The parish and civil registers in Paris are documents containing records that officially establish the lineage of individuals born, baptized, married, divorced, deceased, or buried in Paris, within its administratively variable boundaries over time. Since the 16th century, the capital has maintained an exceptional quantity of parish registers due to its size and the high number of parishes. Directories accompany the collection.
In May 1871, during the Commune, most of Paris' archives, including its civil records, suffered a major disaster: deliberate fires almost destroyed the parish registers from the 16th century to 1792 and the civil registers from 1793 to 1859, despite being stored at two different sites. The flames obliterated nearly 11,500 registers containing over 8 million documents in a few hours. This resulted in a vast and permanent gap, making historical and genealogical research in Paris particularly challenging today.
The oldest known parish register in Paris belongs to the parish of . In agenda format and written in Latin, it covers the period from April 1515 to November 1521. Registers of baptisms were opened as early as 1525 in the parishes of and . The first burial registers, from Saint-Josse and , date back to 1527.
In August 1539, Francis I issued the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, requiring parish priests to keep a register of baptisms conducted in their church, written in French (Article 51):
Before this legal requirement, fifteen Parisian parishes already kept baptismal registers, three kept marriage registers, and one kept burial registers.
Presided over by Pope Paul III from 1545 to 1563, the Council of Trent also required priests to keep a register of baptisms performed in their parish. The names of godparents had to be included to prevent marriages between people linked by spiritual kinship (e.g., a godfather and his goddaughter could not marry). The council also mandated that marriages, freely contracted before a priest and two or three witnesses, be preceded by the publication of banns and recorded in a designated register. It also advocated for the union of children without requiring parental consent.
In May 1579, the extended the obligation to keep marriage and burial registers throughout France. The Ordinance of Saint-Germain-en-Laye of April 1667, known as the "," required these registers to be kept in duplicate: the first copy (the minute) remained in the parish, while the duplicate (the grosse) was deposited at the court registry. In Paris, the Châtelet registry preserved the second copy, with the oldest dating back to 1668.
By 1790, the capital had around . The law of June 27, 1790, passed by the Constituent Assembly, into forty-eight sections. The city then became the administrative center of the Seine department, which also included several nearby communes.
The law of June 22, 1792, established that municipalities would receive and preserve civil status records. Consequently, the decree of September 20, 1792, created the system. Starting January 1, 1793, mayors were tasked with birth certificate, marriage, and death records in duplicate. This decree also required all Catholic parishes to submit their parish registers to the municipality (Title VI). It was one of the last decrees passed by the Legislative Assembly, which gave way to the Convention the next day.
According to the decree of September 20, 1792, parish registers were handed over to the municipalities of the established in Paris by the law of 19 Vendémiaire Year IV (October 11, 1795). The Palace of Justice, located on the ÃÂle de la Cité, received duplicates of these registers along with those of the communes in the newly created Seine department, which retained their local collections.
Although Catholic priests lost their role in maintaining civil status records in 1792, they continued to record baptisms, marriages, and burials they performed. These were called "registers of catholicity" and, from 1793, were kept in each Parisian parish. The law of February 4, 1791, reduced the number of parishes in the capital to thirty-three, abolishing twenty-seven and creating nine new ones. Most Parisian Catholic registers began in the early 19th century, following the signed between Napoleon Bonaparte and Pope Pius VII. These registers were kept in duplicate for baptisms and marriages but in a single copy for burials. Article LV of Title III of the Concordat specified that "the registers kept by religious ministers, being and only concerning the administration of sacraments, cannot under any circumstances replace the registers required by law to document the civil status of French citizens." Nevertheless, these religious registers were largely used to reconstruct Paris's civil records after the 1871 disaster.
On the proposal of the politician Adolphe Thiers, after whom it would be named, a fortification was built around Paris from 1841 to 1844 by order of Louis-Philippe I. The king was convinced that defending the territory required preventing the capital from falling into the hands of foreign armies, as had occurred in 1814 during the Battle of Paris. Louis-Philippe thus wanted to encircle the city with fortifications to make it impregnable. With fifty-two gates or posterns, this fortification encompassed the capital and all or part of the surrounding communes. In these areas, residents avoided the octroi taxes imposed on Parisians, which the Wall of the Farmers-General enforced as both an administrative boundary and a fiscal burden.By the decree of February 16, 1859, and the , Napoleon III extended ParisâÂÂs territory to the Thiers wall. On January 1, 1860, the city expanded from to twenty districts. It absorbed, fully or partially, some nearby suburban communes.
The 11 fully annexed communes, moving from southwest to southeast through the north and east, were: Vaugirard, Grenelle, Auteuil, Passy, Batignolles-Monceau, Montmartre, La Chapelle, La Villette, Belleville, , and .
The 13 partially annexed communes, following the same directional pattern, were: Issy-les-Moulineaux, Neuilly, Clichy, Saint-Ouen, Aubervilliers, Pantin, Le Pré-Saint-Gervais, Bagnolet, Saint-Mandé, Ivry, Gentilly, Vanves, and Montrouge.
Since the twenty newly created districts differed geographically from the , the original parish registers up to 1792 and civil records covering 1793 to 1859 were stored at City Hall, along with those of fully annexed communes. All duplicates, forming the "Greffe collection," were stored at the Palais de Justice. Partially annexed communes retained their original registers, but their duplicates were also sent to the Palais de Justice.
On May 23, 1871, at the instigation of anarchist Jean-Louis Pindy, Communards set fire to many public buildings, including Parisâ City Hall. The civil records, stored in an annex at 4 Avenue Victoria, were the first to burn. Within hours, the originals of civil and parish registers were destroyed, along with the collection of the Historical Library of Paris, which had been transferred to City Hall. Just days earlier, on May 17, 1871, Louise Michel had declared at the "Club de la Trinité": "Paris will be ours or will no longer exist!"
On May 24, 1871, the day after City HallâÂÂs destruction, Communards burned the Palais de Justice on orders from Blanquist Théophile Ferré. The second copies of civil and parish registers for Paris and all communes in the Seine were lost as well. Besides civil registry offices, much of the Palais was destroyed: the offices of the Court of First Instance; the General ProsecutorâÂÂs Office; the Public ProsecutorâÂÂs Office; judgesâ chambers; two criminal courts (completed just two years earlier); much of the Court of Cassation; the Court of Appeal; the Great Hall and Grand Chamber; the Correctional Police; and the archives.
During this civil war, which ended the Commune, many other Parisian buildings burned, sometimes accidentally due to artillery fire from both sides. In mere hours, centuries of history were destroyed, including the Tuileries Palace, Palais-Royal, (seat of the Court of Accounts), the Ministry of Finance, the Palace of the Legion of Honor (where many records of honorees were lost), the Police Prefecture, the Louvre Library, the , Gare de Lyon, and the home of Prosper Mérimée at 52 Rue de Lille, which housed his correspondence and part of his library.
However, some buildings escaped destruction: the National Archives were saved by , who stopped his Communard comrades from setting them ablaze; the Louvre Museum; the Sainte-Chapelle, already doused in petroleum; Notre-Dame, where interns from Hôtel-Dieu extinguished a fire; and the Granary of Abundance at the Arsenal Basin.
Prior to the destruction of City Hall and the Palais de Justice, Paris' archives included:
The total losses exceeded eight million documents.
The memory of the Parisian population, preserved since the 16th century, was thus almost entirely obliteratedâÂÂboth that of the "people of Paris" and of the greatest moments in French history, including the births, baptisms, marriages, deaths, and burials of eminent figures. Historian wrote:
"The destruction of the civil registers stored at the Paris archives (Avenue Victoria) and the registry of the Seine Civil Court is not only a profound disruption for families but also infinitely distressing from a historical perspective. It was the most complete collection of its kind in France, dating back to the reign of Francis I. Within more than 150,000 registers lay solutions to countless questions: historians, biographers, genealogists, topographers, and autograph enthusiasts found a rich and precious mine there."
In the second edition of Critical Dictionary of Biography and History (1872), archivist Auguste Jal similarly lamented: "The Civil Archives of Paris were annihilated by fire, both at the Palais de Justice and the depot on Avenue Victoria, during those bloody days of furious hatred, criminal enterprises, and wild and savage acts that marked the few days in mid-May 1871. It was only natural for those who wished to abolish families to include in their incendiary program the destruction of records that established the genealogies of all familiesâÂÂcertain genealogies of the people, the bourgeoisie, and the nobility. [...] They needed to burn the proof of their ancestors' marriages, their parents', their own, and their children's. They no longer wanted marriages, so what did the registers of old Parisian parishes and municipalities matter to them? These documents, which for each family composed its history, were just ashes to be scattered to the wind. They knew that the records documenting their births, those of their wives, children, and grandparents would be lost. Yet they did not hesitate, despite realizing these births would remain uncertain and unproven in the future. What all sensible people living in society respect was reduced to nothing more than ashes cast to the wind. [...] If I foresaw revolutions, if I thought one might see terror return, I did not anticipate that innocent collections of documentsâÂÂwhere the poor, commoners, artists, and craftsmen stood side by side with the rich, nobles, partisans, ministers, and princesâÂÂwould become targets."
In 1847, A. Taillandier published a list of the starting dates of parish registers in several cities, distinguishing births (baptisms), marriages, and deaths (burials). In the section on Paris, after transcribing the oldest records verbatim, he provided a list of parishes. For several of these parishes, which did not exist under the Ancien RégimeâÂÂsuch as Saint-Ambroise, Saint-François d'Assise, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, or Notre-DameâÂÂthe registers began in 1791.
In 1890, E. Welvert published a summary report on the old archives of the Seine department, destroyed in 1871. This report was compiled by an archivist from the Prefecture named Aubert. Discrepancies in dates appear between the two lists, and some parishes are missing from one or the other.
To this inventory, one must add the parish registers of the communes fully annexed to Paris in 1860:
What survived amounts to only 29 articles. An ambiguous wording in the latest guide to the Paris Archives suggests that many registers were preserved. For example, it mentions a register from Saint-Eustache covering the period 1529âÂÂ1748, even though this parish originally had 395 registers dating from 1529 to 1789.
The mentioned registers are collections of excerpts compiled by Abraham Charles Guiblet. They pertain to noble or notable individuals and may be very brief, sometimes indicating only the name of a godparent or witness. These are preserved in the Manuscripts Department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Some have been digitized:
The destruction caused by the Commune affected not only the originals stored at the annex of the Hôtel de Ville, located at 4 , but also the duplicates from the Greffe collection, which were destroyed in the fire at the Palais de Justice on May 24, 1871. The disaster obliterated most of the parish registers (pre-1793) and civil status records (1793âÂÂ1859) from the communes of the former Seine department. The situation varies depending on how these areas were incorporated into Paris in 1860:
To address the destruction, a commission created by the law of February 12, 1872, was tasked with reconstructing Parisian civil records before 1860. This work relied on cross-referencing family papers (notices in particular), notarial deeds, and records of parish and civil acts compiled before 1871 by archivists such as Auguste Jal, especially for prominent individuals. However, the main sources used were Catholic registers from 1793 to 1860, preserved in parishes and had not been burned.
Accompanied by alphabetical index cards for searching, the reconstructed records were produced in duplicate through three distinct methods:
This operation lasted until 1897 and ended due to a lack of funds. It made it possible to restore slightly more than 2.6 million records, most of which date from the 19th century. Only 347,000 records were restored for the Ancien Régime, with just five dating back to the 16th century. Altogether, the restored documents represent only one-third of those that were destroyed. Birth records are the most numerous, with approximately 1,422,000 records dating from 1550 to 1859, compared to around 922,000 death records from 1568 to 1859 and 322,000 marriage records from 1630 to 1859. However, the vast majority of data, particularly that concerning families without descendants, is lost forever.
The reconstructed records are preserved at the Archives of Paris. Their duplicates, stored at the Montlignon Fort (Val-dâÂÂOise), were destroyed in a fire in June 1974.
A second reconstruction was carried out between 1941 and 1958, initiated by François Jourda de Vaux de Foletier (1893âÂÂ1988), director of the Seine Archives. This effort, referred to as the "second reconstruction," primarily used documents donated by families, biographical works, and dictionaries. It includes over 400 boxes, organized alphabetically by family name, and classified into births, marriages (listed only under the husbandâÂÂs name), and deaths.
The Archives of Paris continue to receive records or copies of documents to supplement the civil records. These contributions usually come from individuals who uncover materials during their research, effectively extending the "second reconstruction" of Parisian civil records.
Under the law of July 19, 1871, civil records registered from March 18, 1871, during the Paris Commune, were annulled and rewritten between August 1, 1871, and September 30, 1871, and in the following years. These revised records are referred to as "corrected records" (actes bâtonnés). Only the rewritten records were included in decennial tables, and their dates can differ significantly from the actual events they record. Despite being invalidated by law, the original corrected records remain in the registers and can be searched like any others.
At the , an accidental fire destroyed birth records from January 1, 1870, to May 25, 1871. These records were reestablished and are classified alongside those reconstructed in the official civil records reconstruction.
The loss of Parisian civil records largely influenced the creation of the family record book in 1877, introduced by a circular from Jules Simon, President of the Council and Minister of the Interior. The circular explicitly referenced the CommuneâÂÂs destruction, stating that âÂÂfamily record books will serve as a third deposit of civil records entrusted to individuals and will provide valuable information should registers be destroyed.âÂÂ
The law of April 5, 1884, concerning municipal organization, required town halls to budget for the costs of family record books.
Like that of all French municipalities, Parisian civil records have been updated over time. Since October 28, 1922, birth records have included the dates and places of birth of the parents. Marginal notes have gradually been added to birth records, including the dates and places of marriage and legitimations since the law of August 17, 1897, divorce information since March 10, 1932, and the dates and places of death since the ordinance of March 29, 1945.
Originally handwritten, Parisian civil records began being typed in the second half of 1922.
If the last residence is unknown, the law of August 10, 1917, requires that the following civil records be transcribed in the :
The arrondissement town halls have deposited their civil records prior to 1903 at the Paris Archives. While it only keeps its records, the centralizes requests requiring searches across all arrondissements.
In 1973, the City of Paris made an agreement with the Archdiocese to deposit duplicates of its registers of Catholic rites, including baptisms and marriages performed in all Parisian parishes from 1793 to 1899. Deposits continued until 1909. The other copies remain preserved in the parishes.
In June 1974, the duplicates of reconstructed records, along with numerous judicial archives, were destroyed in a fire at the Montlignon fort (Val-d'Oise), where they had been stored.
With original civil records starting only in 1860, Paris is one of the few cities in France where tracing family origins is particularly challenging. The 1871 disaster underscored the importance of preserving and protecting archives, which is now facilitated by digitization.
The Paris Archives have gradually made the following records available online:
Currently, all old Parisian civil records are accessible online.
The primary source for compensating gaps in Parisian civil records is the "Minutier central des notaires de Paris." Established in 1932 under the law of March 14, 1928, this repository allows notaries in the Seine department to deposit records over 125 years old at the National Archives. It includes 100 million records, spanning from the late 15th century to the early 20th century, sourced from 122 Parisian notarial offices, numbered I to CXXII. Documents such as marriage contracts, wills, post-mortem inventories, and various other contracts offer insights into Parisian daily life since the late Middle Ages.
While these documents help address gaps in civil records prior to 1860, they are also valuable for researchers studying local, social, demographic, or epidemiological history.
The Paris Archives hold registers for the admission of foundlings, abandoned children, orphans, and rescued minors, referred to as âÂÂassisted children.â These records span from 1742 to 1924, with a gap between 1748 and 1754. Available online, they provide registration numbers that allow access to the admission files on-site.
The Defence Historical Service (SHD), located at the Château de Vincennes, preserves military personnel files. Many of these files contain copies, sometimes complete, of Parisian civil records. The online databases include name indexes for officer career records. On-site, one can consult muster rolls for all army units, which record each soldierâÂÂs date and place of birth, residence, and the names of parents and spouses.
The Paris Archives also retain documents on military recruitment in the Seine department, including alphabetical tables (1872âÂÂ1940) and muster rolls (1887âÂÂ1921). These archives are accessible online.
The Paris Archives store two sets of records for male voters. The first covers voters in the capital from 1860 to 1870. The second lists voters in the Seine department whose registration status was modified (added or removed) between 1921 and 1939. These records are accessible online.
, administratively called "enumerations," are valuable genealogical resources, as their name lists help reconstruct families sharing the same residence. Censuses were conducted roughly every five years, except during wartime. Paris only organized four censusesâÂÂin 1926, 1931, 1936, and 1946. These records are available online via the Paris Archives website, except for the 1946 census, which can only be viewed on-site.
The Léonore database allows online access to a large portion of files for members of the National Order of the Legion of Honor. Many birth records predating 1860 are included, helping to fill gaps in Parisian civil records.
The Assistance PubliqueâÂÂHôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP) preserves numerous archives, some dating back to the Middle Ages. The oldest hospitalization registersâÂÂapproximately one million pagesâÂÂhave been digitized and made available online. âÂÂPopulation registersâ document admissions, discharges, births, and deaths. Each hospital maintains two types of annual records: alphabetical indexes to locate individuals and chronological registers specifying civil status, reasons for admission, and, in some cases, causes of death.
keep burial registers, with the oldest dating back to 1786. These records can be viewed online on the Paris Archives website for burials between 1804 and 1970.
Several publications contain copies of Parisian parish and civil records: