État civil is the French system of civil registration, and for genealogists it is the richest and easiest record set in the country. Since 1792, every commune has recorded births, marriages, and deaths in annual registers, in a consistent format that is easy to learn and very informative. This guide explains what the records contain, how they are organized, who can see them, and how to get a copy.
What état civil is and when it began
Before 1792, the Catholic Church recorded baptisms, marriages, and burials. A law of September 1792 transferred that responsibility to municipal officials, and civil registration has continued without a break ever since. The change happened unevenly, and some communes show overlap, but from 1792 you should expect to search the commune’s civil registers rather than the parish’s.
What each act contains
| Act | Typically records | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Acte de naissance (birth) | Date and place, child’s name and sex, parents’ names, ages, and occupations, declarant and witnesses | Establishes parents; marginal notes may record later marriage or death |
| Acte de mariage (marriage) | Spouses’ names, ages, birthplaces, occupations, residences, both sets of parents, consent, witnesses | The keystone: two generations in one record |
| Acte de décès (death) | Date and place, name, age, spouse, parents, informants | Confirms dates and links to a spouse and parents |
The marriage act is the single most useful document. It usually names the parents of both spouses, whether they were living, and often where they lived, so one marriage can carry you back a generation on two lines at once.
How the registers are organized
- Annual registers by commune. Each commune keeps separate registers for births, marriages, and deaths, often combined in one volume for small communes.
- Tables décennales. Every ten years, an index of the previous decade’s acts was compiled, which means you can find a name in a commune without reading every page.
- Two sets of registers. Each year, one set stays with the commune and a duplicate goes to the court, and after 75 years the duplicate registers are deposited with the departmental archives, where they are freely consultable.
- Marginal notes. Later events, such as a marriage, divorce, or death, were added in the margin of the birth act (mentions marginales), which can save you searching elsewhere.
The Republican calendar, 1793 to 1805
For about twelve years, civil registers dated events by the French Republican calendar, with months such as Vendémiaire and Thermidor and years numbered from 1792. Gregorian dates returned on January 1, 1806. You will need to convert dates for acts from this period, and our guide to reading old French records has a table.
Who can see état civil records?
Access depends on the age of the act, and the rules come from French archives law. As a general guide:
- Birth and marriage acts more than 75 years old are freely communicable to anyone, without giving a reason.
- Birth and marriage acts less than 75 years old are restricted. Full copies are generally limited to the person concerned, close family, and certain legal parties.
- Death acts can be obtained by anyone, though some communes apply a different practice, so ask.
Rules and local practice can vary, and the law is updated from time to time, so check with the commune or archives and with service-public.gouv.fr before relying on any single rule.
Where to look: online and by request
Most departmental archives publish digitized registers online free of charge, but each département decides how recent a record must be before it goes online. A common pattern is births after 100 years, marriages after 75, and deaths after 25, though limits vary. For more recent acts, or for a département that has not digitized a given commune, you can write to the mairie or the archives.
One practical wrinkle trips up many foreign researchers: the official online request service on service-public.fr, which lets you ask a mairie for an act, does not issue full copies of acts over 75 years old to people without a direct link to the person concerned. For those, the answer is to write directly to the mairie or to the departmental archives.
What to include in a written request
- the full name of the person, and any spelling variants;
- the date of the event, or the narrowest range you can supply;
- the commune and département;
- your relationship to the person and the reason for the request (for example, “genealogical research”);
- the type of copy you want (a copie intégrale, or full copy, contains everything in the act);
- your mailing address and, if you are abroad, how to send the copy.
Using paid sites as a shortcut
Filae, now part of MyHeritage, offers an indexed version of civil registration, which means you can search by name without knowing the commune. The images are the same ones published by the departmental archives; what you pay for is the name index and the search tools. See our comparison of French genealogy sites for when that trade-off is worth it, and our guide to the archives for the free route.
A worked example
Illustrative composite (not a real family): A researcher knows her great-grandmother married in 1911 in a village in the Haute-Saône. She finds the commune on the departmental archives site, opens the 1911 marriage register, and reads both spouses’ parents, ages, and the witnesses. One of the witnesses shares her great-grandmother’s maiden name, a likely uncle. From the parents’ names, she goes backward to the earlier marriages, one generation per evening.
When the line leads to a date before 1792, move on to our guide to French parish registers. For the whole picture, return to our complete guide to tracing French ancestry.
Common problems when searching état civil
- The event happened in a different commune than you expected. A birth was registered where it occurred, which may be a nearby town with a midwife or doctor, and a marriage was usually registered in the bride’s commune.
- A year is missing or damaged. Check the duplicate set of registers, the tables décennales, and neighboring communes.
- The name is spelled differently. Clerks wrote what they heard, so search by sound and try variants, and remember that women appear under maiden names.
- The act is hard to read. Zoom in, work through a few clear acts from the same clerk to learn the hand, and use our reading guide.
Special cases: Paris and Alsace-Lorraine
Two regions need extra care. Paris’s civil records were destroyed in 1871, and the city’s pre-1860 records exist today as a partial reconstruction assembled from other sources, which is why Paris searches often rely on reconstructed indexes and on notarial and parish material. Alsace and part of Lorraine belonged to Germany from 1871 to 1918, and registers from that period were kept in German, by civil registry offices, so expect German forms and vocabulary for those years.
For authoritative background on civil registration and archive access, consult service-public.gouv.fr and the national portal FranceArchives.
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