A History of Luxembourgish Nationality Law

A Country Older Than Its Own Law

The Grand Duchy came into existence with the Treaty of Vienna in 1815. It did not write its own Fundamental Law until 1841, and had no constitution until 1848. For that first generation Luxembourg ran on borrowed law — the Napoleonic Code, inherited from the French Republic.

The Code was radical for its time. It pioneered jus sanguinis, nationality by blood, against the prevailing jus soli, which made a subject of anyone born within a feudal lord’s territory. That shift mattered more than it sounds. It tied a person to a state rather than to a patch of ground, and it is the reason a family can leave Luxembourg in 1889, spend a century in Argentina, and still have something to claim.

It was also, deliberately, patriarchal. Napoleon held that the management of all affairs fell to men, and the Code was written accordingly.

What the Code Did to Women

Under the Napoleonic provisions a child born to a Luxembourgish father acquired Luxembourgish nationality whether born inside the country or abroad. Article 12 handled women differently: a woman who married a foreigner took her husband’s nationality. Since dual nationality was prohibited, taking his meant losing her own.

Luxembourg did not pass a comprehensive nationality law of its own until 1934 — the “law on the indigenous.” It gave women a mechanism to keep or recover nationality on marrying a foreigner. That mechanism was revoked six years later, under the shadow of the Nazi invasion of 1940.

So for most of the country’s history, women lost their nationality routinely. Divorce and conflicts between legal systems left some of them stateless. Only in 1968, with the first “Law on Luxembourgish nationality,” could a woman keep her nationality on marrying a foreigner even if she acquired his at the same time. Only in 1986 could she pass her nationality to her children rather than it depending on the father — applied retroactively to minor children born on or after 1 January 1969.

Every restriction above is now a line of descent. The women written out of the law in 1804 are the ancestors people are claiming through today.

2008: The Door Opens

The watershed came in 2008, when Luxembourg passed its first nationality law permitting a Luxembourgish national to hold multiple nationalities. Built into it was a recovery provision: anyone with a direct-line ancestor — male or female — who was alive and held Luxembourgish nationality on 1 January 1900 could reclaim it, provided they applied within ten years.

The drafters could not plausibly have anticipated what followed. Between 2009 and early 2017, 577 Americans, 277 Brazilians and 14 Argentines reclaimed Luxembourgish nationality under it. Those are small numbers. They were the leading edge.

2017: Article 29 Becomes Article 89

The 2017 revision renumbered the recovery provision from Article 29 to Article 89 and added to it. Recovery is a two-step procedure: first the ancestor’s Luxembourgish nationality is validated, then the applicant makes an in-person declaration in Luxembourg.

The 2008 law had set one deadline for both steps, which meant the Ministry could accept a first-step application right up to the cut-off and leave the applicant no time to complete the second. The fix was to split the deadlines: 31 December 2018 for the first step, with the in-person declaration extended to 31 December 2020, then to 31 December 2025.

The same law introduced Article 23, which lets someone with a parent or grandparent who holds or held Luxembourgish nationality acquire it by a similar procedure.

The Third Route, Which Nobody Counts

There is a category the statistics miss. Since at least 2017, some people who began an application were told by the Ministry of Justice that they had been born Luxembourgish all along — where the line of descent ran through men in every generation, or, from 1 January 1969, through women too. Those people were not applying for nationality. They were requesting a first certificate proving what they already held.

The Ministry publishes no statistics on these proceedings. Our estimate for 2018–2022 is 5,836 Americans, 7,612 Brazilians and 154 Argentines, adults and minor children together — which would make recognition by far the largest source of “new” Luxembourgish nationals in the Americas, and the one nobody is counting.

The Three Routes, Side by Side

Adults reclaiming or acquiring Luxembourgish nationality. Ministry of Justice figures for Articles 89 and 23; recognition figures are our estimate and include minor children.

A note on why the third row is an estimate at all. Outside STATEC’s data on Luxembourgers emigrating and the Ministry’s statistics on nationality procedures, no public entity in Luxembourg publishes data explaining why RNPP records show so large an increase in Luxembourgish nationals living in the Americas. The Ministry’s figures cover adult applicants only. Applying our 32% estimate for minor children to the Article 89 and 23 totals and subtracting leaves a residual — people receiving nationality certificates directly. Without that minor-children adjustment, the unexplained difference as of 30 June 2023 is 16,382 people.

Why This Matters to the Surveys

Because most people do not know which provision made them Luxembourgish, we asked no survey question about it. So among the 1,174 respondents across our studies we cannot say who came in through which door — a limitation worth stating plainly, and the reason this chapter exists as reference rather than as a finding.

The surveys themselves are where the human answers are: the American-Luxembourgers Survey, the Brazilian-Luxembourgers Survey and the Argentine-Luxembourgers Survey, alongside the running count from Luxembourg government data.

Sources

1. Scuto, Denis. La Nationalité Luxembourgeoise (XIXe–XXIe Siècles): Histoire d’un Alliage Européen. Preface by Gérard Noiriel, Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2012.
2. Luxembourg, Ministry of Justice. “Les Statistiques en Matière de Nationalité Luxembourgeoise.” mj.gouvernement.lu.
3. Adapted from The LuxCitizenship Study 2024, pp. 11–13. Read the full study →