A French and English wedding in France:
one invitation, two languages, the whole weekend.

A French wedding weekend usually has more moving parts than English-speaking guests expect. The legal marriage happens at the mairie, often in the late morning or early afternoon, and only the civil ceremony there makes you married in France. A religious or symbolic ceremony can follow at a church or at the venue. Then comes the vin d'honneur, the drinks reception that many French families open to a wider circle, before a long seated dinner and a party that can run well past midnight. Friday welcome drinks and a Sunday brunch bookend it.

Put every moment on one schedule, with its time and its place, before you write a single invitation. Guests flying in from London or New York need to know that the mairie and the venue may be twenty minutes apart, that the dinner starts late by their standards, and that the brunch is the morning after, not the same day.

In The Private Wedding App, the schedule runs over several days with one tab per day and the real date on each tab, and every moment links to a venue card with its own map. See how the digital wedding invitation lays out a multi-day weekend.

• Friday: welcome drinks, time and place
• Saturday: mairie, ceremony, vin d'honneur, dinner, party
• Sunday: brunch, time and place
• One venue card per place, with a Google Maps link
• Hotel and parking notes for guests coming from abroad

The classic answer is two printed invitations, one per language, and two versions of every update. It works until the dinner time moves and only one version gets corrected. A single invitation that each guest reads in their own language removes that risk.

With The Private Wedding App you write in your main language and fill the French or English field under each text, or press the AI Translation button to fill the empty fields and then adjust the wording. When a guest opens the link they pick English or French once, and every built-in label follows: buttons, the RSVP form, the menu names. You can also send the French side of the family a link that opens straight in French, so nobody has to pick at all.

Some details only matter to one side. The note about trains from Paris and the advice on tipping are for the guests coming from abroad; the explanation of what a vin d'honneur is would read oddly to a French aunt. Each schedule moment and each info section has a 'Visible in' choice, so you can show a block in one language only.

Read more about the bilingual wedding invitation, which handles up to three languages on one link.

A single yes or no does not tell you who is coming to the Friday drinks or how many plates to order for the brunch. Ask for each event separately. Switch on 'This wedding has multiple events' in the RSVP settings, add the welcome drinks, the wedding day and the brunch, and guests answer each one. The Guests page then shows attending, pending and declined for every event on its own line.

The vin d'honneur is where French and English habits differ most. You may want colleagues, neighbours and the family's friends at the drinks but not at the dinner. Create a guest group for them, tick only the ceremony and the vin d'honneur, and send them that group's link. They see their moments, their venue and their info sections, and nothing about the dinner or the brunch. Your dinner guests get a group link that covers the whole weekend.

On the events without a seated meal, such as the welcome drinks and the vin d'honneur, untick 'Ask the meal choice for this event', and guests who only say yes to those events skip the menu question.

See how multi-event RSVP keeps one guest list with a count per event.

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A French wedding dinner often has several courses, and the caterer usually asks for the choice of main course and every allergy a few weeks before. One detail trips up English-speaking guests: on a French menu, an entrée is the starter, not the main course. Write the dishes in both languages and say which course each one belongs to.

In the Meal Options tab you list the dishes with their French and English names. With 'Guests choose one dish per course' on, each guest picks a starter, a main and a dessert, for themselves and for each person with them. Below the menu, guests can write dietary notes and answer a separate severe-allergy question, which puts a warning next to their name.

When the numbers are final, the caterer day sheet gives the plate count per dish, the allergy list with each guest's table, and a breakdown per table. You print it or export it and send it to the caterer, and 'Mark as sent' remembers what they received so you can see what changed later.

More on the meal and allergy tracker.

French families often share news on WhatsApp, English-speaking friends may expect an email, and an older relative may want something on paper. All three can point to the same invitation.

Each guest row on the Guests page has a WhatsApp button that opens a chat with your message and that guest's link already typed, the group link if they belong to a group. Guests with an email address can receive their own link through 'Email the invitation'. For relatives who want a card on the sideboard, the QR Print Card tab makes a printable card in English or in French, one per group if you need it.

See how WhatsApp wedding invitations work guest by guest.

Long French dinners make the table plan matter. Seating the two families at separate ends of the room is easy; mixing them so the evening works takes more care, and you can only do it once you know who said yes to the dinner.

The seating plan works per event when RSVP per event is on, so the dinner has its own tables and only guests who accepted the dinner appear. Each party arrives as one card you drag to a table, and guests with a severe allergy carry their flag onto the plan. The budget runs in euros alongside it, with each supplier's deposit and payments.

Plan the tables with the seating chart.