Main Courante vs Plainte in France: What a Police Log Does Not Do

Something happened, you went to the commissariat or the gendarmerie, and you walked out with a piece of paper. Months later nothing has moved, nobody has been questioned, and you find out the police never opened a file on it at all. That is usually the moment a person in France discovers that what they filed was a main courante and not a plainte.

The confusion is understandable, because the two are filed at the same counter, in the same building, often at the end of the same conversation. They do completely different things. A main courante writes your account into a police register and stops there. A plainte is what puts the matter in front of the procureur de la République and starts a criminal investigation.

Information last verified on 21 July 2026. This page presents general legal information, not legal advice.

What a main courante actually is

Service-Public describes a main courante as "une declaration par laquelle vous signalez des faits qui sont consignes dans un registre de police ou de gendarmerie". The register entry captures the nature, the date and the place of what you describe, plus your identity. Nothing more happens to it automatically.

The official guidance is blunt about the consequence: "La main courante n'entraine pas l'ouverture d'une enquête judiciaire". No file is passed to a magistrate as a matter of course, no suspect is summoned, and in the ordinary case the person you named is never told that you came in.

There is a narrow safety valve. If the officer taking the declaration considers that the facts you describe amount to a criminal offence, they may report them to the procureur, who then decides what to do. That is a discretionary route and not something you can count on. If you want a case opened, you ask for a plainte and you say so in those words.

Filing is free. It cannot be done online: the Ministère de l'Intérieur online service handles plaintes, not main courantes, so a main courante means going to a commissariat or a gendarmerie brigade in person. Once filed, the entry cannot be altered, although you can come back and add a further declaration.

What a plainte does instead

A plainte is the formal statement that you consider yourself the victim of an offence and that you want the person responsible pursued. Service-Public puts the effect plainly: "Le dépôt de plainte declenche une enquête penale confiee a la police ou a la gendarmerie". That is the whole difference in one sentence.

Filing a plainte is also free, and officers are required to take it whatever the commissariat or brigade you walk into. You are given a recepisse proving you filed. From there the procureur decides whether to prosecute, to use an alternative to prosecution, or to close the file without action.

You do not need to know who did it. A plainte contre X is filed against an unnamed perpetrator and is the normal route after a burglary, a theft or an online fraud. The practical steps, the online route and what happens after the file lands on the prosecutor's desk are covered on our page on filing a complaint in France.

The two routes compared

On purpose, the main courante records and the plainte accuses. If your goal is to have someone prosecuted, the main courante is simply not the instrument that does that job.

On procedure, the main courante produces a register entry and nothing else. The plainte produces an investigation file, an identified prosecutor's decision, and a recepisse you can rely on when you deal with an insurer, a bank or an employer.

On how it is filed, the main courante is in person only. A plainte can be filed in person, in writing to the procureur de la République, or online through the Ministère de l'Intérieur service for property offences committed by an unknown perpetrator.

On time limits, this is where the gap does the most damage. The Ministère de l'Intérieur guidance notes that a main courante does not interrupt the prescription periods. The clock on your right to have the offence prosecuted keeps running while you believe you have "filed something".

Domestic violence is the exception, and it is not a small one

This is the situation where getting the two confused is most dangerous, so treat the general rule above as switched off. Service-Public states that in matters of violences conjugales the opening of a judicial investigation is the rule: "En matiere de violences conjugales, l'ouverture d'une enquête judiciaire est la regle."

The Ministère de l'Intérieur goes further on its own guidance page and says that a main courante is not the route for domestic violence at all, directing that a plainte be taken instead. In practice that means a person reporting violence by a partner or former partner should expect an investigation to be opened regardless of the label they arrived asking for, and should not accept a log entry as the outcome of the visit.

If you are in immediate danger, call 17, or 112 from a mobile. The national helpline for women experiencing violence is 3919, and the government portal arretonslesviolences.gouv.fr sets out the reporting routes, including online reporting, and the associations that can accompany a victim through the process.

The same reasoning applies to sustained harassment, threats and stalking. These are offences in their own right, so a declaration that produces no enquiry leaves the conduct running while the record sits in a drawer.

When a main courante is the wrong instrument

It is the wrong instrument any time you want a prosecution. That includes assault, threats, harassment, sexual offences, theft from you, fraud against you and criminal damage. In each of those the question is not whether the facts are worth recording, it is whether anyone is going to investigate them.

It is also the wrong instrument when a deadline is running against you. Because the log entry does not interrupt prescription, a person who logs an incident every few months can reach the end of the prescription period without ever having asked for a prosecution.

It is the wrong instrument when the person you are describing needs to be confronted with the allegation. Outside exceptional cases, a main courante is never notified to them, so nothing about their conduct is put to them at all.

When a main courante is genuinely useful

It has a real use as a dated record. Service-Public describes it as "un debut de preuve dans une procedure judiciaire", which is exactly what it is worth: not proof of what happened, but proof that you reported it on that date, in those terms.

That matters most for conduct that only becomes an offence, or only becomes provable, through repetition, and for civil disputes where establishing a date is the difficulty. A parent recording a repeated failure to return a child at the agreed time, or a neighbour recording an escalating series of incidents, is using the instrument for the thing it does well.

It also gives you a fixed date for facts you may need to prove to a third party, such as the loss of documents, a departure from the family home, or a workplace incident. The record is kept for five years after filing.

If you already filed a main courante and want it treated seriously

You are not locked in. A main courante does not consume any right, and it does not prevent you from filing a plainte over the same facts, provided the prescription period has not expired. The general periods are one year for a contravention, six years for a delit and twenty years for a crime, with longer periods for certain serious offences and special rules where the victim was a minor.

Go back and file a plainte, in person or by letter to the procureur de la République, and mention the earlier main courante with its date so that it is attached to the file. That earlier entry then works for you as contemporaneous evidence of the report rather than as a substitute for it.

If a plainte is filed and the procureur closes the file, or three months pass without a decision, a further route exists through a plainte avec constitution de partie civile before an investigating judge. That route has strict conditions of its own, set out on our filing a complaint page, and it is not the first thing to reach for.

Which route applies also depends on the offence you are describing. If the facts involve a physical confrontation in which you defended yourself, the legal test the court will apply is a separate question, addressed on our page on self-defence under French law. Our France legal guide collects the rest of the material for readers dealing with French procedure.

The practical rule to leave with

Ask for what you actually want, in the words the system uses. If you want the facts on record, ask for a main courante. If you want someone investigated, ask to deposer une plainte, and do not leave until you have a recepisse.

If you are told at the counter that your situation "is only a main courante" and you believe an offence was committed, you are entitled to insist on filing a plainte, and you can also send one directly to the procureur de la République by letter. Nothing in French procedure requires the police to agree with you before a complaint is registered.