Until 2023, the canonical French company register was a four-way fragmented mess: INSEE Sirene held the identification layer (SIREN, SIRET, name, address, headcount, NAF activity code), the regional Greffes held statutory acts (incorporation deeds, capital changes, director appointments), the Tribunaux de Commerce shared partial data through Infogreffe (paid), and the Bodacc was the gazette. Starting 1 January 2023 the Registre National des Entreprises (RNE) at INPI became the single canonical source for French commercial information — consolidating the old Registre du Commerce et des Sociétés (RCS), Registre des Métiers (RM), Registre Spécial des Agents Commerciaux (RSAC) and the Registre Spécial des EIRL (RSEIRL).

The post-RNE world isn't fully tidy yet — Sirene and RNE are still two distinct API surfaces, and the integration between them has rough edges — but it's the cleanest French registry has ever been for programmatic access. Here's what's actually queryable in 2026 and where the seams are.

What's free and programmatic

INSEE Sirene (api.insee.fr/entreprises/sirene/V3) — free, open, cumulatively the world's most comprehensive company database with ~30M active records.

• Search by SIREN (9-digit identifier of the legal person), SIRET (14-digit identifier of an establishment = SIREN + 5 digits), name, NAF code, postal code, denomination
• Returns establishment-level data: legal name, NIC, etablissement principal, dateCreationEtablissement, NAF activity code (APE), tranche d'effectif (headcount band), workforce date
• 30 requests/minute on the free tier. Higher tiers available with a signed convention.
• Updated daily from the regional URSSAF feed.

INPI RNE (data.inpi.fr) — free, requires account registration with email + Cloudflare Turnstile.

• Returns the statutory dossier: directors, beneficial owners (where not gated), share capital, statuts, recent acts, annual accounts where filed
• Bulk download "RNE complet" for ~7M French entities published quarterly + delta files daily
• Per-record API queries return RNE structured records keyed on SIREN

French Annuaire des Entreprises (annuaire-entreprises.data.gouv.fr) — Etalab's public-facing aggregator merging Sirene + RNE + Bodacc — same data, lowest-friction free API, no auth.

What's paywalled or AML-gated

• K-bis extracts (the official certificate of incorporation) — €3.96 per certificate at infogreffe.fr. The data inside is public via RNE; the certified extract is the paid product.
• Bilans (annual accounts) older than 5 years — Greffes Tribunaux de Commerce charge for archive retrieval; RNE keeps the most-recent only.
• Beneficial-ownership register for non-AML-obliged third parties — France implemented CJEU C-37/20 by gating the public RNE UBO search behind a justification of legitimate interest form. AML-obliged entities (banks, lawyers, notaires) keep direct access.

OpenRegistry's coverage of the French surface

OpenRegistry routes French queries through Sirene first (for SIREN/name lookup) and falls back to RNE for the statutory dossier. The jurisdiction='FR' calls return both.

Quirks an integrator hits the hard way

1. SIREN vs SIRET. SIREN is the 9-digit identifier of the legal person (the entreprise). SIRET is 14 digits — the SIREN concatenated with a 5-digit NIC identifying a specific établissement (place of business). A company with five offices has one SIREN and five SIRETs. Search and profile by SIREN; logistics by SIRET. search_companies accepts either; the result always carries both.

2. NAF codes are not industry codes. France uses NAF (Nomenclature d'Activités Française), revised in 2008 to align with NACE. Codes look like 47.91A or 62.01Z. They are activity codes for the establishment, not the legal person. The headquarters' NAF and a branch's NAF can differ.

3. Sirene's etat_administratif has only two values: A (actif) or F (fermé / cessé). It does not capture liquidation-in-progress or insolvency state — for that, query the Bodacc publications or the RNE acts.

4. Hashed names in some Sirene records. Where a sole-trader entrepreneur has opted for the non-diffusion protection, Sirene returns the company name partially obscured ("*** ***") and the SIREN remains queryable. RNE may still have the name in the legal dossier.

5. Annual accounts are opt-in to keep secret for SAS/SARL. Since 2014, certain small companies can request that their annual accounts not be made public. The accounts are still filed with the Greffes but the public copy is suppressed. The filing record exists in list_filings with the correct date and category, but fetch_document returns a structured "non communicable" notice rather than the document body. Don't treat this as a bug — it's the law.

A complete worked example — Renault

// Request
{
  "name": "search_companies",
  "arguments": { "jurisdiction": "FR", "query": "Renault SA", "limit": 1 }
}

// Response (truncated)
{
  "jurisdiction": "FR",
  "count": 1,
  "results": [{
    "company_id": "441639465",
    "company_name": "RENAULT",
    "status": "active",
    "incorporation_date": "1998-01-15",
    "registered_address": "122 Avenue du Général Leclerc, 92100 Boulogne-Billancourt",
    "jurisdiction_data": {
      "siren": "441639465",
      "siret_siege": "44163946500035",
      "denomination": "RENAULT",
      "naf": "70.10Z",
      "categorie_juridique": "5710",
      "etat_administratif": "A",
      "tranche_effectif": "53",
      "date_creation": "1998-01-15"
    }
  }]
}

Then get_company_profile("FR", "441639465") merges in the RNE acts; get_officers("FR", "441639465") returns the directors and statutory representatives; list_filings("FR", "441639465") returns annual accounts going back 5 years. The 11-digit categorie_juridique (5710) tells you it's an SA — Société Anonyme; if it were 5499 it'd be an SARL — different statutory disclosure obligations apply.

Connecting an MCP client

Add this to your MCP-compliant client (Claude Desktop / Cursor / Cline / Goose / Zed):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "openregistry": {
      "url": "https://openregistry.sophymarine.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Free anonymous tier — 20 requests per minute per IP, every tool, every jurisdiction. No signup, no API key, no convention to sign.

Or skip the MCP layer and search on the web at openregistry.sophymarine.com/search?jurisdiction=FR, or jump straight to a known SIREN at openregistry.sophymarine.com/company/fr/441639465 for Renault's full profile.

What's still moving

The Sirene–RNE integration has rough edges — INSEE and INPI didn't fully merge their schemas at canonicalisation, so a few records exist in one and not the other. INPI publishes corrections weekly; the cumulative gap is shrinking. The DRCBE (Dispositif Rénové de Collecte des Bénéficiaires Effectifs) is the back-office workflow consolidating UBO across the registries, and once it's fully online it should make get_persons_with_significant_control queryable for AML-obliged callers via a structured access flow rather than the current legitimate-interest form.

OpenRegistry's full coverage

OpenRegistry is a free remote MCP server giving AI agents real-time access to company-registry data from 30 national governments. This article focused on France; the same toolkit covers:

🇬🇧 UK Companies House · 🇫🇷 INSEE Sirene + INPI RNE · 🇩🇪 Handelsregister · 🇮🇹 Registro Imprese (BRIS) · 🇪🇸 BORME · 🇳🇱 KVK · 🇧🇪 KBO · 🇨🇭 Zefix · 🇳🇴 Brreg · 🇫🇮 PRH · 🇮🇪 CRO · 🇵🇱 KRS · 🇨🇿 ARES · 🇮🇸 RSK · 🇮🇲 IoM Registry · 🇨🇾 DRCOR · 🇲🇨 RCI · 🇱🇮 Liechtenstein HR · 🇰🇷 OPENDART · 🇭🇰 Companies Registry · 🇹🇼 GCIS · 🇲🇾 SSM · 🇦🇺 ABR · 🇳🇿 Companies Office · 🇨🇦 Corporations Canada (+ BC + NWT) · 🇲🇽 PSM · 🇰🇾 CIMA · 🇷🇺 ЕГРЮЛ

→ Hosted MCP endpoint: https://openregistry.sophymarine.com/mcp
→ Docs: https://openregistry.sophymarine.com/docs/
→ Free anonymous tier: 20 req/min, every tool, every jurisdiction.

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