You land at Charles de Gaulle for your first week in your Paris flat in months, or your Dordogne caretaker calls to say the shutters are forced and strangers live in your house. For a foreign owner who lives hundreds or thousands of kilometres away, discovering that squatters occupy a French second home is a particular kind of shock: the property is full of your furniture, your tax bills prove it is yours, yet you cannot simply walk in and change the locks. French law forbids owners from taking justice into their own hands, but since the summer of 2023 it gives you two structured weapons that work even from abroad: a 48-hour administrative route through the préfet (the State’s representative in the département) that can remove squatters without any judge, and a fast-track court route before the juge des référés (the emergency interim judge) that orders eviction plus a provisional occupation payment. This guide walks you through both routes exactly as they stand today, with the three Cour de cassation decisions and the four statute articles that decide these cases, the traps that make foreign owners lose months, and the prevention steps that cost far less than an eviction. Every rule below is tied to the official text or decision that states it.
I. How Does the 48-Hour Administrative Route Remove Squatters Without a Judge?
The fastest tool in French law is not a court case at all. Article 38 of the Law of March 5, 2007 on the enforceable right to housing, as rewritten by Law No. 2023-668 of July 27, 2023 to protect housing against unlawful occupation, lets the owner or the lawful tenant of a squatted home ask the préfet to order the occupants out and then have them physically removed by the police, with no prior court decision. The official service-public guide “What to do when squatters occupy housing?”, verified August 20, 2026, and the the ANIL (national housing information agency) analysis of the anti-squat law describe the same three-step chain: a criminal complaint, proof of your right over the property, and an official record of the unlawful occupation, followed by the prefect’s decision within 48 hours. Understand each link, because one missing document sends you back to the slow court route.
A. How Do You File the Complaint and Prove the Property Is Yours From Abroad?
First, be sure you are dealing with squatters in the legal sense, because the 48-hour route is closed to every other situation. Squatting means entering a home by break-in, deception, threat or violence and occupying it without the owner’s permission. The service-public guide expressly excludes three lookalikes: the tenant who stays on after the lease ends without your agreement, the guest you once took in who now refuses to leave, and the sub-tenant who remains after an unauthorized sub-lease you never approved. None of them is a squatter. If your occupant is a former tenant holding over, you must use the ordinary lease-termination and eviction procedure, with its payment orders and winter protections, not the squat procedure described here; our companion guide on notice to vacate to sell or repossess explains that parallel track. Starting a squat file against a former tenant is the single most common reason prefectures refuse to act, and it burns the weeks you cannot afford.
Second, file a criminal complaint for home invasion. The complaint (plainte) for violation de domicile (unlawful entry into someone’s home) goes to the police station or the gendarmerie of the place where the property sits, and you do not have to be physically present: a lawyer or a person holding your written authority can file and follow up on your behalf, which is how almost every non-resident owner proceeds. The criminal foundation matters because squatting a home is a standalone offence. Article 226-4 of the Criminal Code, in the version in force since July 29, 2023, states: L’introduction dans le domicile d’autrui à l’aide de manoeuvres, menaces, voies de fait ou contrainte, hors les cas où la loi le permet, est puni de trois ans d’emprisonnement et de 45 000 euros d’amende. In plain English, breaking into someone else’s home by trickery, threats, force or coercion, outside the cases the law allows, carries three years’ imprisonment and a 45,000 euro fine, and the same article punishes continued occupation after such an entry with the identical penalty. The 2023 reform doubled the old penalties and, crucially for you, settled the second-home question in the statute itself: the article now provides that a person’s home includes any residential premises containing furniture that belongs to them, whether or not they live there and whether or not it is their main residence. Your furnished Paris pied-à-terre or Périgord farmhouse therefore counts even if you spend eleven months a year abroad, provided your belongings are inside.
Third, prove the property is yours with paper, not with presence. The prefect needs documentary proof of your right: the title deed (acte de vente), recent taxe foncière (French property tax) bills, utility invoices in your name, or a written statement from a neighbour confirming you own the place. Assemble these before anything else, because from abroad every missing page costs days of courier and certified-translation time. If the squatters physically prevent you from reaching your own documents inside the house, the law has an answer: the prefect must ask the tax administration within 72 hours to confirm who owns the dwelling, and the 48-hour decision clock then runs from the tax office’s reply. Keep copies of everything outside France, in cloud storage your lawyer can access, so that a locked house never means a locked file.
Fourth, have the unlawful occupation officially recorded. The occupation must be formally noted (constat) by a judicial police officer, and since the 2023 reform also by the mayor of the commune or by a commissaire de justice (the sworn court officer, formerly called the huissier de justice, who serves process and draws up official reports). For an absent owner, the commissaire de justice is usually the practical choice: mandate the local office nearest the property to visit, photograph the break-in traces, note the occupants’ presence and, where possible, identify at least one of them, including from a name on the mailbox. That report becomes the backbone of both the prefectural request and any later court case, so order it immediately, before traces are cleaned and occupants rotate. Budget for this officer’s fees from the start: they are charged to you as the requesting party, and the officer must give you an itemised quote before acting.
B. What Does the Prefect Decide Within 48 Hours, and How Is the Removal Carried Out?
Once the complaint is filed, the proof assembled and the occupation recorded, you or your lawyer send the prefect of the département a written request for mise en demeure (formal notice) ordering the squatters to leave. Have the request drafted or reviewed by counsel: it must attach the complaint receipt, the ownership proof and the official record of occupation, identify the dwelling precisely, and state the legal basis. The prefect then has 48 hours from receiving a complete file to decide, taking into account the personal and family situation of the occupants. That last point surprises foreign owners, but it does not mean the prefect weighs your ownership against their housing need: the Cour de cassation has held that eviction is the only measure capable of restoring the owner’s full right, as Part II explains. It means the file must be formally flawless so the prefect can sign quickly. If the prefect refuses, the refusal must state its reasons, which your lawyer can then challenge or cure by completing the file.
The formal notice itself sets the occupants a deadline to leave that cannot be shorter than 24 hours where a home is squatted, and cannot be shorter than seven days in the other situations the procedure now covers. Since the 2023 reform, the route is no longer limited to someone’s lived-in home: it extends to any residential premises, which the ANIL analysis confirms covers vacant dwellings, properties stuck in an ongoing succession, homes standing empty between two tenancies, and newly completed houses the owner never had time to move into. Only the owner can apply for premises that are not a lived-in home, and the proof-of-ownership requirement is correspondingly stricter there. The notice is served on the occupants, displayed at the town hall and on the building concerned, and sent to you as the applicant. If the squatters have not left when the deadline expires, the prefect must have the dwelling forcibly evacuated by the police without delay, unless you yourself objected within the enforcement period. There is no court hearing, no appeal that suspends the operation, and no winter break: the statute expressly provides that the trêve hivernale (the winter truce that normally freezes evictions from November to March) does not apply to squats, so a removal ordered in January is enforced in January.
Three Paris and Île-de-France practicalities deserve a special mention, because most foreign-owned second homes cluster there and the capital’s procedures have their own rhythm. First, identify the competent prefecture before the crisis: it is the prefecture of the département where the property sits, reached through that prefecture’s dedicated unlawful-occupation channel where one exists, and your lawyer will know the current desk. Second, line up your local eyes and ears now, not after the break-in: a neighbour with your telephone number, a building caretaker (gardien) who watches the landing, or a management company that checks the flat monthly will alert you weeks before a squat consolidates, and early complaints are processed faster than entrenched occupations. Third, keep a Paris-based file ready: title deed, last three taxe foncière notices, insurance policy, photographs of each room with your furniture in place, and your lawyer’s standing authority to file complaints and commission reports. Owners who can email that file within hours of the alert routinely obtain the prefect’s order within days; owners who start searching for deeds from abroad routinely lose a month. Readers dealing with the broader landlord toolkit in the capital, from leases to court enforcement, will find our Paris real estate law practice overview useful for situating this emergency procedure among the ordinary ones.
II. How Do the Judge, the Criminal Court and the Money Complete the Recovery?
The prefectural route is fast but conditional: an incomplete file, a prefectural refusal, or occupants who fall outside the administrative procedure’s scope all send you to the judge. The court route is slower but broader, it produces the eviction order and the money judgment the prefectural route never gives you, and its principles were settled by the Cour de cassation in decisions your lawyer will cite by number. This second part covers the emergency eviction trial, the occupation payment and damages that repair your loss, and the criminal and preventive framework that surrounds both routes.
A. How Does the Emergency Eviction Trial Work, and What Occupation Payment Can You Obtain?
The civil action starts exactly like the administrative one, with the complaint and the proof, and then diverges toward the courtroom. Your lawyer seizes the protection-litigation judge (juge des contentieux de la protection) of the place where the property sits, sitting in référé (emergency interim proceedings), and asks for two things: the occupants’ eviction and an order that they pay an indemnité d’occupation (a monthly occupation payment) until they actually leave with the keys returned. To carry the eviction, you prove two facts: that the dwelling belongs to you, with the title deed, tax documents and invoices, and that it is squatted, meaning entry by trickery, threats, force or coercion followed by continued presence, with the commissaire de justice‘s report and, wherever possible, the identity of at least one occupant. The lawyer then has the occupants summoned to the hearing. At that hearing, the owner is entitled to the eviction without any debate about the occupants’ private and family life or their right to decent housing: that shield, which slows down ordinary tenant evictions for months, does not operate against squatters. The judgment is served on the occupants, and if they have not left, the enforcement machinery of payment orders to vacate and police assistance takes over under the ordinary enforcement code.
The legal reason this emergency route almost always succeeds is a 2019 Cour de cassation landmark that every French property lawyer knows. In Cass. Civ. 3rd, July 4, 2019, No. 18-17.119, published in the Bulletin, occupants of a plot of land argued that evicting them without a proportionality review violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Court rejected the appeal, holding that eviction is the only measure that can restore the owner’s full right and that the resulting interference with the occupant’s home can never be disproportionate given the gravity of the attack on property. On the facts it approved the rule that toute occupation sans droit ni titre du bien d’autrui constitue un trouble manifestement illicite. In plain English, any occupation of someone else’s property without right or title is a manifestly unlawful disturbance, which is precisely the gateway condition for emergency référé relief. The civil foundation beneath that rule is Article 544 of the Civil Code, which provides: La propriété est le droit de jouir et disposer des choses de la manière la plus absolue, pourvu qu’on n’en fasse pas un usage prohibé par les lois ou par les règlements. In plain English, ownership is the right to enjoy and dispose of things in the most absolute manner, provided no use prohibited by statute or regulation is made of them. Because your ownership is absolute in this sense, an occupation with neither lease, title nor permission is unlawful on its face, and the emergency judge does not need evidence of any further harm to order the occupants out.
The money follows the eviction, and here a January 2025 decision changed what foreign owners should demand. In Cass. Civ. 3rd, January 9, 2025, No. 23-19.335, the buyer of co-owned apartment lots at a court auction had the former owner, who stayed on paying nothing, expelled in référé and ordered to pay a provisional occupation payment. The occupant argued that the emergency judge, who must not prejudice the merits, could only grant a provision and had exceeded his powers by fixing a full monthly payment. The Court rejected the appeal: Article 835 of the Code of Civil Procedure authorises the court president to grant the owner a provision against the payment due for occupation without right or title, capped only at the amount that is not seriously disputable. The Court’s own words deserve quotation: l’article 835 du code de procédure civile autorisait le président du tribunal judiciaire à allouer au propriétaire une provision à valoir sur l’indemnité due en raison de l’occupation sans droit ni titre de son bien qui n’a d’autre limite que le montant non sérieusement contestable de la créance alléguée. In plain English, Article 835 lets the court president award the owner an advance on the payment owed for occupation without right or title, limited only to the undisputed portion of the claimed sum. The same article states the general rule: Dans les cas où l’existence de l’obligation n’est pas sérieusement contestable, ils peuvent accorder une provision au créancier, ou ordonner l’exécution de l’obligation même s’il s’agit d’une obligation de faire. In plain English, where the obligation is not seriously disputable, the emergency judge may grant the creditor a provision or order performance even of an obligation to act.
Three practical consequences flow from that decision for your file. First, always claim the provisional occupation payment in the same emergency writ as the eviction: it costs nothing extra to add and it converts dead months into a judicially recognised debt from the first day of unlawful occupation until the keys come back. Second, anchor the amount to the property’s rental value with evidence, an agency rent estimate, comparable listings, or the former rent if there was one, because the judge fixes the provision within the undisputed amount and documented figures are rarely disputed. Third, keep the final settlement for the merits court: the référé payment is an advance, and any balance, indexation or dispute over the exact rental value goes to the full trial later. Beyond the occupation payment, claim repair of every proven loss on the general fault principle of Article 1240 of the Civil Code: Tout fait quelconque de l’homme, qui cause à autrui un dommage, oblige celui par la faute duquel il est arrivé à le réparer. In plain English, any act that causes damage to another obliges the person through whose fault it occurred to repair it. Degraded doors and windows, stolen fixtures, cleaning and re-letting costs, and solicitor and enforcement disbursements all belong in that schedule, each with invoice or quote, because French judges compensate proven loss, never bare assertion. One tax flag, without tax advice: have your French tax adviser classify the occupation payments and damages you receive, since recurring occupation payments are normally treated as taxable rental-type income.
B. What Criminal Penalties, Winter-Truce Rules and Prevention Steps Should an Absent Owner Know?
The criminal dimension runs alongside the civil and administrative routes and serves a different purpose: punishment and pressure. Entry and continued occupation each carry three years’ imprisonment and a 45,000 euro fine, and damaging the dwelling on the way in adds up to two years and 30,000 euros. Your complaint therefore triggers a police investigation in parallel with your eviction file, and officers who identify the occupants for the criminal case simultaneously solve your civil problem of naming defendants for the summons. A June 2025 criminal decision adds a precision your lawyer must get right when drafting the complaint. In Cass. Crim., June 3, 2025, No. 23-81.916, the Court quashed a home-invasion conviction and recalled the exact boundary of the offence: 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, quels que soient le titre juridique de son occupation et l’affectation donnée aux locaux, ledit texte n’ayant pas pour objet de garantir d’une manière générale les propriétés immobilières contre une usurpation. In plain English, only a place where a person, whether living there or not, is entitled to call home counts as a home under this article, whatever their legal basis for occupying it and whatever the premises are used for, because the provision does not generally protect buildings against trespass as such. Concretely, your furnished second home where your belongings sit is your home for criminal purposes even between stays, while a bare building site or an empty garage with no residential connection may fall outside this particular offence and must be attacked through the civil eviction and the administrative route instead. Frame the complaint around your furniture, your regular stays and your personal ties to the place, and let counsel choose the exact criminal qualification.
Two related situations need a clear answer because foreign owners constantly confuse them with squats. The first is the guest who was allowed in and will not leave: a housesitter, a relative, a former partner. There was no forced entry, so there is no squat and no 48-hour prefectural route; recovery runs through the ordinary courts, with the occupant’s status, tolerated guest or occupant without right, determining the exact writ. The second is the holiday-let guest who stays on after the rental ends. The service-public guide treats overstaying a tourist furnished letting as its own second scenario, and recent legislation has progressively pulled it into the accelerated removal system; the practical reflex is identical, immediate complaint, immediate official record, immediate lawyer, with counsel confirming which removal track the current rules open on your facts. In both cases, the golden prohibition never changes: never force the occupants out yourself, never change the locks while they are away, never cut water or power to drive them off. Self-help exposes you to criminal complaints for violence or trespass and can reverse the parties’ roles in the file; every euro spent on the lawful routes protects you twice, by recovering the property and by keeping your own record clean.
Prevention is where absent owners win or lose the war, because an occupied-looking, watched property is almost never squatted. Make the dwelling look lived in: timers on interior lights, shutters opened and closed on a rhythm, mail collected, garden cut, snow cleared. Give one local person, a neighbour, a caretaker, a management firm, your keys, your telephone number and written instructions to call the police and you at the first sign of intrusion, and put that arrangement in a short written agreement. Fit intrusion-resistant doors and windows, an alarm with remote notification, and, in houses, exterior lighting; keep the insurance that covers unlawful occupation and legal-protection cover that pays counsel’s fees, and re-read both policies now, since several require the dwelling to be checked at stated intervals and reduce cover if it stands empty beyond the contractual period. Visit or have the property visited on a documented schedule, and after each visit store dated photographs of every room: those images later prove both your furniture for the criminal definition of home and the property’s condition for the damages schedule. None of these steps replaces the two removal routes above, but owners who apply them rarely need those routes at all.
Conclusion
A squatted French second home feels like a legal dead end for an owner living abroad, yet the current system offers one of the fastest removal mechanisms in French property law. Remember the order of operations: verify you face true squatters and not a holding-over tenant or an invited guest, file the criminal complaint immediately through your local representative, assemble the ownership proof and the official record of occupation without delay, and aim first for the prefect’s 48-hour formal notice with police enforcement behind it. If that route closes, the emergency judge evicts on the strength of your absolute ownership without debating the occupants’ housing situation, awards a provisional occupation payment within the undisputed amount, and leaves the balance of your losses to be settled with invoices under the general law of damages. The criminal complaint punishes the entry, the winter truce never protects the squatter, and only documented, lawful action recovers both the property and the money. Prepare the file before the crisis, act within hours when it breaks, and mandate counsel on the ground: distance stops being a handicap the moment the procedure, not the owner, does the pushing.