It was previously considered to be in the public domain because it is a scan (or similar) by the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, but not everything scanned by the BNF is automatically in the public domain.
It is possible that this file is in the public domain for other reasons, for example because it was published a long time ago (anything before ca. 1900 is most likely ok) or because its author / artist / photographer died over 70 years ago and it was published over 95 years ago. In such cases, a new rationale should be applied, and a different license tag (see Commons:Licensing and valid license tags at Commons:Copyright tags) should be used.
If the file is not found to be in the public domain, it might be nominated for deletion (NOT by any automatic process, but manually).
See below for the previous rationale (not applicable anymore).
Previous public domain rationale, no longer applicable
This is a faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional, public domain work of art. The work of art itself is in the public domain for the following reason:
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse
This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or fewer.
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/PDMCreative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0falsefalse
The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain". This photographic reproduction is therefore also considered to be in the public domain in the United States. In other jurisdictions, re-use of this content may be restricted; see Reuse of PD-Art photographs for details.
File history
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