France Has 10,500 Laws and 127,000 Decrees. Some of Them Are Extraordinary. All of Them Are Technically In Force.
PARIS — France’s legal system is one of the most comprehensive in the world, built on the Napoleonic Code of 1804 and extended continuously since by a legislature that has had over two centuries to address every conceivable aspect of French life, commerce, and social interaction. The result is a body of law of extraordinary density that contains, alongside its necessary and sensible provisions, a collection of regulations that have not been repealed despite having outlived their original purpose, which is either a comment on legislative efficiency or a commitment to legal continuity, depending on your position in the relevant government ministry.
The Alcohol Laws That Reveal History
French alcohol law contains provisions that were written in specific historical contexts and remain technically operative. The 1954 law that governs the hours during which alcohol can be sold in specific establishment categories reflects a post-war social concern that has since evolved, but the law itself has been amended rather than replaced, producing a document whose layering reveals the decades through which it has passed. Wine is treated differently from spirits; the restaurant is treated differently from the bar; the municipal authority retains powers of local restriction that sit alongside national provisions. The entire structure is consistent and operable and also clearly the product of many different eras of concern. Legifrance, France’s official legal portal, makes all French law searchable and accessible. The researchers who use it to find unusual provisions have produced content that goes viral periodically. The law remains unchanged. The internet notes it. France shrugs.
The Kissing on the Platform Law
The widely cited “law against kissing on railway platforms” — said to date from a 1910 regulation preventing platform delays caused by extended farewells — is among the most repeated Paris legal myths. Its truth status is disputed. Its appeal is undeniable: it provides a story about France regulating romance that confirms every expectation about a country whose bureaucracy is extensive and whose relationship with love is complicated. Whether the law exists in current operative form or has been repealed or was always exaggerated is less interesting, culturally, than the fact that it is believed to exist, because the belief says something true about France: this is a country thorough enough to have legislated it, if it chose to. The potential exists. The potential is the story.
The Pig Named Napoleon
It is technically illegal in France to name a pig Napoleon. This provision, which appears in varying forms in French legal anecdote, reflects the post-revolutionary sensitivity to the misuse of the name of historical leaders in ways deemed disrespectful. Whether this specific prohibition is currently enforceable and under what statute is a question for a French administrative lawyer, and several French administrative lawyers have been asked it over the years, and their answers vary in specificity and confidence. What is consistent is that France has had the kind of political history that would produce such a regulation, has the legal infrastructure to sustain it, and has a bureaucracy that would not necessarily have gotten around to removing it if the original concern has passed. The pig named Napoleon is, in this sense, a very French legal situation: historically explicable, currently ambiguous, definitively interesting.
Legal, for now, at Virtuosal.com.
