Your father lived in the Dordogne for fifteen years, kept his British passport, and died owning a stone house with a swimming pool — and, as you are about to discover, an unpaid mortgage top-up, three years of arrears on the taxe foncière (the French local property tax), a disputed bill from the builder who re-roofed the barn, and a demand from the syndicat des copropriétaires (the co-ownership management body) for service charges on the small studio flat he also owned in Bordeaux. The house is worth perhaps 280,000 euros. The debts may exceed that. As his British child, do you have to pay the shortfall out of your own pocket? Can you simply walk away? And what happens if you do nothing, sitting in Manchester, hoping the problem stays in France?

French law gives you exactly three answers, and only three. This choice is called the option successorale (the succession option). As the official Service-Public guidance explains, you may accept the estate outright (acceptation pure et simple), accept it only up to the value of its net assets (acceptation à concurrence de l’actif net), or renounce it (renonciation). Article 768 of the Civil Code states the rule in one sentence: “L’héritier peut accepter la succession purement et simplement ou y renoncer. Il peut également accepter la succession à concurrence de l’actif net lorsqu’il a une vocation universelle ou à titre universel.” Each option carries different consequences for your personal savings, and each is fenced in by strict deadlines that French creditors know how to use.

One preliminary point matters enormously for British families. Since Brexit changed nothing about this European text, the EU Succession Regulation No 650/2012, presented by Service-Public in its succession guide, still decides which country’s law governs the estate: the starting rule points to the law of the country where the deceased had his or her habitual residence at the time of death. If your father lived permanently in France, French succession law governs who inherits and how — even though he was British. The same Regulation lets a person choose instead the law of the country whose nationality he or she holds, whether at the time of the choice or at death, which is why a British will choosing English law can still shape the outcome. If your father made such a choice, read our guide to British wills, French houses and the choice of English law alongside this article: the will decides who gets what, while this article explains what you do when the estate is loaded with debt. And when someone has to prove authority to deal with the French house or unblock a bank account, the practical route runs through the French notaire (the public officer who settles estates) as described in our guide to getting English probate past the French notaire.

I. Your three options when the French estate owes more than it owns

A. Accept outright or walk away: what acceptance and renunciation really mean for a British heir

Accepting outright is the default that most heirs drift into without realising it. When you accept purement et simplement, you step into your father’s legal shoes: you receive your share of the assets, and you become personally liable for his debts in proportion to your share. The official guidance gives the arithmetic plainly: if you are entitled to one quarter of the estate, you must pay one quarter of the debts and charges. There is no ceiling. If the Bordeaux studio turns out to carry a 90,000-euro service-charge debt and your share of the estate is one half, that debt follows you onto your own bank balance, in Manchester as much as in France, once a French judgment is enforced.

Acceptance can be express or accidental. It is express when you sign a document describing yourself as the accepting heir, before a notaire or in a private deed. Far more dangerous for British heirs is tacit acceptance. Article 782 of the Civil Code provides: “Elle est tacite quand le successible saisi fait un acte qui suppose nécessairement son intention d’accepter et qu’il n’aurait droit de faire qu’en qualité d’héritier acceptant.” In plain terms, if you do something with the estate that only an heir who has accepted could do, the law treats you as having accepted. Selling your father’s car in France and keeping the proceeds, pocketing the rent paid by the tenant of the studio, or emptying his French bank account to “keep the money safe” can each count as an act of an accepting heir. Purely protective steps — paying for the funeral, securing the house, renewing the buildings insurance, asking the notaire for information — do not count, but the boundary is narrow and every borderline act should be cleared with the notaire first. Once you have accepted outright, Article 786 shuts the door behind you: “L’héritier acceptant purement et simplement ne peut plus renoncer à la succession ni l’accepter à concurrence de l’actif net.” There is one narrow escape hatch in the same article, examined in Part II below, for a debt you genuinely could not have known about.

Renunciation is the mirror image, and French law makes it deliberately formal so that no one renounces by accident. Article 804 states: “La renonciation à une succession ne se présume pas. Pour être opposable aux tiers, la renonciation opérée par l’héritier universel ou à titre universel doit être adressée ou déposée au tribunal dans le ressort duquel la succession s’est ouverte ou faite devant notaire.” A letter to the family, an email to the notaire, or simply ignoring the estate for years is not a renunciation. You must file a declaration at the greffe (the court registry) of the tribunal judiciaire (the ordinary civil court) for the area where the succession opened — normally where your father last lived — or make it before a notaire, who then forwards a copy to that court within one month. The effect, under Article 805, is radical: “L’héritier qui renonce est censé n’avoir jamais été héritier.” You receive nothing and, under Article 806, “Le renonçant n’est pas tenu au paiement des dettes et charges de la succession.” The single exception worth knowing is that parents and children who renounce can still be asked to contribute to funeral expenses in proportion to their means.

Renunciation redirects the inheritance rather than extinguishing it. Subject to the rights of your own children, who step into your place by representation, your share passes to your co-heirs or, if you were the only heir, to the next in line — and eventually to the State, acting through the Domaine (the State property service). The Service-Public guidance warns expressly that if you renounce, your own children inherit in your place and must each make their own choice. In a British family this produces a common and painful pattern: the father renounces the indebted French estate, only to learn that his teenage children have each become heirs who must themselves renounce, within their own deadlines, through their legal representative. Renunciation is also revocable, but only within limits. Article 807 provides: “Tant que la prescription du droit d’accepter n’est pas acquise contre lui, l’héritier peut révoquer sa renonciation en acceptant la succession purement et simplement, si elle n’a pas été déjà acceptée par un autre héritier ou si l’Etat n’a pas déjà été envoyé en possession.” So a renunciation made in panic after the first frightening creditor letter can be undone if the estate turns out to be healthier than feared — provided nobody else has taken your share in the meantime.

B. The middle path: accepting up to the net assets with a court-supervised inventory

Between unlimited liability and walking away sits the option most British heirs should examine first: acceptance à concurrence de l’actif net, formerly called acceptance under benefit of inventory. Article 787 states simply: “Un héritier peut déclarer qu’il n’entend prendre cette qualité qu’à concurrence de l’actif net.” You become heir, you keep your share of whatever surplus exists, and the creditors of the estate cannot touch your personal assets. Your exposure is capped at what the estate itself contains.

The price of that protection is procedure. The declaration is made at the greffe of the tribunal judiciaire or before a notaire, with election of a single address in France for the administration of the estate — your French solicitor’s office or the notaire‘s study can serve. Then comes the inventory. Article 789 requires that “La déclaration est accompagnée ou suivie de l’inventaire de la succession qui comporte une estimation, article par article, des éléments de l’actif et du passif.” A commissaire-priseur judiciaire (an official auctioneer-valuer), a bailiff, or a notaire values every asset and lists every debt, line by line. Article 790 adds the guillotine: “L’inventaire est déposé au tribunal dans le délai de deux mois à compter de la déclaration.” You may ask the judge for more time for serious and legitimate reasons, and the clock stops while the judge decides — but “Faute d’avoir déposé l’inventaire dans le délai prévu, l’héritier est réputé acceptant pur et simple.” Miss the inventory deadline and you fall back into unlimited liability, which is precisely why this option must be launched promptly and managed by a professional.

Once the declaration is registered and published nationally, the machinery of creditor protection starts. Creditors must declare their claims by notifying their title at the estate’s elected address. Those without security over estate property who fail to declare within fifteen months of publication see their claims extinguished against the estate. The heir then administers the estate: Article 796 explains that secured creditors are paid according to the rank of their security, while unsecured creditors who declared are paid in the order of their declarations, and cash legacies come only after creditors. Crucially, Article 798 ring-fences your own money: “Sans préjudice des droits des créanciers munis de sûretés, les créanciers de la succession et les légataires de sommes d’argent ne peuvent poursuivre le recouvrement que sur les biens recueillis de la succession” — property still within the estate and neither kept back nor sold off outside the supervised procedure. Estate creditors chase estate property, not your Manchester salary or your English savings.

The heir who accepts up to net assets is not a passive bystander. You administer the property, keep accounts of everything you pay and every transaction affecting the estate’s value, and answer to any estate creditor who asks for the accounts. You may keep specific items for yourself by declaring that you retain them in kind, in which case you owe the estate their inventory value, or sell what you do not wish to keep and account for the price. If you keep an item, creditors can challenge its inventory value before the judge within three months of publication by proving it is worth more — and if they succeed, you pay the difference out of your own pocket unless you return the item to the estate. Faults of administration are your personal responsibility for serious mismanagement. And the option is a one-way street in one direction only: Article 801 states that “Tant que la prescription du droit d’accepter n’est pas acquise contre lui, l’héritier peut révoquer son acceptation à concurrence de l’actif net en acceptant purement et simplement”, while adding that acceptance up to net assets blocks any later renunciation. Choose this route with a clear-eyed view of the estate’s balance sheet, because you cannot later walk away from it.

II. Deadlines, traps and fighting back against French creditors

A. The four-month shield, the creditor summons and the two-month guillotine

French law gives you breathing space first, then forces your hand. Article 771 provides: “L’héritier ne peut être contraint à opter avant l’expiration d’un délai de quatre mois à compter de l’ouverture de la succession.” For four months after the death, no creditor, no co-heir and no court can make you choose. Use that window to instruct a notaire, gather the mortgage statements, the taxe foncière bills, the co-ownership charges and the bank letters, and commission a realistic valuation of the house — not the price your father hoped for in 2019, but what it would fetch now.

After those four months, any estate creditor, any co-heir, any next-in-line heir or the State may serve you with a formal demand to take your option, called a sommation d’opter, by extra-judicial act — in practice a bailiff’s writ (acte de commissaire de justice). Article 772 then sets the trap: “Dans les deux mois qui suivent la sommation, l’héritier doit prendre parti ou solliciter un délai supplémentaire auprès du juge lorsqu’il n’a pas été en mesure de clôturer l’inventaire commencé ou lorsqu’il justifie d’autres motifs sérieux et légitimes.” If the inventory is under way or you have other serious and legitimate reasons, ask the judge for extra time; the two-month clock stops while the judge decides. But the final sentence is merciless: “A défaut d’avoir pris parti à l’expiration du délai de deux mois ou du délai supplémentaire accordé, l’héritier est réputé acceptant pur et simple.” Silence means unlimited liability.

The Cour de cassation (France’s supreme court for civil matters) has just confirmed how absolute that guillotine is. In Cass. 1re civ., 5 February 2025, No 22-22.618 (ECLI:FR:CCASS:2025:C100085), three children of the deceased, living abroad, were served in July 2019 by a co-ownership body owed service charges, requiring them to exercise their succession option. They did nothing within two months and renounced only afterwards. The Court rejected their appeal and held: “Il en résulte qu’à l’expiration de ce délai, s’il n’a pas pris parti et n’a pas sollicité de délai supplémentaire auprès du juge, étant réputé acceptant pur et simple de la succession, il ne peut plus y renoncer, ni l’accepter à concurrence de l’actif net.” Their late renunciations were declared inoperative and they were ordered, as heirs, to pay 91,545.25 euros in charges. For a British heir in exactly this position — served at an English address while the French deadlines run — the lesson is brutal: never ignore a sommation d’opter. Either take your option or apply to the judge for time, within the two months.

Beyond that guillotine sits a slower, quieter deadline. Article 780 provides: “La faculté d’option se prescrit par dix ans à compter de l’ouverture de la succession. L’héritier qui n’a pas pris parti dans ce délai est réputé renonçant.” Ten years of complete inaction equals renunciation — but ten years is an eternity during which creditors will have moved, co-heirs will have sought court orders, and interest will have compounded. And the clock does not run against an heir who has legitimate reasons for not knowing the right even exists, such as never having been told of the death. Do not plan around the ten years; plan around the four months and the two months.

Two further traps deserve emphasis because they catch British families specifically. The first is tacit acceptance by remote control: from England you telephone the French estate agent and tell them to sell the furniture, or you transfer the balance of your mother’s French current account to your own account “for safekeeping”. Each can be characterised as an act only an accepting heir could perform. The second is concealment, or recel successoral. Article 778 punishes the heir who hides estate property or hides the existence of a co-heir: “Sans préjudice de dommages et intérêts, l’héritier qui a recelé des biens ou des droits d’une succession ou dissimulé l’existence d’un cohéritier est réputé accepter purement et simplement la succession, nonobstant toute renonciation ou acceptation à concurrence de l’actif net, sans pouvoir prétendre à aucune part dans les biens ou les droits détournés ou recelés.” Take cash from the French house before the inventory, “forget” to mention the second bank account, or deny the existence of a half-sibling, and you become an unlimited-liability heir by operation of law — even if you had formally renounced — and you lose all rights in whatever you concealed. In Cass. 1re civ., 2 September 2020, No 19-15.955 (ECLI:FR:CCASS:2020:C100465), the Court recalled the classic formula that “les héritiers qui auraient diverti ou recelé des effets d’une succession sont déchus de la faculté d’y renoncer ; ils demeurent héritiers purs et simples, nonobstant leur renonciation, sans pouvoir prétendre aucune part dans les objets divertis ou recelés”, while adding a procedural safeguard worth knowing: “Les demandes en rapport d’une donation déguisée dont aurait bénéficié un héritier et en application de la sanction du recel successoral ne peuvent être formées qu’à l’occasion d’une instance en partage successoral.” Your siblings cannot ambush you with a concealment claim in isolation; it must be raised within partition proceedings, where a judge examines the whole estate.

B. Paying the right creditors in the right order, and challenging what you are asked to pay

Suppose you have accepted up to the net assets, or accepted outright, and the demands arrive: the mortgage lender, the trésorerie (the local tax office) for taxe foncière arrears, the co-ownership body, the builder, and perhaps the French tax administration for the déclaration de succession (the estate tax return, due within six months of death, with penalties for delay). Who gets paid first, and what can you dispute?

The order is fixed. Secured creditors — typically the bank holding the mortgage (hypothèque) over the house — are paid according to the rank of their security. Unsecured creditors who declared their claims are paid in the order they declared. Cash legacies under the will are paid dead last, after every creditor. A creditor who misses the fifteen-month declaration window without holding security loses its claim against the estate. This is why the inventory and publication procedure matters so much: it forces every creditor out into the open and extinguishes the latecomers. Your personal creditors, conversely, cannot seize estate property until the fifteen-month window closes and the estate creditors have been paid in full.

Paris and Île-de-France readers face the same rules with heavier practical stakes. Successions opened in Paris go through the tribunal judiciaire de Paris, whose greffe handles renunciations and declarations of acceptance up to net assets for the whole capital; notarial fees, valuations and co-ownership charges in the Paris region run far above provincial levels, so the inventory figures — and any creditor challenge to them — carry larger sums. If the deceased’s Paris flat is mortgaged and the estate is marginal, the fifteen-month declaration window and the valuation challenge described below are where Paris cases are won or lost. Whether the file sits in Paris, Bergerac or Aix-en-Provence, the procedure is national and the deadlines identical.

Challenging the bill takes several forms. First, the late discovery of a serious debt after outright acceptance is not always fatal. Article 786 allows the heir who accepted outright to “demander à être déchargé en tout ou partie de son obligation à une dette successorale qu’il avait des motifs légitimes d’ignorer au moment de l’acceptation, lorsque l’acquittement de cette dette aurait pour effet d’obérer gravement son patrimoine personnel”, with the strict condition that “L’héritier doit introduire l’action dans les cinq mois du jour où il a eu connaissance de l’existence et de l’importance de la dette.” Discover, six months after accepting, a 120,000-euro personal guarantee your father gave for a friend’s business loan, and you have five months from that discovery to ask the tribunal judiciaire for a full or partial discharge — but you must prove both that you legitimately did not know and that paying would seriously damage your own assets.

Second, valuations can be fought. When the heir administering an estate accepted up to net assets keeps an item or sells one privately, any estate creditor may challenge the retained value or the private-sale price before the judge within three months of publication by proving the property is worth more. The weapon points both ways in practice: an heir who considers a creditor’s claimed valuation inflated should commission an independent valuation early, because the judge decides on evidence, not on assertion. Third, the creditor’s title itself can be disputed like any debt: limitation periods, payments already made by the deceased, charges voted irregularly by a co-ownership general meeting, or a builder’s invoice for work never completed are all contestable before the competent court, and a British heir sued in France for a French estate debt defends on the same terms as a French heir. Fourth, where siblings weaponise concealment allegations against you, the 2020 ruling above confines those claims to partition proceedings, where the judge sees the complete picture rather than a single disputed transfer.

Practical sequence for a British heir who has just learned of the death: do not move money or sell anything before advice; use the four-month shield to have the notaire establish the full picture of assets and debts; decide, before any creditor serves a summons, whether renunciation, capped acceptance or outright acceptance fits the balance sheet and your family strategy — remembering that your children inherit your place if you renounce; if the balance is uncertain, declare acceptance up to the net assets and commission the inventory immediately, watching the two-month filing deadline; calendar the fifteen-month creditor declaration window; and if a sommation d’opter arrives, treat the two-month guillotine as the most dangerous date in the file. Keep every document — the death certificate, the will if any, the mortgage offer, the tax notices, the bailiff’s writs — because each deadline runs from a dated act, and each challenge turns on what you can prove you knew and when.

Conclusion

A French estate loaded with debt is not a trap without an exit, but every exit has a timetable. Renunciation, filed at the court registry or before a notaire, erases your heirship as if it never existed — at the cost of passing the choice to your own children. Acceptance up to the net assets caps your liability at what the estate contains, at the cost of a supervised inventory, published accounts and a two-month filing deadline that admits no excuses. Outright acceptance, express or tacit, makes the debts your own, with only a five-month discharge action for genuinely unknown debts as a safety net. Above all, the creditor’s summons starts a two-month guillotine that the Cour de cassation enforces without mercy: silence is deemed acceptance, and late renunciation is worthless. For a British heir managing all this from across the Channel, the winning strategy is the same in every case — establish the balance sheet inside the four-month shield, choose your option deliberately, file it in the right place, and challenge inflated or stale claims with evidence rather than hope.