You land at Charles de Gaulle, take the train to the Dordogne or drive down to the house near Uzès that you visit three times a year, and the key no longer turns. Through the window you see other people’s curtains. The electricity bill in your mailbox is in a stranger’s name. For a foreign owner of French property, discovering squatters is a particular kind of shock: you are far from home, you do not know which office to call first, and well-meaning neighbours repeat the old legend that once occupiers have been inside for forty-eight hours nothing can be done. That legend is false, and since August 2026 it is further from the truth than ever. French law now gives owners of second homes a fast administrative track to forced evacuation within days, backed by criminal penalties of three years in prison, and a court track that orders both expulsion and money. This guide explains, in plain English, what counts as squatting, the exact steps that get occupiers out, the defences that fail in court, and the traps that still catch absent foreign owners.
The framework changed twice in three years. The Law of 27 July 2023, known after its sponsors as the Kasbarian-Bergé law, tripled the criminal penalties for home invasion and extended them expressly to second homes. Then Article 14 of the Law No. 2026-798 of 18 August 2026 rewrote the administrative evacuation procedure and has applied since 20 August 2026, extending it beyond dwellings to business, farm and professional premises. Two recent Cour de cassation rulings complete the picture: a June 2025 criminal decision defining what a protected home actually is, and a January 2025 civil decision confirming that the emergency judge can expel and award money in a single order. This article is written for non-resident owners, not for lawyers, but every decisive statement is anchored in the statute or the court decision cited beside it.
I. The fast track: what counts as squat and how the préfet removes occupiers in days
A. Break-in plus staying put: the legal definition that decides everything
French criminal law punishes the act of entering another person’s home by trickery, threats, force or coercion, and punishes staying on after such an entry with the same severity: « est puni de trois ans d’emprisonnement et de 45 000 euros d’amende ». See Article 226-4 of the Penal Code. Three years of imprisonment and a 45,000 euro fine is the ceiling for both the break-in and the continued occupation. For a foreign owner, the practical message is that squatting is treated as a criminal matter from the first day, not as a civil dispute that slowly ripens. Your first step is therefore always a criminal complaint at the police station or gendarmerie, the plainte (formal criminal complaint), filed in person or through a representative holding your authority.
Since the 2023 reform, the statute protects second homes explicitly. Any dwelling containing furniture belonging to the owner counts as that owner’s home for criminal purposes: « tout local d’habitation contenant des biens meubles lui appartenant, que cette personne y habite ou non et qu’il s’agisse de sa résidence principale ou non ». See Article 226-4 of the Penal Code. A furnished holiday house in the Luberon that you occupy eight weeks a year is therefore your home in the eyes of the criminal law, provided your furniture is inside it. This single sentence ended years of argument about whether absentee owners deserved the same protection as permanent residents. Keep the property furnished and keep proof of it, because photographs of your furniture, inventory lists and insurance schedules are what turn an empty-looking house into a legally protected home.
There is one boundary to the criminal route, drawn by the Cour de cassation on 3 June 2025. The Court quashed a conviction where the supposed victim, a buyer at a forced auction, had never lived in the property and had only received the keys months after the alleged events, recalling that « Seul constitue un domicile, au sens de ce texte, le lieu où une personne, qu’elle y habite ou non, a le droit de se dire chez elle ». See Cass. crim., 3 June 2025, No. 23-81.916. Only a place where a person is entitled to feel at home qualifies, whatever the legal basis of occupation, and the offence is not a general guarantee of real estate against usurpation. For ordinary foreign owners this ruling changes nothing, because a furnished second home you actually use satisfies the test comfortably. It matters in edge cases: a bare plot, an unfurnished shell held purely as an investment, or a property you have never set foot in may fall outside the criminal definition, leaving you to the administrative and civil routes described below rather than the criminal complaint alone.
The opposite edge case confirms the rule. Where an occupier who had already been expelled broke back in and settled again, the criminal chamber upheld the conviction for home invasion, treating the forced re-entry as the decisive act. See Cass. crim., 19 November 1997, No. 97-80.762. Returning after a lawful eviction, changing the locks, and moving back in is a fresh offence, not a continuation of an old dispute. Owners who recover a property should therefore change every lock immediately, record the recovery with a commissaire de justice (sworn enforcement officer, formerly called huissier), and file a new complaint at once if anyone forces their way back in, because each re-entry restarts the criminal clock in your favour.
Three situations that look like squatting are legally something else, and confusing them wastes months. A tenant who stays on after the lease ends, a guest you accommodated who refuses to leave, and an unauthorised sub-tenant who remains after the sub-lease expires are not squatters in French law, so the express administrative procedure does not apply to them. The official public-service guide, verified on 20 August 2026, states this exclusion plainly and sends those cases to the ordinary courts. See the service-public.fr guide on squatted housing. Unpaid-rent tenants follow the special eviction procedure for leases, with its notices, debt-counselling stages and winter protections. Before spending money, identify your occupier correctly: forced entry by strangers means squat, while anyone who entered with your agreement, however informally, means a court case of a different kind. Our Paris real-estate team triages exactly this distinction before owners commit to a procedure.
B. The préfet procedure after the August 2026 reform: complaint, proof, report, then forced evacuation
The administrative track now runs on Article 38 of the Law of 5 March 2007 as rewritten by the Law of 18 August 2026, in force since 20 August 2026. Its scope covers entry by trickery, threats, force or coercion into another person’s home, « qu’il s’agisse ou non de sa résidence principale », and since the reform also any residential, business, farm or professional premises: « ou dans un local à usage d’habitation ou à usage commercial, agricole ou professionnel ». See Article 38 of the Law No. 2007-290 of 5 March 2007. Main home or second home no longer matters, and neither does the nature of the building. The same article now also covers the guest who lawfully rented a furnished tourist flat and simply stays on after the contract ends, closing the so-called holiday-rental squat that used to fall between two procedures.
Three conditions open the procedure, and a foreign owner can assemble all three from abroad through a lawyer or authorised representative. First, file the criminal complaint for trespass. Second, prove the property is your home or your property, using the authentic deed of sale, tax assessments, utility bills, or a neighbour’s written statement. Third, have the unlawful occupation formally recorded by a judicial police officer, the mayor, or a commissaire de justice who visits the site, draws up a report and, where possible, identifies at least one occupier. If the occupation itself prevents you from reaching your title deeds inside the house, the préfet must ask the tax administration to identify the owner within seventy-two hours. Practically, keep a folder outside France with a copy of your deed, your last two taxe foncière (local property tax) bills, electricity or water contracts in your name, and dated photographs of the interior, so your representative can move on day one.
Once the file is complete, you apply to the préfet (the State’s representative in the département) for a formal order to leave, a mise en demeure de quitter les lieux (formal notice to vacate). The préfet must decide within forty-eight hours of receiving the request, taking the occupiers’ personal and family situation into account, and may refuse only if the legal conditions are unmet or for a compelling reason of general interest, giving reasons for any refusal. The notice then sets a deadline of at least twenty-four hours: « La mise en demeure est assortie d’un délai d’exécution qui ne peut être inférieur à vingt-quatre heures. » See Article 38 of the Law No. 2007-290 of 5 March 2007. If the occupiers ignore it, the préfet must have the premises forcibly evacuated by the police without delay, unless you yourself objected within the deadline. Count the realistic timetable: complaint and report on day one, préfet’s decision within two days, evacuation a few days later. That is the days-not-months track the 2026 reform was designed to deliver.
Two qualifications protect owners against unpleasant surprises. Where the occupied building is not your own home, for example a vacant property held for renovation or resale, the vacating period extends to seven days and the occupiers may suspend the préfet’s order by filing an emergency application before the administrative court. Budget that extra week and ask your lawyer to monitor the administrative docket so a suspension application does not catch you unprepared. And the winter truce, the trêve hivernale (the 1 November to 31 March suspension of most evictions), does not apply to squatters at all: forced evacuation can happen at any time of year. An owner who discovers occupiers in December has exactly the same remedies as one who discovers them in June, which is not the case for ordinary landlord-tenant evictions.
Never take the law into your own hands. Forcing the door yourself, cutting off water or electricity, or hiring anyone to frighten occupiers out exposes you to criminal prosecution and destroys the clean procedural file the préfet needs. Every euro spent on a proper commissaire de justice report and a lawyer-drafted application to the préfet buys speed, while every act of self-help buys delay and liability. From abroad, the safest instruction to neighbours and caretakers is to observe, photograph from the street, call the gendarmerie, and touch nothing.
II. When the express track does not fit: the judge, the money, and the defences that fail
A. The emergency judge: expulsion, occupation rent, and damages in one order
Where the administrative track is unavailable or the préfet refuses to act, the owner turns to the civil emergency judge, the judge seized in référé (fast-track interim proceedings), in practice the juge des contentieux de la protection (the protection-litigation judge) of the local tribunal judiciaire (general civil court). The statute lets this judge order, even where the dispute looks serious, any measure needed to stop a manifestly unlawful nuisance: « pour faire cesser un trouble manifestement illicite ». See Article 835 of the Code of Civil Procedure. Occupation of your house without right or title is the textbook example of such a nuisance, and the same article lets the judge grant the owner a provisional payment where the debt is not seriously disputable. One summons can therefore produce three things: an expulsion order, a monthly occupation payment, and an enforceable basis for the rest.
The Cour de cassation confirmed in January 2025 how powerful this single order is. After a forced auction sale, the former owner, aged ninety-nine, stayed in the flats now owned by the buyer company, and the Paris court of appeal ordered his expulsion under a penalty payment plus a provisional occupation indemnity running from the auction date. The Third Civil Chamber rejected his appeal in full: the emergency judge was entitled to fix the provisional indemnity at the property’s rental value, and the fact that the former owner had appealed the auction judgment against him was no serious defence, since « l’existence d’un pourvoi formé contre le jugement d’adjudication ne constituait pas une contestation sérieuse ». See Cass. 3rd civ., 9 January 2025, No. 23-19.335. For foreign owners, the lesson is that the indemnité d’occupation (occupation indemnity, the court-set equivalent of rent owed by an occupier without title) runs from the day the occupier lost the right to be there until the day the keys are actually returned, at market rental value, and weak procedural challenges do not reduce it by a euro.
Beyond the occupation indemnity, the occupiers owe compensation for every loss their wrongdoing caused, on the general fault principle: « Tout fait quelconque de l’homme, qui cause à autrui un dommage, oblige celui par la faute duquel il est arrivé à le réparer. » See Article 1240 of the Civil Code. Any human act that causes damage to another obliges the person at fault to repair it. In squat cases this covers ripped-out kitchens, broken shutters, stolen boilers, the cost of the enforcement officer’s reports, locksmith and security bills, and the rent you lost because the house was unusable or unsellable during the occupation. Document everything from the first visit with dated photographs, keep every invoice, and have the damage recorded by the commissaire de justice in the same visit as the occupation report, because judges award what is proved and reduce what is merely asserted. Ask the court to add a daily penalty payment, an astreinte (court-ordered daily fine for each day of delay), to the expulsion order so that staying on after judgment becomes expensive by the day.
Expect the proceedings to move fast but not instantly. A référé summons typically brings a hearing within weeks, the order follows days later, and enforcement then requires a formal order to leave followed by the enforcement officer’s request for police assistance, which the préfet grants or, occasionally, delays for public-order reasons. The whole court route commonly takes a few months rather than a few days, which is why the administrative track should always be tried first when the facts qualify as squat. Run both analyses in parallel from day one: if the préfet route succeeds, withdraw or pause the court case; if it stalls, the court file is already moving. Owners based in Paris and the Île-de-France litigate expulsions before the Paris protection judge, where English-speaking lawyers are easiest to find, while provincial houses go to the court of the property’s location, which may require instructing local counsel alongside your Paris lawyer.
B. The defences that fail, the confusions that cost, and how absent owners prevent the next squat
Occupiers and their advisers regularly invoke the right to respect for private life and home under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, asking the judge to weigh their hardship against the owner’s title. The Cour de cassation has closed that door firmly and repeatedly. In a leading published decision, it quashed an appeal judgment that had refused expulsion out of concern for settled families, holding that « l’expulsion étant la seule mesure de nature à permettre au propriétaire de recouvrer la plénitude de son droit sur le bien occupé illicitement ». See Cass. 3rd civ., 28 November 2019, No. 17-22.810. Expulsion being the only measure capable of restoring the owner’s full rights, the resulting interference with the occupier’s home cannot be disproportionate given the gravity of the attack on property. The January 2025 decision applied the same formula to a ninety-nine-year-old occupant with no rehousing solution, confirming that age, poverty and absence of alternative accommodation do not save an occupier without title. This reflects the foundation of French ownership itself: « La propriété est le droit de jouir et disposer des choses de la manière la plus absolue ». See Article 544 of the Civil Code. Ownership is the absolute right to use and dispose of things, and no hardship on the other side rebalances an occupation that has no legal basis at all.
The costliest confusion is between squatters and tenants, because each follows a different procedure with different timelines. If the occupier holds or once held a lease, a receipt, or your written or verbal permission to stay, you face the lease-eviction procedure with its formal notices and longer delays, not the express squat track, and filing in the wrong track gets your case thrown out. Conversely, a genuine break-in must never be handled as a tenancy problem: do not sign anything with the occupiers, do not accept money from them, and do not negotiate a departure payment without legal advice, because each of those acts can be brandished later as proof of an agreement or a tenancy. The test is simple: did they enter by force, trickery, threats or coercion without your consent. If yes, it is squat. If they entered with your consent and stayed too long, it is something else, and your lawyer will redirect you before you waste a filing.
Absence is the occupier’s best ally, so prevention is part of the legal strategy. Houses that look empty for months attract break-ins: uncut hedges, permanently closed shutters, overflowing mailboxes and dark windows advertise vacancy. Arrange for a neighbour, caretaker or management agent to visit regularly, collect mail, open shutters in turn and park a car in the drive; install an alarm with remote notification and, for isolated houses, exterior lighting on detectors. Inform the gendarmerie of your absences through the standard holiday-absence scheme so patrols include your street. Check your home insurance: many policies suspend burglary or squat-related cover after sixty or ninety days of unoccupancy unless you declared the secondary-residence use and paid the corresponding premium, so call your insurer before a loss, not after. For owners who visit rarely, a written mandat de gestion (property-management mandate) with a local agent, including a duty to inspect and alert, pays for itself the first time it shortens your reaction time from months to hours.
Finally, diary the money and the paperwork as carefully as the procedure. The occupation indemnity is assessed at market rental value, so obtain a local agent’s rental estimate early to anchor your claim. Enforcement costs, locksmith, reports, translations and counsel fees add up to several thousand euros on a standard file, and while the court usually orders the occupiers to pay your irrecoverable costs, actually collecting from insolvent occupiers is often illusory. View the legal spend as the price of recovering an asset worth hundreds of thousands, keep every receipt, and ask your lawyer about legal-expenses cover in your French or home-country insurance before instructing. For Paris and Île-de-France properties, where values and rental levels make every month of occupation expensive, moving within days of discovery regularly saves more than the entire procedure costs. Our Paris real-estate team acts for non-resident owners from the first complaint to the final recovery of the keys.
Conclusion
Squatters in a French second home are an emergency, not a negotiation. Since the 2023 reform your furnished holiday house is your protected home under criminal law, and since 20 August 2026 the préfet can order occupiers out within days across homes, business premises and farm buildings alike, with the police enforcing the order if they stay. Where the express track does not fit, the emergency judge expels, sets a market-value occupation indemnity from the first day of unlawful staying until the keys return, and adds damages and daily penalties on top, while human-rights hardship defences fail as a matter of settled case law. Your part is speed and paperwork: file the complaint immediately, prove ownership with documents kept outside the house, have the occupation recorded by a sworn officer, never use force yourself, and never confuse a break-in with a tenancy dispute. Do those five things in the first week and French law, as it stands in September 2026, is firmly on the owner’s side.
Need a quick opinion on your case
Strangers moved into your French house, or a guest refuses to leave your holiday flat? Our office offers a telephone consultation within 48 hours with a lawyer of the firm to review your complaint file and your fastest route to eviction. Call +33 6 46 60 58 22 or write via our contact page with your deed, your latest property-tax bill, and any police report you have already filed.