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Over the last thirty years, in the wake of independent administrative authorities, administrative penalties have experienced an unprecedented development in France as well as in other countries. Prompted by the European Court of Human Rights, French law has finally granted the targets of administrative repression the guaranties required by the penal character of such procedures. The combination of criminal and administrative sanctions, which is a creation of the practice of law rather than of legal thought, remains problematic. The law of decriminalization proposes new ways of linking these two types of punishment, and its completion requires the incorporation of the notion of ‘repressive negotiation’ in our law.