After an inheritance, an heir has the will drawn up by a notary canceled. He recovers all inherited property to the detriment of the municipality.
To prepare their estate, many parents and grandparents write a will. But when dividing the inheritance before the notary, it sometimes happens that the heirs are not in agreement with the last wishes of the deceased. In some cases, they can contest and have the will annulled. Different reasons are valid: ingratitude of the beneficiary of the bequest, errors in drawing up the will, legal incapacity of the beneficiary to receive the inheritance or even insanity of mind of the person who wrote the will.
This last reason concerns the state of mental health of the deceased at the time he wrote the document. In French law, insanity of mind is defined as “a psychophysical indisposition which removes from the person who is affected by it all ability to enjoy free consent”. Article 414-1 of the Civil Code specifies that “to carry out a valid act, one must be of sound mind”. Heirs who wish to contest a will on this basis must therefore demonstrate that the deceased could suffer from mental illness, dementia, psychological disorders or even be under influence at the time the will was drawn up.
Such a situation was recently judged by the Court of Cassation and set a precedent. The case pitted an heir against the city of Narbonne. When his father died in 2013, this only son discovered that he would not be able to recover the entire inheritance. In 2011, his father had a will drawn up by a notary. This act provided for part of his property to be bequeathed to the municipality of Narbonne. The son, for his part, remains convinced that his father was no longer able to make such a decision in 2011.
The heir then tried to have the will annulled by highlighting his late father’s insanity of mind. After a long legal procedure, the case landed before the Montpellier Court of Appeal. The latter ruled in favor of the city of Narbonne in its judgment of June 30, 2023.
The heir had presented to the court medical certificates from two doctors dated 2018, i.e. 7 years after the will was drawn up and 5 years after the death of the father. The court of appeal considered that these certificates, drawn up years after the bequest, could not demonstrate the insanity of mind of the author of the will at the time of drawing up the deed. Faced with this rejection, the son of the deceased filed an appeal, considering that the court of appeal had misapplied the law.
According to the heir, the court of appeal violated articles 414-1 and 901 of the Civil Code by deciding that the medical certificates established after the drafting of the will could not demonstrate the father’s insanity of mind on the day of the act. According to him, the doctors who examined his father’s file in 2018 could perfectly account, based on the elements available to them (history, medical file, retrospective symptoms), of the mental state of this person in 2011.
In its judgment no. 83 FD, the Court of Cassation ruled in favor of the heir. The country’s highest court notably criticized the court of appeal for not having investigated whether, whatever their date, the medical certificates actually established the father’s insanity of mind. Clearly, by refusing to take these elements into consideration simply because of their date of execution, the court of appeal did not provide a legal basis for its decision.
The Court of Cassation therefore overturned and annulled the judgment rendered by the Montpellier Court of Appeal and referred the case back to the Nîmes Court of Appeal. The city of Narbonne was ordered to pay the heir the sum of 3,000 euros for legal costs incurred.
The heirs can therefore have medical assessments carried out well after the death of the testator. They have a period of five years from the death to make a request to annul the will. The procedure can be launched even if the will was drawn up before a notary and even if the notary has attested to the mental faculties of his client.
