> Almost all of Europe uses civil law, where there is no distinction between civil and criminal courts.
Obviously not true. In fact, this is so obviously wrong I don't know where to start.
Differences between civil and criminal courts:
* different hierarchy
* different powers (criminal court can, say, order imprisonment)
* different judges
* different parties (defendant vs prosecution for criminal, defendant vs complainant for civil court)
* different standards of proof
* different rights (e.g. the right to a jury trial in some countries)
Even this barely scratches the surface of the differences.
> This is far removed from reality as far as I am aware. Please provide sources.
Start reading here, it describes part of the procedure:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partie_civile_en_France
Google suggests this as an English alternative:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1468-2230....
(note there is "partie civile" and "action civile". They are NOT the same, aren't directly related. Specifically it is NOT the case that the "partie civile" is the complainant in an "action civile", as one might think. Keep reading)
The procedure is, generally speaking:
1) complain to the police, get a record or the complaint
2) with the record (which is a number), go to an "investigation judge" (no need to prove anything or ...), declare your intent to become "partie civile", register your lawyer, etc. He will tell you the amount of the "bail" for the case (which is going to be ~1000 euro. It differs from case to case, but not much)
3) pay the "bail" to the "griffe" (sort-of-kind-of the secretary of the court, they have an office in every courthouse) and register it
4) take said registration back to the judge you registered with, judge writes an order
5) write the prosecutor to deliver the order of the investigative judge
Now, the prosecutor is forced to bring the case before criminal court within a certain amount of time, and is forced to demand a nonzero punishment for whatever the complaint is (in fact this is one of the ways they get out from under it: they demand ridiculous punishments so the judge will rule against them).
The non-obvious and terrible thing for the victims of this system is misjudging the motivation of the police/prosecution (technically there is a distinction between the police and the people that do this, but it's essentially a different department of the same organization...). You might think the police will try to punish the guilty party, if there is one. That's technically true, but only in the following sense : they will try to get a conviction, and with this procedure REGARDLESS of their judgement there is a guilty party. If they think they can get a conviction, odds are VERY good they'll pursue seriously. Things that do NOT influence whether they pursue (and therefore do not influence whether you get convicted) include reasonableness, whether you're nice to the police, whether there's significant damages, whether anyone else was involved, whether the police promised not to do that (which they do, frankly almost always, then bring the case anyway and get the conviction), ...
An evil way to get ahead in elections in France: use this system to get your niece to complain against your competition, then point out (perfectly accurately) that your opponent is under investigation for terrible crime X. They will go free, eventually (or maybe not), but by that time it has long since stopped mattering.