Légifrance MCP server: connect AI agents to French law from the EU

Légifrance is the French government's official legal information service, published by the DILA. It covers codes, laws and decrees, the Journal officiel, case law from the courts, CNIL decisions and collective agreements. Developers can reach it for free through the Légifrance API on PISTE, the state's API portal.

fr-eli-mcp by MateMatic is an Apache-licensed MCP server for that API, published on PyPI and the MCP registry. It is read-only, runs over stdio, and every answer carries a stable source URL and a human-readable French citation.

An in-house lawyer can ask for the current wording of an article of the Code du travail, then for recent Cour de cassation decisions applying it, each with an ECLI and a link to verify. An HR team can look up the collective agreement for an IDCC code and read the clauses on notice periods.

Compliance teams use it to find CNIL deliberations on a topic, such as video surveillance, and to quote them precisely in an internal note. Legal researchers can build a list of sources before drafting, instead of relying on the model's memory.

Create a free account on piste.gouv.fr, create an application, subscribe it to the Légifrance API and copy its OAuth client ID and secret. On inference.eu, add the Légifrance connector to an agent and enter these two values as the server's credentials.

The credentials are stored encrypted in the EU and only reach the agents you allow. The server fetches and refreshes its access token automatically. PISTE applies quotas per token, so a shared research agent may need its own application.

The server sends your search terms and document IDs to the Légifrance API run by the French administration, and nothing else. It keeps a local cache and an audit log of queries. The legal texts themselves are public data under the Licence Ouverte.

On inference.eu, the model that reads the texts runs in EU data centres, and your PISTE credentials are stored encrypted in the EU. Avoid putting client names or case facts into search queries, because queries leave your environment to reach the API.

Every tool is read-only, so an agent cannot change anything. The real risk in legal work is a wrong or outdated citation. The server reduces it by returning verbatim text, the version date and a link, and by never inventing identifiers it does not have.

Ask agents to quote the text and link every source, and have a lawyer check citations before advice leaves the firm. On inference.eu you can require approval for calls that send results to clients through email or document connectors.