GET /legal/history

Returns the version timeline of a legal article, French or European Union: each stored version with its version_id, its stored etat status and its validity dates. The timeline is served from a local store built from the official LEGI and EUR-Lex datasets, so a covered reference resolves in milliseconds without an account or API key. The corpus currently covers a selected set of French codes and EU acts and is expanding; an uncovered reference returns 404, never a paid empty timeline.

This is the monitoring primitive: an agent re-checks an article periodically to detect when a new version has appeared - regulatory drift, amendment tracking, compliance monitoring - without re-reading full text every time. The payload is deliberately compact: it answers when an article changed and which versions exist, not what the text says or what changed between two versions.

• For the full consolidated text of a version, call GET /legal/article (or GET /legal/eu-act) with date=.
• For what changed between two dates, call GET /legal/diff.

See the live /catalog for the authoritative endpoint listing and price.

x402 golden rule: the agent pays for the answer to its question. A well formed, known article returns its timeline -> 200, including when the most recent version is abroge: the timeline is the data being sold. Requests the service cannot answer - malformed references, unknown articles, unknown acts - leave the 200 range.

Parameters

A single endpoint covers both corpora. Supply a French identity or a European Union identity. There is no date parameter - history always returns the whole timeline.

For a French article, provide code + article. For an EU article, provide celex (or eli) and optionally article; omitting article targets the act head.

GET /legal/history?code=code-civil&article=1240

GET /legal/history?celex=32016R0679&article=17

200 response - UnifiedResponse

{
  "data": { ... },
  "provenance": {
    "source": "legifrance-legi",
    "fetched_at": "2026-06-20T12:00:00Z",
    "freshness": { "kind": "snapshot", "as_of": "2026-06-01T00:00:00Z" }
  }
}

• provenance.source: source identifier from the served store, commonly legifrance-legi for French law or eur-lex-cellar for EU law.
• freshness.kind: snapshot; as_of is the store dump date that backed the answer.

Fields of data

The identity fields are echoed exactly as supplied: code/article for a French request, celex/eli/article for an EU request. There is no text and no diff in the payload - timeline only, by design.

versions[]

Versions are sorted by date_debut. etat is carried as stored and may include vigueur, abroge, abroge_diff, vigueur_diff, modifie and perime. A version with no date_fin is the open-ended current version.

Example - French article with two versions

{
  "data": {
    "code": "code-civil",
    "article": "1240",
    "label": "Code civil, art. 1240",
    "versions": [
      {
        "version_id": "v-1804",
        "etat": "abroge",
        "date_debut": "1804-03-21",
        "date_fin": "2016-10-01"
      },
      {
        "version_id": "v-courant",
        "etat": "vigueur",
        "date_debut": "2016-10-01"
      }
    ],
    "count": 2
  },
  "provenance": {
    "source": "legifrance-legi",
    "fetched_at": "2026-06-20T12:00:00Z",
    "freshness": { "kind": "snapshot", "as_of": "2026-06-01T00:00:00Z" }
  }
}

Example - a repealed article still returns its timeline

When the most recent version is abroge, the article is still a successful answer: the repeal is part of the timeline, not an error. The status lives in each version’s etat; it is never converted into an HTTP error.

{
  "data": {
    "code": "code-test",
    "article": "abroge",
    "label": "Code test, art. abroge",
    "versions": [
      {
        "version_id": "v-1",
        "etat": "vigueur",
        "date_debut": "2010-01-01",
        "date_fin": "2020-01-01"
      },
      {
        "version_id": "v-2",
        "etat": "abroge",
        "date_debut": "2020-01-01"
      }
    ],
    "count": 2
  },
  "provenance": {
    "source": "legifrance-legi",
    "fetched_at": "2026-06-20T12:00:00Z",
    "freshness": { "kind": "snapshot", "as_of": "2026-06-01T00:00:00Z" }
  }
}

Example - EU article

{
  "data": {
    "celex": "32016R0679",
    "article": "17",
    "label": "Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR), Article 17",
    "versions": [
      {
        "version_id": "32016R0679-art-17-v1",
        "etat": "vigueur",
        "date_debut": "2018-05-25"
      }
    ],
    "count": 1
  },
  "provenance": {
    "source": "eur-lex-cellar",
    "fetched_at": "2026-06-20T12:00:00Z",
    "freshness": { "kind": "snapshot", "as_of": "2026-06-01T00:00:00Z" }
  }
}

Coverage honesty

The service answers from a local snapshot of the LEGI and EUR-Lex corpora. It does not fetch Legifrance or EUR-Lex at request time, search by keyword, infer missing versions or reinterpret statuses. The versions array reflects exactly what the served store dump contains; a newer amendment that postdates the snapshot appears only after the store is refreshed (provenance.freshness.as_of tells you which dump backed the answer).

etat is carried from the source store as legal metadata; callers should treat each value as the authoritative status for that version. Unknown articles and unknown acts are not partial paid answers: they return 4xx errors.

Errors

Only requests the service cannot answer leave the 200 range.

{ "error": "query parameter `code` (e.g. `code-civil`) with `article`, or `celex`/`eli`, is required", "code": "INVALID_REF" }

{ "error": "no article `9999` found for text `code-civil` in the store", "code": "UNKNOWN_ARTICLE" }

{ "error": "no act `39999R9999` found in the store", "code": "UNKNOWN_ACT" }

Attribution

French legislation and regulation data is derived from the LEGI dataset made available by the Direction de l’information legale et administrative (DILA) on Legifrance, under the Licence Ouverte / Etalab open licence. EU law data is derived from EUR-Lex / Cellar data made available by the Publications Office of the European Union; reuse must preserve attribution to the European Union and EUR-Lex.

See also

• GET /legal/diff - what changed in an article’s text between two dates.
• GET /legal/article - full consolidated text of a French article at a date.
• GET /legal/eu-act - full consolidated text of an EU act or article at a date.
• For agents - discovery surfaces, the live /catalog and how settlement works.