The French hotel register

Every innkeeper, hotel-keeper and lodging-house keeper in France had to enter at once and without a blank, in a register kept regularly, the name, qualities, usual domicile and dates of entry and exit of everyone who slept a night under his roof, and show it to the mayor or the police on demand (Code pénal, art. 475, 2°). A keeper who knowingly wrote a guest under a false name faced six days to a month in prison (art. 154).

No register of the period has been found, so the page Bearer prints is a reconstruction whose columns are the article's. It is where investigators find who slept here, and under what name.

Bearer makes an investigator's papers for Call of Cthulhu and any 1920s or 1930s tabletop campaign: the passport a consul would have filled in, with the visas and frontier stamps a campaign leaves in it, and the permits, certificates and tickets of the period, to print or to share.

An example

Open this example in the office

The paper

A reconstruction

This paper is a reconstruction. No hotel register of the period has been found: its columns are the ones the Code pénal required (art. 475, 2°: the name, qualities, usual domicile, dates of entry and exit of every person who slept in the house, entered at once and without a blank), and the police's numbering and initials on each page are ours. Entering a guest under a false name knowingly cost the keeper six days to a month in prison (art. 154).

Still to be confirmed

• the whole page: its layout and heading. What would settle it: a French hotel register of 1920 to 1939.
• the foreigners' own forms that hotels in Paris may have had to fill in addition. What would settle it: the police ordinances on lodging-houses of the period.

Sources

• Empire français; text at ledroitcriminel.fr, Code pénal de 1810, art. 154 and art. 475, 2°, art. 475, 2°: innkeepers, hotel-keepers, lodging-house keepers who neglect to enter at once and without a blank, in a register kept regularly, the name, qualities, usual domicile, dates of entry and exit of every person who slept or spent a night in their houses, or fail to show the register to the mayors, deputies, police officers or commissaires; art. 154: a keeper who knowingly enters a guest under a false or assumed name, six days to one month's imprisonment (read directly)

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