ABSTRACT
The aim of this contribution is to show how, through precise situations, recent and old, French builders handle the legal constraints regulating their work. Hence, when the readers use the term they are referring to law in general, except when they explicitly mention one in particular. They discusses these four scenarios based on examples drawn from the seventeenth and eighteenth-century legal archives of French institutions supervising the construction world. Nowadays too, architects sometimes defy all the legal constraints of construction. In that respect the example of building on Reunion Island is surprising, to say the least. The Plan Local Urbanisme (PLU), local town planning scheme for the capital city, Saint-Denis, was drawn up by organisations knowledgeable and competent in terms of town planning and the protection of historical monuments. If unfortunately any of these came to be destroyed they were to be rebuilt identically. The basic premise was to preserve the historical heritage.
