The efficient and reliable assessment of general community health requires the development of comprehensive and parsimonious measures of proven validity. The Nottingham Health Profile (NHP) has been demonstrated to be a reliable indicator of common expressions of discomfort and stress in the general population. The present paper describes its linguistic adaptation into French, the derivation of item weights by Thurstone's method of paired comparisons and the comparison of item weights across various sociodemographic groups. There is more similarity than variation on the valuation of the state of health explored by the NHP between the French and the British population as little inter-cultural or inter-linguistic variations were found. The differences in judgement of severity elicited across sociodemographic groups in the French sample cast some doubts on the relevance of general weights for use in population surveys.