Originally from Collective Litigation in Europe: Law and Practice – Preview Page

The debates regarding the need to adopt a class action “à la française” can be dated back to the mid-1980s when a French group action was envisaged by the consumer law commission.1 The idea then was to introduce collective redress during the codification of consumer law at the dawn of the 90s, as the idea grew on a European scale.  
Before then, several collective actions—in the sense of actions that can be brought by an association- already existed, but none allowed compensation for a plurality of victims harmed by an infringement through a single action. They are still in force and are part of the French collective redress panorama (A) together with traditional means of regrouping claims that have emerged (B).  
Since the above-mentioned actions would not lead collectively to compensation to victims in general or consumers, there were successive promises to reform group action legislation2 (C), now materialising in the adopted law transposing the EU Representative Actions Directive 2020/1828 (the Directive). This description of national law is current as of May 2025. 

A. Collective Associative Actions
The Consumer Code provides for four collective actions.

The first one was enacted in 1973. French consumer associations were granted an action for the compensation of damages caused to the “collective interest of consumers,” by the Royer Act of 27 December,3 which authorizes associations “duly declared and having as their explicit statutory object the defence of consumer interests” to bring civil actions.