Францияның ежелгі құқығы: салты мен жазба заңдарының айырмашылығы

Old French law, referred to in French as l'Ancien Droit, was the law of the Kingdom of France until the French Revolution. In the north of France were the Pays de coutumes ('customary countries'), where customary laws were in force, while in the south were the Pays de droit écrit ('countries of written law'), where Roman law had remained paramount. Roughly speaking, the line separating the two areas was the river Loire, from Geneva to the mouth of the Charente, although this was not a firm border between the two categories of law.

In the north existed a variety of customs "with a Frankish Germanic character." The coutumes were asserted and enforced under feudalism during the Middle Ages and in the early modern period by the French kings and their vassals, especially in the lands of the Île de France, to the exclusion of Roman law. A number of regional coutumes starting from the 13th century: e. g. the Coutumes de Beauvaisis, compiled by Phillipe de Remy. By the 16th century, the Coutume de Paris, first published in 1510, eventually extended to all of the Parlement of Paris' jurisdiction and beyond in cases of lacunae in the local customs. Antoine Loysel published a work of 958 legal maxims developed over a period of 40 years distilling the coutumes in his Institutes coutumières: Ou manuel de pluſieurs & diuerſes reigles, ſentences, & Prouerbes tant anciens que modernes du Droic‍t Couſtumier & plus ordinaire de la France in 1607. Further development of customary law had been halted by the late 16th century. For example, Claude de Ferrière commented that "community of goods" ("a partnership between married persons of all personal property, and of all real property acquired during the marriage state") prevailed "throughout all customary France, except Normandy, Rheims and Auvergne."

As worded by George Mousourakis, "after the revival of Roman law in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries and the spread of its study from Bologna to Montpellier and other parts of France, the Roman law of Justinian came to be accepted in southern France as the living law of the land", even though, as emphasized by Ernest Glasson, "coutumes did develop in those southern regions, and they often contradicted Roman law." "Prior to this, the pays de droit écrit in the south followed pre Justinian Roman law, based primarily on the Code of Theodosius II (A. D. 438)", as reissued in the Alarician Breviary. As wrote,

In the 18th century, Voltaire declared that in travelling through France one changed the laws as often as one changed horses. When the Napoleonic Code entered into force in 1804 all coutumes were abolished.

In 1664, under the royal act creating the French East India Company, the Custom of Paris became the only law of the land in New France. In 1866 the Civil Code of Lower Canada was adopted in Lower Canada. The majority of the Code's rules borrowed heavily from the Custom of Paris.