By Raphaël MORENON
26 March 2025
When debts pile up with no hope of being cleared, a situation often referred to as over-indebtedness, the French legal system offers a radical solution: personal recovery. This procedure, often compared to «civil bankruptcy», allows debtors to start afresh by wiping out their debts under certain strict conditions. To benefit from this procedure, the debtor must be in an «irremediably compromised» situation, according to article L.724-1 of the French Consumer Code. In practice, this means that it is clearly impossible to implement conventional measures for dealing with over-indebtedness. The debtor's assets must also be very limited: only furnishings needed for day-to-day living, non-professional assets essential to his business, or assets with no market value. In a ruling handed down on 19 February 2015, the Court of Cassation stated that this procedure applies even when the debtor owns property that is not part of his business....
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