Abstract
In Private Judicial Law, the distinction between the fact and the law is supposed to found the distribution of the roles between the parties and the judge concerning the contentious matter and the delimitation of the cassation control. At first, this historical distinction, adopted by numerous legal systems seems obvious, and even elementary. In terms of the theory of law, it draws a border between the fact, meaning the event, and the norm according to a criterion of normativity However, this simplicity is only apparent, as, in Private Judicial Law, there is no single distinction, but several differentiations. In order to adapt to the processual reality, as regards the judge's function, it becomes the distinction between sectors of the law and the fact, the first sector including the legal activities, which deal with the rules of law, the second sector refering to the factual activities aiming at the matters of facts. As far as cassation is concerned, it becomes the distinction between question of fact which focus on the appreciation of the facts and question of law which deal with the enforcement of the law. Yet the multiplication of the levels of distinction is not sufficient to make it operating : the judge plays a part in the factual field whereas the parties have some obligations in the fields of law ; the Court of Cassation controls questions of fact whereas it gives up certain questions of law. Since the distinction is devoid of normative basis, it is necessary to break away to come back to the texts which precisely determine the role of each party in the civil trial and achieve a balance of the roles. The inoperative nature of the distinction encourages to replace it with the real criterion of competence: the distinction between the judgement and the case which reveals the real object of the control : the jurisdictional operation.