"\verb" does not work within a footnote for special characters such as _ or #

Question

For example

\footnote{\verb+https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_France+}

treats _ as meaning a subscript and produces o as a subscript of n and F as a subscript of f.

Answer 1

As a general answer the memoir class (a superset of book, report, article) has a \verbfootnote macro which lets you include verbatin material in a footnote.

% verbfprob.tex  SE 564552
\documentclass{memoir}
\begin{document}
Some text%
\verbfootnote{Footnote with a \verb!verbatim entry! as shown}
followed by more text.
\end{document}

Answer 2

\verb does not work in the arguments to any command. The simplest approach is to use \texttt and explicitly escape special characters, e.g.,

\footnote{\texttt{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution\_of\_France}} 

although there isn't a simple escape for a backslash so maybe not so simple as you desire.

I have to admit I'm not crazy about the memoir class solution. It feels to me that memoir includes a lot of functionality that really should be in packages rather than the document class.

For URLs, there is the url package as mentioned by Ulrike Fischer in the comment on your question. This has the advantage that it incorporates line breaking in a fashion that we would expect for URLs while \verb and the \texttt solution above do not. To do this, you would, somewhere before your footnote do something along the lines of

\urldef{\frenchconst}\url{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_France}

and then in your footnote you could write

\footnote{\frenchconst}