French Consumer Law is a comprehensive and comparative overview of French and EU law in this field, covering: advertising, unfair commercial practices, conditions for the validity of contracts, unfair terms, product conformity, latent defects, product safety.

French Consumer Law

To be fair, a commercial practice must be as transparent as possible . Transparency implies allowing a contracting party to make his choice in full knowledge of the facts and therefore to clearly identify the other contracting party. Even before the introduction of the concept of identification in Article L. 121-2 of the Consumer Code, other texts imposed this obligation. For example, Article 20 o …

Concept

To be fair, a commercial practice must be as transparent as possible . Transparency implies allowing a contracting party to make his choice in full knowledge of the facts and therefore to clearly identify the other contracting party. Even before the introduction of the concept of identification in Article L. 121-2 of the Consumer Code, other texts imposed this obligation. For example, Article 20 of Law No 2004/575 of 21 June 2004 for confidence in the digital economy (LCEN) provides that “any advertising in any form whatsoever, accessible by an online public communication service, must be able to be clearly identified as such. It must make clearly identifiable the individual or legal entity on whose behalf it is carried out”. 

Article L. 121-2 now qualifies the commercial practice as misleading “when the person, on whose behalf this practice is implemented, is not clearly identifiable”. The text appears to lay down a general obligation to identify the beneficiary of the commercial practice, which differs from the material author of the message, covered by the special texts. In its earlier version, only advertising that is misleading as to the identity of the advertiser was sanctioned . The new incrimination, wider in scope, should allow for a more direct intervention vis-à-vis representational operations, in which the consumer is unable to identify the principal , infomercials which are not presented as such  or, on the internet, false consumer opinions.

 T. com. of Paris, 20 December 2010, LawLex201200001370JBJ.

See Cass. crim., 3 September  2002, LawLex200300001000JBJ; Cass. crim., 23 March 1994, LawLex200300003579JBJ: purchase order presenting the appearance of an invoice of the former public operator France Télécom.

 See CA Paris, 12 December 2006, LawLex200700001537JBJ: case of the publication of a rental advertisement in the "classifieds" section of a newspaper by a real estate agent.

 See, inter alia, CA Paris, 11 October 1994, LawLex200300001714JBJ.

French Consumer Law

168. Concept

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168. Concept

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Les décisions de justice citées dans ce paragraphe :

Les notions juridiques connexes

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