Business Contracts

Under Article 1582, paragraph 1 of the Civil Code, a contract of sale is “an agreement by which one party undertakes to deliver a thing, and the other to pay for it”. It thus follows that a contract of sale is a bilateral contract ("contrat synallagmatique") concluded for valuable consideration: bilateral, because, as stipulated in new Article 1106 , “the contracting parties are mutually obliged to each other”, and valuable, insofar as “each of the parties receives from the other a benefit in return for that which he provides”, pursuant to the provisions of Article 1107 .

We will begin by examining the transfer of ownership of the thing which is the subject of the sales agreement, before turning to the payment of the price in consideration of it .

Resulting from the reform of contract law, this provision defines this category of contract as opposed to unilateral contracts.

Also stemming from the reform, Article 1107, paragraph 2, states that, by contrast, an agreement is gratuitous “when one of the parties gives the other a benefit without expecting or receiving anything in return”.

7. Components of the contract of sale