Виллер-Котренің жарлығы: француз тілінің заң жүзінде бекітілуінің тарихы

Statute that mandated the use of French for all legal actions

The Ordinance of Villers Cotterêts is an extensive piece of reform legislation signed into law by Francis I of France on August 10, 1539, in the city of Villers Cotterêts and the oldest French legislation still used partly by French courts. Largely the work of Chancellor Guillaume Poyet, the legislative edict had 192 articles and dealt with a number of government, judicial and ecclesiastical matters (ordonnance générale en matière de police et de justice).

The ordinance was part of a wider legislation regarding the policing of church benefices, to keep vital records registers in the various church local institutions (mainly parishes). The ordinance ordered the creation of at least a register of baptisms, needed for determining the age of candidates for ecclesiastical office, as a proof of one's date of birth, and a register of burials of churchmen, as a proof of one's date of death. Though both registers were kept by religious authorities, they were authenticated by a public notary, always a layman, and were kept in the local royal administration's archives. In fact, as the church kept parish registers since the Middle Ages (the oldest one in France is Giry's, of 1303), these registers were used to meet the ordinance's dispositions. The national registration was fully laicized in 1792 during the French Revolution by order of the French Republic. These records have continued until the present and are kept at the departmental archives. The civil registration now includes birth, marriage, divorce, and death records.

Another article prohibited guilds and trade federations (toute confrérie de gens de métier et artisans') in an attempt to suppress workers' strikes (although mutual aid groups were unaffected).

Many of these clauses marked a move towards an expanded, unified and centralized state and the clauses on the use of French marked a major step towards the linguistic and ideological unification of France at a time of growing national sentiment and identity. Despite the effort to bring clarity to the complex systems of justice and administration prevailing in different parts of France and to make them more accessible, Article 111 left uncertainty in failing to define the French mother tongue. Many varieties of French were spoken around the country, to say nothing of sizeable regional minorities like Occitans, Bretons and Basques whose mother tongue was not French at all. It was not until 1794 that the government decreed French to be the only language of the state for all official business, a situation still in force under Article 2 of the current French Constitution.