You run your French company from London, New York, Berlin or Singapore, and the message that ruins your week arrives by email: your only employee in France has stolen from the till, insulted a client, refused to carry out an instruction, or simply stopped coming to work. Your first instinct is to terminate the contract immediately and cut off access to the bank account and the mailbox. Under French employment law, that instinct is the most expensive mistake a foreign employer can make. Dismissing for misconduct in France is not a decision, it is a procedure, and every step is timed: a two-month clock to start, a five-day wait before the meeting, a two-day freeze before the letter, and a dismissal letter that will fix the boundaries of any future trial. Miss one deadline and the dismissal collapses, even when the misconduct is genuine. This guide gives foreign founders and directors the only safe sequence. It explains what level of misconduct justifies an immediate dismissal without severance or notice, how the two-month rule and an internal investigation protect you, how to run the summons, the prior meeting and the notification letter from abroad without a procedural fault, and how the Paris labour court, the conseil de prud’hommes, judges the case and prices a defeat. The company formation path, the bank account and the Kbis extract, the company identity document issued by the greffe, the clerk of the commercial court, are covered in our general setup guide for foreign founders, and the economic dismissal route, with its redeployment and CSP obligations, is analysed in our companion guide on economic dismissal from abroad.
I. What can you lawfully punish, and how fast must you act from abroad?
A. What counts as serious misconduct that lets you dismiss immediately?
French law grades employee misconduct on three steps, and the grade decides what the dismissal costs you. Simple misconduct, faute simple, justifies dismissal but leaves the employee with the full package: notice period or pay in lieu, statutory or contractual severance, and accrued paid leave. Serious misconduct, faute grave, is the behaviour that makes it impossible to keep the employee in the company, even for the duration of a notice period, and it strips away both the notice and the severance pay. Intentional misconduct with an intent to harm, faute lourde, goes one step further and can also deprive the employee of the paid-leave indemnity, but courts reserve it for proven malice such as sabotage, theft for a competitor, or orchestrated disparagement. For a foreign employer, the practical target is almost always faute grave: it ends the contract at once and it is granted regularly, while faute lourde fails in most cases for lack of proven intent to harm.
The legal test for faute grave comes from the Court of Cassation, the supreme court for labour disputes, and it is purely objective. In a widely applied ruling of 12 March 2025, appeal number 23-12.663, the Social Chamber restated that “la faute grave, qui peut seule justifier une mise à pied conservatoire, est celle qui rend impossible le maintien du salarié dans l’entreprise”, meaning serious misconduct is the fault that makes it impossible to keep the employee in the company. In that case, an employee dismissed for persistent refusal to perform his contractual duties and a violent gesture toward a superior had signed, immediately after the dismissal, a settlement under which the employer undertook to rehire him subject only to a medical fitness opinion. The Court held that this rehire promise proved the employer itself did not consider the employee’s continued presence impossible, quashed the appeal judgment, and recalled the violation of article L. 1234-1 of the Labour Code, which grants notice rights whenever the dismissal is not grounded on serious misconduct. The lesson for a director sitting abroad is direct: never promise a return, a transfer, or a second chance in writing after notifying a dismissal for faute grave, because that document will be used to destroy your own qualification.
Typical behaviour that courts accept as faute grave includes theft or misappropriation of company funds, proven with till records or bank traces, repeated unjustified absence or abandonment of post, insubordination such as a documented refusal to carry out a lawful instruction, violence or serious insults toward colleagues, clients or superiors, disclosure of confidential data to a competitor, and working for a competitor during working hours. Typical behaviour that courts downgrade to faute simple includes an isolated delay, a single error without consequences, a private criticism of the employer without public disparagement, or a performance shortfall without disobedience. The difference is proved by documents, not by your conviction: warning letters, emails recording instructions, witness statements drafted and signed the day of the events, clock records, and the employee’s own written explanations. Start this file the day the incident is reported, because the labour court will later weigh papers, and an employer file assembled six months after the facts carries little weight.
Three financial consequences follow automatically from a valid faute grave, and each is fixed by statute. First, there is no notice period and no pay in lieu: notice exists only when the dismissal is not grounded on serious misconduct. Second, there is no severance pay. Article L. 1234-9 of the Labour Code provides that “Le salarié titulaire d’un contrat de travail à durée indéterminée, licencié alors qu’il compte 8 mois d’ancienneté ininterrompus au service du même employeur, a droit, sauf en cas de faute grave, à une indemnité de licenciement”, so an employee with at least eight months of service is entitled to severance except in cases of serious misconduct. Third, the paid-leave indemnity remains due in faute grave cases and is only lost for faute lourde. One point surprises almost every foreign founder: dismissal for faute grave does not deprive the employee of unemployment benefits. The French commentary, including the Village de la Justice practitioner note on the procedure, repeats this classic correction, and the job centre assesses entitlement on its own criteria once the employer files the mandatory employment certificate. Threatening an employee with loss of benefits to extract a resignation therefore achieves nothing and can turn into evidence of moral pressure.
When the facts are fresh and visibly serious, protect the company at once with a precautionary suspension, the mise à pied conservatoire, which removes the employee from the premises while the procedure runs. This suspension is unpaid only if the dismissal for faute grave or faute lourde is later confirmed; if the case ends in simple misconduct or no cause, the withheld wages must be repaid. Never confuse it with a disciplinary suspension, the mise à pied disciplinaire, which is itself a sanction capped in duration and governed by its own rules. Notify the precautionary suspension in writing, state that it is ordered pending the disciplinary procedure, cut system access through a documented IT ticket rather than a personal message, and keep paying nothing until the outcome. The suspension buys you calm, but it does not buy you time: the two-month clock described below keeps running, and a suspension that drags on for weeks without a summons looks like a punishment without procedure.
B. Why does the two-month clock decide everything, and how does an internal investigation protect you?
The deadliest rule in French disciplinary law fits in one sentence and kills more employer cases than any other. Article L. 1332-4 of the Labour Code provides that “Aucun fait fautif ne peut donner lieu à lui seul à l’engagement de poursuites disciplinaires au-delà d’un délai de deux mois à compter du jour où l’employeur en a eu connaissance, à moins que ce fait ait donné lieu dans le même délai à l’exercice de poursuites pénales.” In plain terms, once you know about a misconduct, you have two months to start the disciplinary procedure, and the starting act is the summons to the prior meeting. After two months of inaction, the fact is time-barred on its own: it cannot support a dismissal, a demotion, or any sanction, unless criminal proceedings were opened within the same period. A dismissal based on a prescribed fact is declared without real and serious cause, with full damages, even if the theft or the insult is proved beyond doubt.
The decisive question is therefore when the employer “knew”. Living abroad does not pause the clock: knowledge held by your French manager, your accountant who processes the expense reports, or any person with authority over the employee counts as the company’s knowledge from the day they learned the essential facts. The Court of Cassation clarified this on 15 October 2025, appeal number 23-18.178, a case between an employee and HSBC Continental Europe, by restating that “aucun fait fautif ne peut donner lieu à lui seul à l’engagement de poursuites disciplinaires au delà d’un délai de deux mois à compter du jour où l’employeur en a eu connaissance”. In that case the misconduct dated back before September 2016, a colleague reported it in November 2017, and the employer only reached an exact understanding of the facts in January 2018 at the end of an internal investigation, before summoning the employee on 8 February 2018. The Court approved the appeal judges for finding that the employer had obtained exact and complete knowledge of the reality, nature and scale of the facts only in January 2018, so the February summons fell inside the two-month period. The rule for a foreign director follows directly: an internal investigation genuinely needed to understand the facts postpones the starting point until you hold complete knowledge, but you must be able to prove the date of discovery and the reality of the investigation with dated material such as the complaint, the audit trail, interview notes, and the final report.
Three refinements decide most borderline cases. First, only the employer who proves late discovery survives: if the payslips, the till printouts, or the client complaint sat in your shared drive for three months before anyone reacted, the court treats the company as informed from the first availability. Second, a fact that continues or repeats restarts the analysis for the recent occurrences, so a new insult or a new cash shortage in the current month supports the procedure even when older similar facts are prescribed, provided the dismissal letter relies on the recent facts and proves them. Third, criminal proceedings opened within two months of knowledge, typically a complaint with civil-party constitution for theft, breach of trust, or forgery, suspend the bar and let the employer wait for the criminal outcome, but a mere police report filed late or a complaint lodged after the two months expired changes nothing. Diarise the discovery date the day you learn the facts, order the investigation in writing the same week, and summon within two months of the investigation report, because a file that shows reaction within days almost never loses on prescription.
A recent ruling of 13 May 2026, appeal number 25-12.039, opposing the company Enedis to an employee, adds a practical shield for employers who act fast. The Court noted that “la prescription des faits du 29 novembre 2018 a bien été interrompue par la première convocation à entretien préalable en date du 12 décembre 2018, intervenue avant l’expiration du délai de deux mois”, confirming that the first summons to the prior meeting interrupts prescription when it is sent before the two months expire, even in a complex multi-stage procedure. Concretely, sending the registered summons in week three after discovery locks the prescription issue, and the later stages can then unfold at their own statutory pace. Waiting for the perfect file before summoning is therefore the worst strategy: summon early on the known facts, investigate in parallel, and complete the file before the meeting and the notification.
One final preliminary applies before any sanction: the employee must be informed in writing of the grievances at the same time as the sanction process runs. Article L. 1332-1 of the Labour Code states that “Aucune sanction ne peut être prise à l’encontre du salarié sans que celui-ci soit informé, dans le même temps et par écrit, des griefs retenus contre lui.” The summons and the meeting satisfy this duty when they spell out the facts precisely, with dates, places, and amounts. A vague summons invoking “behavioural problems” or “loss of confidence” without facts breaches this article and poisons everything that follows, including a dismissal whose real grounds you only reveal in the notification letter.
II. How do you dismiss without flying to France, and how do you survive the labour court?
A. How do you run the summons, the meeting and the notification letter without a procedural fault?
The dismissal procedure has three dated acts, and the calendar between them is mandatory public policy that no employment contract and no company handbook can shorten. First, the summons to the prior meeting, the convocation à l’entretien préalable. Second, the meeting itself, where the employee speaks last in practice and may be assisted. Third, the notification letter, sent after a cooling period, which alone states the legal grounds. Each act can be performed from abroad through a French representative, a lawyer, or a manager holding a written delegation, because the law requires authority and traceability, not your physical presence. What destroys foreign employers is not distance but informality: a phone call instead of a registered letter, a meeting fixed too early, a letter signed by someone with no power, or grounds invented after the event.
The summons must be sent by registered letter with acknowledgment of receipt, the LRAR, or handed over in person against a signed receipt, and it must state its subject, the date, time and place of the meeting, and the employee’s right to be assisted. Article L. 1232-2 of the Labour Code provides that “L’entretien préalable ne peut avoir lieu moins de cinq jours ouvrables après la présentation de la lettre recommandée ou la remise en main propre de la lettre de convocation.” Working days exclude Sundays and public holidays, and the day of presentation does not count, so a letter presented on Monday supports a meeting the following Tuesday at the earliest. The letter must indicate that the employee may be assisted either by a fellow employee or, where the company has no staff representative, by an external employee adviser, the conseiller du salarié, chosen from the official list kept by the local labour authority. Omitting the assistance notice, or sending the summons by ordinary email, creates an irregularity that costs damages even when the misconduct itself is proved.
When the employee cannot attend, through sick leave, travel, or a request linked to your own rescheduling, handle the postponement with written care. The Court of Cassation decided on 21 May 2025, appeal number 23-18.003, that once the initial registered summons respected the five-day period, “l’employeur est simplement tenu d’aviser, en temps utile et par tous moyens, celui-ci des nouvelles date et heure de cet entretien”, meaning the employer only needs to inform the employee in good time and by any means of the new date and time. In that case the employee had been properly summoned by a letter of 31 October 2016 for a meeting on 9 November, then summoned again by a letter of 24 November for a meeting on 30 November because sick leave running until 17 November prevented the first date, and the Court approved the dismissal procedure as regular. The holding protects employers whose employee is on sick leave, a frequent situation in misconduct cases, but it assumes the first summons was valid and the notice of the new date was timely and documented. Send the postponement by registered letter and by email together, keep both proofs, propose a date at least a few days ahead, and never treat a medical absence as a refusal to attend.
The meeting itself follows simple rules that foreign directors often misunderstand. The employee must be heard, the employer states the contemplated sanction and collects explanations, and the employee’s companion, who must belong to the company staff or be a listed external adviser, may speak. You do not need to attend personally: a manager, a human-resources provider, or your lawyer can conduct the meeting under a written delegation that you sign and keep, and the delegation should state the power to hear the employee and report back, while the dismissal decision itself remains yours. Draft minutes the same day recording who was present, which facts were put to the employee with their dates, what the employee answered, and which documents were shown. Have the minutes signed by your representative, offer a copy to the employee without forcing signature, and file the acknowledgment slip. For disciplinary sanctions other than dismissal, article L. 1332-2 of the Labour Code adds that “La sanction ne peut intervenir moins de deux jours ouvrables, ni plus d’un mois après le jour fixé pour l’entretien”, a two-day to one-month window that also disciplines your timetable toward dismissal.
The notification is the act that wins or loses the future trial, because the letter alone defines what the judge may examine. Article L. 1232-6 of the Labour Code requires that “Cette lettre comporte l’énoncé du ou des motifs invoqués par l’employeur. Elle ne peut être expédiée moins de deux jours ouvrables après la date prévue de l’entretien préalable au licenciement auquel le salarié a été convoqué.” Send it by registered letter with acknowledgment of receipt no earlier than two full working days after the scheduled meeting date, even if the employee failed to appear, and describe each grievance with its date, place, amount or words used, and the evidence reference. The Court of Cassation held on 23 October 2024, appeal number 22-22.206, that “la lettre de licenciement fixe les limites du litige en ce qui concerne les griefs articulés à l’encontre du salarié et que le juge a l’obligation d’examiner l’ensemble des griefs invoqués dans la lettre de licenciement”. In that case the appeal court had examined some grievances, vehicle misuse, services provided to clients at no charge, poor workmanship, and late reports, but ignored the disloyalty grievance based on false rumours spread about the company with intent to harm, and the Supreme Court quashed the judgment for failing to examine every grievance in the letter. Draft accordingly: put every proven grievance in the letter, develop each one, and add nothing afterwards, because facts absent from the letter cannot be introduced at trial, while every fact inside must be proved.
Two practical tools complete the notification stage. The employee may ask for clarification of the reasons within fifteen days of the notification, and you may then specify the grounds within fifteen days of the request, using the official reason forms where useful; a careful clarification can save an imprecise letter, but a contradictory addition can destroy it, so have a lawyer draft the reply. The official employer guide on personal dismissal procedure and the official note on disciplinary sanctions in the private sector summarise these steps for employers and confirm the sequence of summons, meeting, waiting period, and reasoned notification. Close the administrative file the same week: deliver the employment certificate, the final pay slip with the paid-leave indemnity, and the tax and social attestations, because missing separation documents generate automatic penalties and a hostile exhibit at trial.
B. What does the labour court check, what does a lost case cost, and how do you defend from Paris or abroad?
When the employee contests the dismissal, the case goes to the conseil de prud’hommes, the French labour court composed of elected employer and employee judges, sitting in the district of the workplace or, for an employee working from home in Paris, the court of the employer’s French establishment. For a company whose French operations sit in Paris or the inner suburbs, that means the Paris labour court for the capital, and the courts of Nanterre, Bobigny, or Créteil for Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis, and Val-de-Marne respectively. The Paris court is reached through its greffe, the court clerk’s office that registers claims and summonses, and proceedings start with a conciliation hearing where the parties may settle against a statutory lump-sum payment, followed by a full hearing if conciliation fails. Limitation is twelve months from the notification for contesting the dismissal grounds, so a letter that arrives while you are abroad starts a clock you cannot pause by silence. A Paris and Île-de-France section belongs in your file from day one: note the competent court, the practical hearing delays in the Paris region, which routinely run beyond a year on the merits, the documents to prepare in French with certified translations of your English exhibits, and the procedural channel, representation by a Paris-bar lawyer holding a written power of attorney, so that neither you nor your manager needs to fly in for every hearing.
On the merits, the court applies a burden-sharing rule that foreign employers underestimate. Article L. 1235-1 of the Labour Code directs the judge to assess the regularity of the procedure and the real and serious character of the grounds, adding that the judge “forme sa conviction au vu des éléments fournis par les parties après avoir ordonné, au besoin, toutes les mesures d’instruction qu’il estime utiles”, and closes with the famous tie-break: “Si un doute subsiste, il profite au salarié.” Doubt benefits the employee. In practice, the employer must bring precise, dated, and consistent evidence for each grievance in the letter, while the employee only needs to raise a credible doubt on one decisive point, the date of a theft, the authorship of an email, or the proportionality between a single lapse and instant dismissal. An employer who proves three grievances out of four still wins if the remaining one constitutes faute grave on its own, because the judge examines each grievance independently, but an employer whose only grievance rests on an anonymous accusation or an undated screenshot loses outright. Build the trial file around originals: contracts, delegation of powers, summons with postal proofs, meeting minutes, the notification letter with its acknowledgment slip, payroll records showing the precautionary suspension, witness statements in the statutory form with identity documents attached, and the investigation report with its annexes.
The price of defeat is computed on three layers that stack. First, reclassification: a faute grave held to be a faute simple reopens the notice indemnity, the severance pay, and the paid-leave balance on the notice, plus recall of wages withheld during the precautionary suspension. Second, damages for dismissal without real and serious cause, priced by the Macron scale. Article L. 1235-3 of the Labour Code sets minimum and maximum awards in months of gross salary by seniority, from one month maximum for less than one year of service up to twenty months beyond thirty years, with a three-month floor for employees with at least two years of service in companies with eleven or more staff. Third, damages for procedural irregularity, which can be added when the procedure itself was breached, plus reimbursement of unemployment benefits to the state within statutory caps, article 700 costs, and enforcement expenses. Nullity, reserved for violations of a protected freedom, harassment, discrimination, or dismissal of a protected employee without administrative authorisation, removes the scale ceiling entirely and can lead to reinstatement or damages of at least six months’ wages. A single employee with three years of service can therefore cost between a few thousand euros for a minor procedural slip and over a year of salary for a dismissal annulled on the merits with nullity elements.
Defending from abroad is entirely possible when the mandate chain is clean. Your Paris-bar lawyer appears with a signed power of attorney, your French manager or HR provider attends the conciliation with settlement authority capped in writing by you, and you join critical preparation calls by video while the lawyer handles the greffe filings through the lawyers’ electronic network. Never send your foreign director to the hearing unprepared to answer in French through an interpreter: an improvised appearance that contradicts the dismissal letter damages the case more than an absence with proper representation. Prepare a settlement range before the conciliation hearing, because Paris courts push conciliation actively and a settlement at three to six months of salary often costs less than a full defence through appeal, while preserving confidentiality that a public judgment destroys. Keep every deadline in a shared calendar with Paris time, because the twelve-month contestation period, the appeal period of one month, and the enforcement stages run under French public-holiday rules that your home calendar does not know.
Five errors account for most foreign-employer defeats, and each is avoidable. Acting after two months of knowledge without criminal proceedings, which makes the dismissal ungrounded whatever the proof. Summoning by email or fixing the meeting inside the five working days, which adds an irregularity penalty to a case you might otherwise win. Signing the notification through a person with no written delegation, which lets the employee argue the dismissal came from someone without authority. Forgetting a grievance in the letter and trying to add it at trial, which the court must ignore since the letter fixes the dispute. And promising a rehire, a transfer, or a transitional mission after a faute grave dismissal, which contradicts the impossibility of keeping the employee and converts a won case into a lost one under the 12 March 2025 ruling. Run the checklist in order, keep the originals, and have a labour lawyer review the summons and the letter before sending: a one-hour review costs a fraction of a month of salary at the Macron scale.
Conclusion
Dismissing a French employee for misconduct while you live abroad follows a fixed sequence that urgency never excuses you from. First, qualify the facts honestly: only behaviour that makes it impossible to keep the employee, even during notice, supports faute grave with loss of notice and severance, and any written promise of return after the dismissal destroys that qualification. Second, beat the two-month clock: record the discovery date, order a dated internal investigation when the facts need checking, and summon by registered letter before the period expires, because the first summons interrupts prescription while waiting for a perfect file loses the case. Third, respect the three dated acts: a reasoned summons with assistance notice, a meeting held no earlier than five working days after presentation with minutes drafted the same day, and a detailed notification letter sent no earlier than two working days later that lists every grievance with dates and proof, since the letter alone fixes what the judge may examine. Fourth, defend the file from Paris with a mandated lawyer, a settlement range set before conciliation, and originals for every grievance, because doubt benefits the employee and the Macron scale prices every missing document. Distance is no defence and no handicap in this system: the foreign employer who documents each step wins from abroad, and the one who dismisses by email from another time zone pays for the lesson at the Paris labour court.