Nationals and foreigners in french civil law

The issue of the relationship between nationals and foreigners in civil law is undergoing a number of mutations characterised by an apparent convergence of the two judicial statuses and by their redefinition. The issue is indeed that of the place which civil law can or must grant to those who live in the State but do not possess the nationality thereof and that of the current significance given to the status of nationality in French civil law. This significance seems to depend simultaneously on the mode of distinction between concepts of national and foreigner, i.e. the exercise of State sovereignty in that choice, and the status they are then granted, inasmuch as they are tied by a primordial element: presence on the same territory. Thus, the foreigner, if not attached to the State by a tie of nationality, is nonetheless subject to state power by his or her presence on State territory. Logically, the relative right to nationality and foreignness is primarily a right of exclusion and restriction which leads to granting the foreigner less rights than the national and which codifies this difference. But this right is also, at the same time, a right of integration as it defines a status for the foreigner in the State in which he or she lives, making the foreigner subject to the law in that State. The concern of a study of the relations between « nationals » and « foreigners » is therefore to question the present judicial distinction of the two concepts. It will thus be necessary to reconcile the two expressions of state power: the power of unilateral command founded on constraint and conservation of autonomy and the freedom given to the individual in society, while maintaining the balance between a necessary differentiation of the statuses, by reason of the existence of a national community which establishes the constitutional pact, which is to be distinguished from simple civil society, and the respect for individual freedoms in the State