On March 23 2006, the French government, acting under the authority of a law passed the previous summer by the National Assembly, adopted an Ordonnance that changes the laws on guarantees and security interests.
Those changes represent a half-finished revolution. While there has been a real effort to modernise the rules governing individual security interests, no effort has been made to simplify or rationalise the myriad of existing interests was kept in place and the sections on real and personal property were merely modernized. This is a missed opportunity.
It had been recognized for some time that the traditional principles governing security interests, both as they affect real estate and personal (moveable) property, which were enshrined in the Civil Code at the beginning of the nineteenth century, required modernization. In an effort to keep pace with evolving commercial requirements, many special security interests had been created over the years, each...