Paris’s lost property office in rue des Morillons is France’s best-known and is famous for its efficiency. Wherever you live your town will have its own service des objets trouvés
ANY good lost property office might be expected to make some effort to find owners of items handed in but Paris’ is reputed for this.
The service, situated in rue des Morillons in the 15th arrondissement, collects around 190,000 items a year, notably mobiles, keys, bags and ID cards, which it stocks in a 530m2 warehouse.
Staff there report that the public are surprisingly honest - envelopes of money and well-stocked wallets are regularly brought in and a wallet containing diamonds was restored to an American tourist. They do their best to reunite objects with owners - a funeral urn of ashes, for example, was given back to the family thanks to an identification number on the bottom of it.
The service covers the city and the three departments of the Petite Couronne. It is for items found in the streets as well as on RATP public transport (eg. the Metro), in post offices, handed to police or lost in department stores and museums. Found items can be declared online at www.tinyurl.com/ParisLP
Other cites, like Lyon (www.tinyurl.com/LyonObjetsTrouves) have followed suit.
The Paris service is run by the Préfecture de police and in other cities it is usually the mairie’s police municipale that organises the service des objets trouvés. There is usually one main office per town. SNCF train stations, and airports, usually have their own separate ones. The opening hours at municipal ones may be limited (station ones may be better - eg. opening longer hours, and on Saturdays) but it is also possible to telephone them to see if your item has been found.
At the service for another large city, Angers, the office reports set procedures according to the item - eg. for identity papers, locals are called in, in other cases they are sent to the corresponding prefecture; numbers of Sim cards are sent to phone firms who can then alert their customers etc. In other cases they may use any details on the item to try to identify owners, for example, by enquiring at mairies’ births, deaths and marriages offices.
In Connexion staff 's experience not all of the services are as proactive as Paris’ or Anger’s and it may be advisable to keep phoning, say once a week for a few weeks, if your first enquiry drew a blank. It can take a week or so for items found at different locations to make their way to the central service so it is worth being patient.
Some lost property services are now using the internet to list items handed in, such as Avrillé in the Maine-et-Loire (www.villeavrille.fr/Objets_trouves.html) - a system well-suited to smaller towns where the objects are in the tens, rather than thousands, each month.
The return of items is usually free, apart from in Paris, where only I cards or passports are given back free. It levies a fee of €11 for items worth less than €100 and for others 3% of the value.
Services keep items for a maximum period set by local bylaws, often a year and a day, though in Paris less valuable ones are only kept for three months. After this items may be returned to the finder (called the inventeur), destroyed or sold for the benefit of the state.
In the case of return to the inventeur, however, ownership is not automatically conferred and they may need to retain it for a period which is not necessarily legally clear-cut. Paris’ Préfecture de Police advises three-years, but other interpretations suggest at least five.
Apart from official channels, there are websites where you can list lost items (with place and date etc) in the hope that another user contacts you. They include: www.trouveperdu.com and www.perdus.fr
The following sites offer a tagging service to help make sure lost items are returned: www.faisunbongeste.fr and www.objetretrouve.com You buy labels from them which have with identification numbers on them allowing finders to phone a number at the ordinary landline rate or visit a website. Their details are then emailed and texted to you. The second site also has free labels, but with these you need to pay €10 to be given the finder’s details.
