You ship the goods, you issue the invoice, and then the email arrives: your French customer has been placed in redressement judiciaire, the French court-supervised reorganisation procedure, or in liquidation judiciaire, the French court-ordered winding-up procedure. You are based in London, New York, Dubai or Singapore, the unpaid invoices total tens of thousands of euros, and a well-meaning contact in France tells you to sue immediately. That advice would waste your money. From the day the French court opens insolvency proceedings, individual lawsuits and enforcement measures over old debts are frozen, the customer is forbidden from paying you even if it wants to, and your only path to recovery runs through a strict administrative procedure with deadlines measured in weeks. Miss the deadline and your claim is shut out of every distribution. This guide explains, for a foreign supplier or service provider with no office in France, how to declare your claim on time from abroad, how to reclaim your goods instead of joining the queue of unpaid creditors, and how to challenge a rejection without flying to Paris. If your French customer has simply stopped paying but no court has stepped in yet, read our companion guide on recovering an unpaid invoice through the French injonction de payer procedure first: French Customer Won’t Pay Your Invoice? How a Foreign Company Recovers the Debt in France. Once a court has opened proceedings, this guide takes over. For the bigger picture of running a French business from abroad, start with our pillar guide: Setting Up a Company in France as a Foreign Founder: Bank Account, Kbis, VAT and Your First Hire.

French insolvency vocabulary is precise and every word matters, so here are the actors you will meet. The jugement d’ouverture is the court decision that opens the proceedings and is published in the BODACC, the Bulletin officiel des annonces civiles et commerciales, the official gazette where every French insolvency opening is announced and which you can search free of charge on bodacc.fr. The mandataire judiciaire is the court-appointed officer who represents the creditors as a group; in a liquidation he is called the liquidateur judiciaire. The juge-commissaire is the supervising judge inside the court who admits or rejects claims and grants relief from missed deadlines. The greffe is the clerk’s office of the commercial court. With those roles in mind, the two questions every foreign supplier asks have clear answers: first, how do I declare my claim before the deadline, and second, how do I actually get money or goods back.

I. How does a foreign supplier declare its claim in France before the deadline?

A. Stop suing, find the opening judgment and identify who receives your declaration

The first reflex to unlearn is the lawsuit. Article L. 622-21 of the French Commercial Code provides that the opening judgment interrupts or prohibits any legal action by creditors whose claims arose before the opening and seek an order that the debtor pay a sum of money or the termination of a contract for non-payment of money: Article L. 622-21 of the Commercial Code. The same article stops or prohibits all enforcement proceedings against movable and immovable property. In plain terms, the bailiff you were about to instruct must stand down, and a case you already started is interrupted. Parallel to that freeze, Article L. 622-7 of the Commercial Code states that the opening judgment automatically prohibits the payment of any claim that arose before the opening judgment: Article L. 622-7 of the Commercial Code. Your customer is not being difficult when it stops paying after the opening; paying you would be illegal, with only narrow exceptions such as set-off of connected claims. Any payment you manage to extract individually after the opening can be clawed back, so do not waste fees chasing one.

Your first practical step is therefore to confirm the opening and its exact date. Search the debtor company’s name on bodacc.fr and read the announcement of the jugement d’ouverture: it names the court, the type of proceedings — sauvegarde, the preventive procedure for a solvent but struggling company, redressement judiciaire, the reorganisation procedure, or liquidation judiciaire, the terminal procedure — and, critically, the mandataire judiciaire or liquidateur judiciaire with his office address. Everything runs from the publication date of that judgment in the BODACC. Set up a monitoring routine, because French customers rarely warn their foreign suppliers before filing, and the clock starts whether or not anyone emails you. If you hold a published security such as a mortgage or a pledge, or you are bound to the debtor by a published contract, the mandataire must warn you personally, and your time limit runs from that personal notice rather than from the BODACC publication, as Article L. 622-24 of the Commercial Code explains: Article L. 622-24 of the Commercial Code. Ordinary unsecured foreign suppliers get no personal notice, which is exactly why so many of them discover the proceedings too late.

The second practical step is to freeze your own exposure. If you have an ongoing supply contract, know that the opening alone does not kill it: Article L. 622-13 of the Commercial Code provides that no termination of an ongoing contract can result from the mere fact of the opening of sauvegarde proceedings, and the other party must perform its obligations despite the debtor’s failure to perform pre-opening commitments, with the administrator alone entitled to require continued performance: Article L. 622-13 of the Commercial Code. The same logic applies in redressement judiciaire. Do not keep shipping on the old payment terms hoping things improve; negotiate cash in advance for any post-opening deliveries, because claims arising properly after the opening for the needs of the proceedings enjoy priority treatment, while your old invoices do not. Suspend any direct debit mandates and stop any enforcement agent you previously instructed, since acts of enforcement after the opening are void and cost you fees for nothing. Gather today the full documentary file you will need for the declaration: every unpaid invoice, the underlying contract or purchase orders, delivery notes and proof of delivery, your general terms of sale with any retention-of-title clause highlighted, account statements showing partial payments, and any correspondence acknowledging the debt. A declaration filed from abroad with complete documents in the first envelope is processed faster and contested less often than a thin declaration followed by three rounds of follow-up letters.

B. File the declaration of claims within four months and know the rescue route if you are late

The declaration des créances, the formal lodging of your claim, is the single act that decides whether you exist in the proceedings. Article L. 622-24 of the Commercial Code requires every creditor whose claim arose before the opening judgment, except employees, to send the declaration of its claims to the mandataire judiciaire within time limits set by decree: Article L. 622-24 of the Commercial Code. The decree is Article R. 622-24 of the Commercial Code, which sets the standard period at two months from publication of the opening judgment in the BODACC, and then adds the provision that matters most to readers of this guide: where the proceedings are opened by a court sitting in metropolitan France, the period is extended by two further months for creditors who do not live in metropolitan France: Article R. 622-24 of the Commercial Code. A supplier based in London, New York, Dubai or Singapore therefore has four months, not two, and the French administration confirms this plainly: the official service-public guide states that the period is two months from publication, that creditors outside metropolitan France get four months, and that secured or published-contract creditors warned personally get two months from that personal notice: Déclarer ses créances envers un partenaire commercial en procédure collective, service-public.fr. Do not treat the extra two months as comfort; international post, translations and the appointment of a French representative consume them quickly, so file in month one.

The declaration itself follows strict form. Send it by lettre recommandée avec accusé de réception, the French registered letter with acknowledgment of receipt universally abbreviated LRAR, to the mandataire judiciaire or liquidateur named in the BODACC announcement, and keep the original receipt: in a dispute about timeliness, that small pink slip is your evidence. You may declare yourself or through any agent or representative of your choice, which means a French lawyer or even your French sales agent with a written power of attorney can sign for you, and Article L. 622-24 allows you to ratify a declaration made in your name until the judge rules on admission of the claim: Article L. 622-24 of the Commercial Code. State each invoice with its date, amount, contractual basis and supporting documents, declare claims whose final amount is not yet fixed on the basis of an estimate, and declare even claims established by no formal title, because the statute expressly says declarations must be made even where the claims are not evidenced by any title. Useful detail: where the debtor itself has brought a claim to the mandataire’s attention, the debtor is presumed to have acted on the creditor’s behalf until the creditor sends its own declaration, so check with the mandataire whether your invoices already appear on the debtor’s list — but never rely on that presumption instead of filing your own declaration, because the presumption only covers what the debtor actually disclosed.

If the deadline passes without a declaration, the sanction is severe. Article L. 622-26 of the Commercial Code provides that creditors who fail to declare within the prescribed periods are not admitted to distributions unless the juge-commissaire lifts the time bar, and that claims and securities not regularly declared within those periods cannot be enforced against the debtor during the execution of the plan: Article L. 622-26 of the Commercial Code. Relief, called relevé de forclusion, is granted where the creditor shows that its failure was not its own doing or resulted from the debtor omitting it from the creditor list the debtor is obliged to file. Here the Cour de cassation, the French supreme court for civil and commercial matters, has given foreign suppliers a powerful precedent. In a published decision of 3 July 2024, appeal number 23-15.715, the Commercial Chamber held, word for word: « l’omission du créancier par le débiteur sur la liste prévue à l’article L. 622-6 précité permet à ce créancier d’être de plein droit relevé de la forclusion par le juge-commissaire » — in English, where the debtor omits the creditor from the statutory list, the creditor is entitled as of right to be relieved of the time bar by the supervising judge: Cass. com., 3 July 2024, No. 23-15.715, published in the Bulletin. The same decision adds that a debtor who contests the very existence of the debt cannot use that contestation as an excuse for leaving the creditor off the list. Concretely, if your French customer never listed your invoices, your late declaration can still be saved by an application to the juge-commissaire — but you may then share only in distributions made after your application, so every week of delay permanently shrinks your recovery.

Once declared, your claim enters the verification phase. Article L. 624-1 of the Commercial Code requires the mandataire judiciaire, within a period set by the court and after seeking the debtor’s observations, to draw up the list of declared claims with proposals for admission, rejection or referral to the competent court, and to transmit that list to the juge-commissaire: Article L. 624-1 of the Commercial Code. Read the mandataire’s proposal the day you receive it. If your claim is admitted, monitor the proceedings for the plan or liquidation distributions. If it is contested or the supervising judge declares himself incompetent or notes a serious dispute, the case is referred to the competent court, and Article R. 624-5 of the Commercial Code requires the creditor, debtor or mandataire to seise that court within one month of notification of the referral notice, on pain of being time-barred: Article R. 624-5 of the Commercial Code. From abroad, the workable setup is a French lawyer holding a standing power of attorney who receives the mandataire’s letters, calendars each one-month and two-month trap, and files observations in French within days. The court will not translate your documents, will not extend deadlines because you are abroad beyond the statutory four-month rule, and will not excuse a missed referral because the notice sat in a spam folder.

II. How does a foreign supplier actually recover money or goods from France?

A. Reclaim your delivered goods and their unpaid price instead of queuing with unsecured creditors

Declaration admits you to the distributions, but in most liquidations the unsecured dividend is a few percent paid after years. Reclaiming your goods, the revendication procedure, can return one hundred percent of identifiable stock. The gateway rule is Article L. 624-9 of the Commercial Code: revendication of movable property can only be exercised within three months following publication of the opening judgment: Article L. 624-9 of the Commercial Code. Note the trap for foreign readers: unlike the declaration period, this three-month period is not extended for creditors living abroad, so a supplier who waits for the four-month declaration deadline has already lost the right to reclaim. The procedural mechanics are in Article R. 624-13 of the Commercial Code: the revendication request is sent within the Article L. 624-9 period by registered letter with acknowledgment of receipt to the administrator if one has been appointed or otherwise to the debtor, with a copy to the mandataire judiciaire, and if there is no acceptance within one month of receipt, the claimant must, on pain of being time-barred, apply to the juge-commissaire no later than one month after expiry of the reply period: Article R. 624-13 of the Commercial Code. Two registered letters and two one-month clocks: calendar both on the day you learn of the opening.

The strongest basis for revendication is the clause de réserve de propriété, the retention-of-title clause in your terms of sale stating that ownership passes only on full payment. Article L. 624-16 of the Commercial Code allows revendication, provided the goods are still held in kind, of goods sold with a retention-of-title clause, on condition that the clause was agreed between the parties in writing no later than at delivery, including in a master agreement governing a set of commercial transactions between the parties: Article L. 624-16 of the Commercial Code. Three conditions decide everything: a written clause accepted no later than delivery, which is why general terms printed only on the invoice after delivery regularly fail while signed framework terms or order confirmations accepted before shipment succeed; goods still existing in kind, meaning unprocessed, unmixed and unsold stock identified by serial numbers, batch references or segregated storage; and action within the three-month window. Photograph and inventory the goods at the customer’s premises through a commissaire de justice, the French enforcement officer formerly called huissier, before they are used, resold or mixed into production, and send the revendication letter immediately. The same article also covers goods handed over precariously such as consignment stock and goods on loan, which many foreign suppliers hold without realising they are revendication candidates.

Where the goods themselves are gone but their price is still unpaid, the law follows the money. Article L. 624-18 of the Commercial Code provides that the price or part of the price of the goods covered by Article L. 624-16 that was neither paid, nor settled in value, nor set off between the debtor and the buyer at the date of the opening judgment may be revendicated, as may the insurance indemnity subrogated to the goods: Article L. 624-18 of the Commercial Code. The Cour de cassation confirmed the mechanism in a decision of 9 December 2020, appeal number 19-16.542, holding word for word: « le droit de propriété du bien retenu à titre de garantie par l’effet d’une clause de réserve de propriété se reporte sur la créance du débiteur à l’égard du sous-acquéreur » — in English, ownership of the goods retained as security by a retention-of-title clause carries over onto the debtor’s claim against the sub-buyer: Cass. com., 9 December 2020, No. 19-16.542. If your customer resold your machines or materials before collapsing and its own customer has not yet paid, you can claim that resale receivable ahead of the unsecured creditors. The same decision usefully limits what revendication decides: it makes your ownership enforceable against the proceedings but does not itself settle every competing claim over the resale debt, so expect a second round against competing assignees such as factoring companies and instruct counsel accordingly. Lesson for future contracts: put a written retention-of-title clause in every set of terms accepted before delivery, require acceptance in writing, and keep delivery records that prove the goods found at the customer’s site are yours.

B. Collect the dividend, challenge rejections and manage the case entirely from abroad

For claims that are admitted without revendication, recovery means waiting for the distributions and protecting your ranking. In sauvegarde and redressement, the plan, the court-approved repayment schedule, sets the dividends and their timing; in liquidation judiciaire, the liquidateur sells the assets and distributes the price according to the ranking of claims, with secured and priority creditors paid first and unsecured chirographaires sharing what remains. Your declaration should therefore assert every accessory that improves your position: contractual interest and late-payment penalties provided by your terms, reservation of the costs of recovery where the contract allows them, and any security you hold, from a retention-of-title clause to a bank guarantee, a parent-company guarantee or a credit-insurance policy. Notify your credit insurer the day you learn of the opening, because most Euler-Hermes-type policies impose declaration periods as short as thirty days and a missed insurer deadline destroys the very safety net you paid for. Keep the mandataire informed of any change in your bank details using an IBAN that accepts SEPA transfers, since distributions are paid by transfer and a closed or changed account sends your dividend into administrative limbo.

When the mandataire proposes rejection or the juge-commissaire rejects your claim, challenge quickly and in French. The ordonnance of the juge-commissaire on admission can be appealed, and where he refers a seriously disputed claim to the competent court, the one-month referral deadline of Article R. 624-5 of the Commercial Code applies as described above: Article R. 624-5 of the Commercial Code. The most common grounds for rejecting foreign suppliers’ claims are documentary, not substantive: invoices without proof of delivery, claims stated in dollars without conversion workings, powers of attorney missing or in English only, and copies instead of the LRAR receipts proving timeliness. Cure each defect with a targeted filing rather than a general protest letter: the delivery note with the carrier’s tracking record, a statement converting each invoice at the ECB rate on the due date, a bilingual power of attorney legalised where required, and the original acknowledgment slip. If your claim was omitted from the debtor’s list and you filed late, combine the relevé de forclusion application under Article L. 622-26 of the Commercial Code with the admission file, invoking the 3 July 2024 decision of the Cour de cassation quoted above: Article L. 622-26 of the Commercial Code. Courts respond better to a file that cites the exact ground for relief and attaches the exact missing document than to general complaints about fairness.

Running the whole case from abroad is routine if you set it up properly. Appoint a French avocat with a written bilingual power of attorney covering declaration, revendication, applications to the juge-commissaire and appeals; give him a single contact person in your company with authority to sign; and ask him to copy you on every letter from the mandataire with a two-line English summary and the deadline in bold. Budget realistically: declaration and monitoring typically cost a contained fixed fee, revendication with a site visit by a commissaire de justice costs more but regularly saves the entire stock value, and a contested admission appeal is the expensive phase to reserve for claims worth fighting over. Watch the parallel tracks that change your recovery: if the proceedings convert from redressement to liquidation, your revendication rights survive but the dividend outlook darkens, so accelerate; if a plan is adopted, calendar each dividend date and chase late payments immediately, because plan dividends that go unclaimed or unmonitored are easily lost. And keep the commercial relationship with the administrator correct but firm: he alone decides whether your ongoing contract continues under Article L. 622-13 of the Commercial Code, so put any post-opening deliveries on cash-in-advance terms confirmed in writing: Article L. 622-13 of the Commercial Code. Foreign suppliers who act in the first fortnight — declaration drafted, revendication letter sent, counsel appointed, insurer notified — recover multiples of what passive creditors receive years later.

Conclusion

A French customer’s insolvency is not the end of your invoice; it is the start of a procedure where speed and form beat commercial pressure. Declare your claim to the mandataire judiciaire by registered letter within four months of the BODACC publication if you are based outside metropolitan France, and do it in the first month. Reclaim identifiable goods and their unpaid resale price within three months on the basis of a written retention-of-title clause accepted before delivery, because revendication returns stock while unsecured dividends return cents. If a deadline was missed because the debtor omitted you from its creditor list, apply to the juge-commissaire for relief from the time bar with the 2024 decision of the Cour de cassation in hand. Challenge any rejection within the one-month referral period with complete French-language documents, and run everything through a French lawyer holding a proper power of attorney so that no letter from the mandataire sits unread. Suppliers who treat the opening judgment as an emergency act once and recover; suppliers who wait for someone to contact them are quietly written out of the distributions.

Need a quick opinion on your case?

A French customer in sauvegarde, redressement or liquidation judiciaire, unpaid invoices piling up, goods sitting in its warehouse and a deadline running? Get a telephone consultation within 48 hours with a lawyer of the firm. Call +33 6 46 60 58 22 (Maître Reda Kohen) or write via our contact page with your invoices, your terms of sale and the BODACC announcement: we will tell you what to declare, what to reclaim and what it costs.