The copy of La confession de foi des églises réformées de France dite confession de foi de la Rochelle (1559) that I provided previously was not the original French but French with updated spelling. In both America and France, updating a document does not bestow copyrights - copyright is limited to the creative text surrounding it e.g. new footnotes or commentaries. However, a forumite expressed his concern so I went looking for an original text online. While I was doing so, the original post was reported and removed by Logos - hence the new post rather than add an explanation and replace the text on the original post.
My shared text came from CFLR-Texte.pdf As I read the site declaration, it explicitly allowed for educational, non-financial reuse; it identified the text as an extract but included no copyright. The forumite convinced me it could be ambiguous so I went off to research the copyright status of modern editions of old texts and find a replacement. My replacement text would come from The French Confession of Faith, 1559, by John Calvin. Perhaps my favorite full Confession. | Irishanglican's Weblog. For a personal version as it has added notes, I would use la-confession-de-la-rochelle1.pdf. another nice version is Microsoft Word - Confession de foi de La Rochelle.doc . While literally hours of research convinced me that the CFLR text originally shared is not under copyright, I have better things to do with my time that triple-checking French copyright law. Therefore, I will leave it to you to convert the text of your choice to .docx format.
Sidebar: The rule regarding updated/ transcribed old texts is true of most of Europe. However, England is an exception - think of the West Gallery music fiasco … and the loss to church music historical performances.
