth: a child born while the parent was still French can inherit; a child born after the parent naturalized abroad generally cannot. Check the destination country's naturalization records: e.g. US — USCIS Genealogy Program / NARA (and pre-1906 county court records); Canada — Library and Archives Canada; UK — The National Archives (HO series). Also check for a French 'libération des liens d'allégeance' decree (Archives nationales / Journal officiel). - **Notes:** Nuance to verify per era: France later signed and then partly denounced the 1963 Strasbourg Convention on reduction of multiple nationality (France denounced Chapter I effective 5 March 2009), and post-1973 law made loss on foreign naturalization non-automatic in many cases. The automatic-loss rule mainly bites for ancestors who naturalized abroad in the 19th–mid-20th century; the exact statute in force at the naturalization date governs, so this is a fact-specific legal check, not a blanket rule. ## Gotchas - Ask for the 'copie intégrale' (full copy with filiation), never the 'extrait sans filiation' — a CNF/descent file must show the parent-child link, and the wrong product type forces a re-request and re-wait. - Right office for the birthplace: a French ancestor born ABROAD (or in a former colony/Algeria) is NOT at any mairie — their act is at the Service central d'état civil in Nantes. Sending the request to a town hall is a common dead end. - The apostille authority CHANGED in 2025: since 1 May 2025 French apostilles come from the notariat (apostille.notaires.fr), NOT the cour d'appel / parquet général. Older guides and many blogs still say 'cour d'appel' — following them wastes a trip. - Don't over-apostille: French civil-status acts used INSIDE France for the CNF need no apostille; it is the FOREIGN ancestor documents that must be apostilled (or EU-exempt under Reg. 2016/1191) and sworn-translated. People often pay for the wrong apostille. - The 75-year (25-years-after-death / 100-year-for-minors) confidentiality delay controls who can pull a recent ancestor's act: within the window only close family/authorised pros; older acts are open archives at the Archives départementales and freely browsable online — so the retrieval route differs by the act's age. - Name/spelling and jurisdiction drift: French acts use marginal mentions (mentions marginales) that carry later marriage/divorce/death and even loss-of-nationality notes — read them; and Alsace-Moselle records for 1871–1918 may be in German-era registers under a different classification. - Beware paid look-alike sites: official civil-status copies are free via service-public.gouv.fr and the SCEC; commercial intermediaries charge for what the state provides at no cost. ## Sources - [Service-Public.fr — Acte de naissance : demande de copie intégrale ou d'extrait (F1427, incl. who-can-request, 75/100-yr rule, SCEC Nantes for births abroad)](https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1427) - [Service-Public.fr — Légalisation ou apostille d'un acte public français (F1400 / R71995; notariat since 1 May 2025, cost & delay)](https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1400) - [Notaires de France — Apostille et Légalisation (notariat/CSN authority, apostille.notaires.fr portal, replaces parquets généraux)](https://www.notaires.fr/fr/actualites/apostille-et-legalisation) - [Notariat apostille request portal](https://apostille.notaires.fr/) - [Service-Public.fr — Certificat de nationalité française (CNF) (F1051; cerfa 16237, tribunal judiciaire greffe, Paris for those born abroad, required ancestor acts)](https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1051) - [Service-Public.fr — Traduction d'un document : trouver un traducteur agréé (F12956 / R45936; expert judiciaire, cour d'appel / Cour de cassation lists)](https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F12956) - [Service-Public.fr — Perte volontaire de la nationalité française (F3073; loss by voluntary foreign naturalization / libération des liens d'allégeance)](https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F3073) - [FranceArchives — Les registres paroissiaux et d'état civil (digitized by Archives départementales, 1792 start of état civil, series E)](https://francearchives.gouv.fr/fr/article/26287743) - [Service central d'état civil (SCEC) Nantes — contact/FAQ portal (records of French nationals born/married/deceased abroad incl. former colonies/Algeria)](https://etat-civil.diplomatie.gouv.fr/rece-informationusager-ui/) --- General guidance, not legal advice. EasyPassport is a document-organization tool, not a law firm. Confirm your own case with the relevant authority or a qualified professional.