France's donation entre vifs lets you pass assets to loved ones while you're alive — but what about your digital life? A practical guide for expats and privacy-conscious citizens navigating French succession law.

The Gift That Arrives While You're Still Alive

Picture this: your daughter is buying her first apartment in Lyon. You want to help — not after you're gone, but now, when it actually matters. French law has an elegant solution for this: the donation entre vifs, a lifetime gift that lets you transfer assets to heirs before death, often with significant tax advantages.

But here's what most people don't plan for: your digital life has become just as valuable as your physical one.

Your Spotify playlists won't be in a notaire's office. Your Dropbox of family photos, your crypto wallet, your online banking credentials, the subscription services charged to your card — none of these appear in a standard French succession plan. And French law, despite being one of the most sophisticated legal systems in Europe, hasn't fully caught up with the reality of digital assets.

What Is a Donation Entre Vifs?

A donation entre vifs (literally "gift between the living") is a notarized transfer of assets from one person to another while both are alive. It's a cornerstone of French succession planning for good reason:

The abattement (tax allowance): Parents can give each child up to €100,000 every 15 years completely tax-free. The clock resets, so timing matters.
Gifts to spouses/partners: Separate allowances apply for married couples and those in a PACS.
Réserve héréditaire: French law protects children's mandatory inheritance share (the réserve). A lifetime gift strategy must work within these constraints — you can't disinherit your children through cleverly timed donations.

The donation-partage (a specific type of lifetime gift that divides assets among all heirs simultaneously) is particularly powerful for families because it fixes the value of each heir's share at the time of the gift, protecting against future disputes.

The Digital Gap in French Succession Law

Here's where it gets complicated. The French legal framework for digital assets remains murky at best.

What French law says: The loi pour une République numérique (2016) established a right to define what happens to your personal data after death, but it mainly governs data privacy — not asset transfer. The broader question of who inherits your online accounts, digital subscriptions, or cryptocurrency is largely unaddressed.

The practical problem: French notaires (the only professionals authorized to formalize a donation entre vifs) don't have standard mechanisms for transferring digital accounts. Platforms like Apple, Google, or Netflix each have their own terms of service — and those terms often forbid account transfer entirely, even to family members.

Crypto is different: Cryptocurrency and digital tokens are increasingly recognized as transferable assets under French law. The Pacte d'actifs numériques discussions in French legal circles suggest that crypto may one day be formally included in estate inventories — but today, it's a grey area that requires active planning.

What You Can Actually Do Right Now

If you're living in France as an expat, or if you're a French citizen with a digital life worth preserving, here's a practical roadmap:

1. Separate your digital assets into categories

Not all digital assets are equal:

Transferable financial assets: Crypto wallets, investment accounts, PayPal balances. These can potentially be included in a donation entre vifs or in your will.
Licensed content: Kindle books, iTunes movies, Spotify libraries. These are licenses, not owned property. They typically cannot be gifted or inherited — but your family should know they exist.
Accounts with sentimental value: iCloud photo libraries, email archives. Legally murky, but practically important.
Subscription services: Netflix, Amazon Prime, utilities. These need to be cancelled or transferred — and someone needs to know the credentials.

2. Document everything your family needs to know

A French notaire cannot help your family access your Google account. You need to leave instructions. This means:

A secure list of accounts and how to access them (not passwords in plaintext — stored in a zero-knowledge encrypted vault)
Instructions for what each account contains and what your family should do with it
Codes or recovery keys for crypto wallets, stored separately from the wallet itself

3. Use the tools French law does provide

For genuinely transferable digital assets:

Include crypto and digital investment accounts explicitly in your donation entre vifs or your testament
Ask your notaire about including a clause de réversion for joint digital accounts
Consider a mandat de protection future — a French legal instrument that designates someone to manage your affairs if you become incapacitated. This can include digital account management.

4. Talk to a notaire who understands digital assets

Not all notaires have experience with digital succession. Ask specifically about succession numérique and whether they've helped clients plan for crypto or online assets. The Chambre des notaires de Paris has published guidance on this — a good notaire should be familiar with it.

The Expat Dimension

If you're a British, American, Dutch, or German expat in France, your situation is more complex:

Applicable law: Under EU Regulation 650/2012 (Brussels IV), your succession is generally governed by the law of your country of habitual residence — which may be France. But you can elect for the law of your nationality to apply. This choice affects everything, including digital assets.
Cross-border accounts: If your digital accounts are registered in another country, or your crypto exchange is based in Malta or Estonia, French law may have limited reach.
Tax residency: France's wealth and inheritance tax rules are among the strictest in Europe. Digital assets held in foreign accounts may still trigger French tax obligations.

Get advice from a notaire and potentially a cross-border estate planning specialist before assuming French rules don't apply to your foreign digital accounts.

The Clock Is Already Running

The tragedy of digital legacy planning isn't that it's complicated. It's that most people put it off until it's too late to do anything about it.

If you have children in France and plan to make a donation entre vifs, do it now — you have a €100,000 allowance that renews every 15 years. Don't waste it by waiting.

And while you're at it, spend an afternoon documenting your digital life. Not for a notaire. For your family. The person who will sit at your kitchen table trying to work out your passwords while also arranging your funeral deserves better than that.

Start your free LegacyShield vault today — the secure, zero-knowledge place to document your digital life alongside your physical estate plan.

French Donation Entre Vifs and Your Digital Legacy