Principles of French Law by John Bell Sophie Boyron & Simon Whittaker

Author:John Bell, Sophie Boyron & Simon Whittaker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

C. Objet, Cause, and Lésion

The Civil Code contains two further requirements for the validity of a contract, that it have both an objet and a lawful cause.163 It then goes on to declare that lésion (gross disparity of undertaking) will not in principle affect the validity of a contract, though it will in specific instances.164

1. Objet

The Code itself does not make clear whether the requirement of objet (subjectmatter) deals with the subject-matter of the contract, of an obligation or of its prestation (a difficult word to translate, but the sense is of the actual thing to be done or not done), but modern jurists say that a contract itself possesses no subject-matter but rather has only effects (its obligations)165 and that the subject-matter of a contract’s obligations are its prestations.166 They therefore either talk in terms of the objet of a contractual obligation or of the latter’s prestation, the two being intimately related. The objet of a party’s prestation may either be a physical thing (such as the property in a seller’s obligation in sale, the prestation here being the delivery of the property)167 an activity or omission (such as the doing of work by an employee in employment) or a risk (in a contract such as insurance). French law requires both that an objet exists and that it be lawful, failure in either respect leading to absolute nullity (nullité absolue) of the contract, which means that in principle any person and not merely one or other of the parties to the contract may ask a court to annul it.168

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