Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
will be allowed solely in cases of lost or inexistent registers.
8
Given their
now essential role as evidence in litigation, the
Ordonnance
requires regis-
ters' custodians to deliver copies of inscriptions (“extracts”) to interested
parties, against a fee fixed by the state. Throughout the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, a steady stream of rules further specifies the correct
maintenance of registers, the data they record, and their corresponding
power to testify on an expanded range of issues relative to individuals' civil
status. In 1787, the difficulty for protestants to establish their status finally
leads to the separation of the role of the priest as church official and as
officier d'état civil
, officer of civil status, representative of royal power.
The 1804 Napoleonic Civil Code would bring together the various pro-
fessionals empowered to create reliable written evidence under the umbrella
of a single legal category:
authenticity
.
9
In its elegant aphoristic style, the
Code simply defines authentic acts as those produced according to required
rules of forms (“
solenités
”) by a public officer vested with the authority of
the state. Beyond notarized contracts and registers of civil status, a broad
range of documents would eventually fall under the umbrella of authentic-
ity: land registers, court decisions and their copies, official testimonies from
bailiffs, and so on. For such documents, the system brings much conve-
nience: authentic acts testify in and of themselves, not only beyond testi-
mony, but beyond all other written evidence. Firmly seated at the top of
the evidential hierarchy, they can be contested only through a complex
procedure whose failure exposes to damages. Conversely, public officers
face prison and heavy fines for committing the serious crime of forgery
—
faux en écriture publique
.
10
Although the Code provides the overarching definition of authenticity,
the formal requirements specific to each type of public officers are specified
in application decrees
(
décrets d'application
), regularly updated as the tasks
and circumstances of each professional group evolve. Yet as one of France's
most eminent scholars of authenticity, Pierre Catala, noted, “Article 1317,
which defines authentic acts, has resisted electricity, wireless communica-
tions, the telegraph, the telephone, the telex, and radio transmissions. Not
a single letter which constitutes it has been modified since 1804.”
11
That
is, not until the 2000 evidence law reform. The Senate's bold declaration
that authentic acts could be established on electronic media thus consti-
tuted a significant leap for all concerned parties, especially as it left all
specifics to future decrees.
