The Conseil constitutionnel, France's Constitutional Council, held on 14 August in decision 2026-915 DC that extending the fast administrative-expulsion procedure to occupants who remain after a tourist-let contract expires is constitutional1. It struck down the accompanying criminal provision, on the ground that identical conduct attracted unequal penalties.
The Council is the court that rules on whether a French law complies with the Constitution. Its reasoning here turned on premises, not people: it treated tourist-let accommodation as residential premises capable of being the landlord's own home, which is what pulls it inside the accelerated route. The ordinary route to remove an occupant in France runs through a judge and takes months. The accelerated route runs through the prefecture, the state's local administrative office, so an owner's case no longer waits on a court list.
Landlords have the better of the argument on the facts the Council considered. An owner locked out of their own flat waits months for a bailiff, and pays for the wait. The reach is wider than that case, because the procedure now applies by the character of the premises and not by how long the occupant has been there. For a guest, a booking that overruns its dates carries a faster removal in September than it did in July.
Constitutional courts have run the other way on short lets this year. Spain's Tribunal Supremo voided the national short-let registration number on federalism grounds in May, taking apart an administrative instrument the state had built. France's Council kept one intact. Nothing in the decision amends the Le Meur law, the separate statute governing how French short lets are regulated.
