In France, monitoring of maternal mortality began in 1995 with the first "perinatal plan." A National Committee of Experts on Maternal Mortality (CNEMM) was established to study, through confidential surveys, the rate of maternal mortality, its risk factors, and its preventability. The Committee is also tasked with issuing recommendations to relevant professionals to improve the situation. In 2001, the InVS, whose mission is to monitor the health status of the population, became an ex officio member of this committee. In 2004, the Public Health Policy Act expanded the InVS’s missions and entrusted it with the responsibility of piloting a program to collect and analyze serious adverse events related to healthcare. The analysis of maternal mortality, which falls within this framework, was thus entrusted to the InVS in 2006, and it is in this capacity that we are releasing, together with Inserm and the entire CNEMM, the results of the confidential survey covering the 1999–2001 period. Until then, the committee’s work had been based on medical causes of death validated by the CépiDC, which are produced with a certain delay. This delay is compounded by a rigorous but cumbersome investigation procedure that requires, for each recorded maternal death, two assessors (an obstetrician-gynecologist and an anesthesiologist) to visit the team concerned to collect data for a comprehensive standardized report. This investigation document is returned to Inserm, which anonymizes it and forwards it to the CNEMM, with no possibility of linking it back to the hospital medical record. National experts analyze each case and issue an opinion on the cause of death and its preventability. The overall analysis leads to recommendations regarding practices. The results presented cover the years 1999, 2000, and 2001. The number of maternal deaths and the preventability rate have changed little compared to the previous period, but the analysis of causes of death, risk factors, and professional practices is significantly different and reinforces the importance of continuing the work undertaken over the past ten years. Thanks to the electronic certification of medical causes of death, which will be implemented starting in 2007, it will be possible to identify and analyze maternal deaths more quickly. This is why the InVS, together with the CNEMM and Inserm (U149 and CépiDC), plans to revise the survey protocol in 2007 to improve its responsiveness. Recommendations to healthcare professionals, now issued within a shorter timeframe, should therefore become operational more quickly. (R.A.)