Violence par abus de dépendance (economic duress): A First — and a Misfire

A case note on Cass. 3e civ., 4 June 2026, no. 24-15.070, FS-B

Abstract

For the first time, it seems, the Cour de cassation has upheld the annulment of a contract for violence par abus de dépendance — duress arising from the abuse of a state of dependence — on the basis of article 1143 of the Civil Code. But at the cost of a highly idiosyncratic conception of duress, one that appears contra legem.

Introduced into the Civil Code by the Ordinance of 10 February 2016, article 1143 provides that “there is also violence where one party, abusing the state of dependence in which the other party stands towards it, obtains from the latter an undertaking to which it would not have agreed in the absence of such constraint, and derives from it a manifestly excessive advantage”.

This provision enshrines a variant of the defect of consent known as violence (duress), wrongly labelled “economic duress”. For our part, we shall avoid that misleading name, for article 1143 — contrary to the Senate’s attempted rewriting on the occasion of the ratification statute of 20 April 2018 — can capture every kind of duress, be it economic, emotional, corporate or any other.

We shall therefore call it, even if conceptual precision suffers for it, violence par abus de dépendance — duress by abuse of dependence.

This particular form of duress, doubtless less crude than physical violence but no less effective, is the fruit of a long judicial sequence.

Its starting point may be set in the year 2000, when the Court, without recognising the existence of such duress, confined itself to stating that “economic constraint relates to violence and not to lésion” (substantive unfairness of price).

The landmark decision was the Larousse-Bordas judgment of 2002, whose restrictive formula has passed into posterity: “only the abusive exploitation of a situation of economic dependence, carried out so as to take advantage of the fear of an evil directly threatening the legitimate interests of the person, can vitiate consent by violence”.

It will be recalled that, in Larousse-Bordas, the employee — who claimed she had been compelled to assign to her employer, at a low price, her rights in the collection of pocket dictionaries she had created — was unsuccessful, for want of proof. The diffuse fear of being part of the next “batch” of collective redundancies on economic grounds was not enough to establish so-called economic duress. The employer would have had to threaten the employee explicitly with dismissal for such duress to be made out.

And then? Then, next to nothing. Between Larousse-Bordas in 2002 and the reform of the law of obligations in 2016, so-called economic duress seems to have generated more academic commentary than case law.

Then came the reform, which enshrined violence par abus de dépendance in two stages.

First stage: the wording of article 1143 resulting from the Ordinance of 10 February 2016 provided that “there is also violence where one party, abusing the state of dependence in which the other party stands, obtains from the latter an undertaking to which it would not have agreed in the absence of such constraint, and derives from it a manifestly excessive advantage”.

Second stage: the ratification statute. Let us say so without mincing words: the senators were hostile to the text, which they sought to muzzle. First, by appending the epithet “economic” to “dependence”, so that only the abusive exploitation of an economic situation could be sanctioned. That proposal did not secure the assent of the deputies.

The senators did, however, obtain the addition of the words “towards it” (à son égard), the text now providing: “There is also violence where one party, abusing the state of dependence in which the other party stands towards it, obtains from the latter an undertaking to which it would not have agreed in the absence of such constraint, and derives from it a manifestly excessive advantage”.

The addition is anything but anecdotal. It considerably narrows the scope of the text. Henceforth, only the exploitation of a situation of dependence pre-existing between the parties can be taken into account.

The text thereby removes any risk of confusion between dependence and vulnerability.

Take a simple example: a company is in dire straits, owing a substantial debt to URSSAF or the DGFIP (the French social-security and tax authorities). A competitor, scenting a bargain, offers to buy its land or its machinery for 50% of their value. Predation, no doubt, but not violence within the meaning of article 1143, for the weaker party was not, before the contract, dependent upon the stronger.

Matters seemed clear, then… until this judgment delivered on 4 June 2026 by the Third Civil Chamber, which may appear contra legem.

In the case at hand, a couple of elderly and infirm Corsican wine-growers (the husband having suffered a stroke in 2017, the wife afflicted since the same year by neurocognitive disorders and Alzheimer’s disease) granted, on 26 August 2019, a rural lease (bail rural) to one of their sons and to the EARL (an agricultural limited-liability company) which he manages.

The lease covered 72 hectares of vines and orchards.

What is striking is the rent, extremely modest: about €10,000 per year for the vines and orchards alone (to which are added €300 per month for the buildings, the cellar and the wine-making equipment, and so on), whereas the average rent for the vines alone was assessed at between €72,000 and €86,400.

A good deal, or an abuse of weakness?

The father died on 4 October 2019, the mother on 17 January 2022.

Between those two dates, by writs of 28 and 29 December 2021 — the mother then still being alive and herself a defendant — their other son, acting in his capacity as heir and as a member of the lessor EARL, sued his brother for annulment of the lease.

The Rural Leases Joint Tribunal (tribunal paritaire des baux ruraux) of Bastia annulled the agreement on 20 October 2022. The Bastia Court of Appeal confirmed this on 28 February 2024, citing article 1143 of the Civil Code, but referring to “the abuse of dependence provided for by the civil law”.

An appeal on a point of law was brought by the brother who benefited from the so-favourable lease.

In substance, the ground of appeal levelled two complaints at the appellate judgment.

The first concerned the characterisation of “dependence” as required by article 1143. The ground argued that a state of dependence presupposes a situation of “subjection” of one person towards another — a situation that cannot be inferred merely from the fact that the faculties of the lessors, two elderly persons, were impaired.

Put differently, the first complaint lay in the Court of Appeal’s conflation of two concepts: vulnerability and dependence. It is true that the Court of Appeal had held that “the impaired faculties of the two elderly persons, one of whom was a party to the rural lease at issue, are deemed, at the decisive stage, to constitute a state of dependence”.

As for the second complaint, it concerned the requirement of threats. The appeal contended that “the abusive conduct of the contracting party who imposes its domination and proceeds to take advantage of the established state of dependence must manifest itself through threats or pressure on its part”. Yet, in the case at hand, the Court of Appeal had not been especially demanding as to the characterisation of duress. Under the guise of “objectivising a defect of consent” (in its own words), the Bastia court had essentially inferred duress from the mere finding of lésion. Judge for yourselves: “as regards the abuse of that state of dependence, the relatively derisory consideration, in the light of the usages prevailing in the wine-growing sector in Corsica, suffices on its own to demonstrate the abuse of the dependence of Mr and Mrs [I]/[J]”.

In fact, the Court of Appeal had required no demonstration of duress whatsoever. Neither threat, nor fear, nor pressure. It had performed a kind of logical short cut, inferring duress from dependence (if one may put it that way) and from the imbalance affecting the contract. In other words, the Bastia court holds that, where the contract concluded is imbalanced, it is the product of duress.

The Third Civil Chamber of the Cour de cassation answers in two sentences.

At paragraph 12, it states that “it is not necessary to establish the existence of positive acts of threat or pressure in order to characterise a defect of consent through violence within the meaning of [article 1143 of the Civil Code]”.

At paragraph 13, it holds that “the state of dependence towards the other contracting party, required by that last provision, may result from a state of vulnerability, known to that party, of which it takes advantage when concluding the contract in order to obtain a manifestly excessive advantage”.

Having laid down these new rules, the Court applies them to the case.

First step: the lessor parents were markedly impaired, so much so that “the impaired faculties of these two elderly persons did not allow them to grasp the extent and the import of the rural lease concluded on 26 August 2019”.

Second step: the son “maintained regular relations with his parents”, so that he could not be unaware of the state they were in.

Third step: the lease was heavily imbalanced, the rent being extremely modest (seven times less than the average rent, considering the vines alone).

Conclusion: “having thus shown that Mr [E] [Y] was aware of the general impairment of his parents’ discernment and thus of their state of vulnerability, the Court of Appeal was entitled to infer that, having regard to the circumstances in which the lease was signed, the lessors were in a state of dependence towards their son, and that he had abused it in order to obtain an advantage which it, in its sovereign assessment, held to be manifestly excessive, and it therefore rightly annulled the lease”.

The Court accordingly dismisses the appeal.

Admittedly, the judgment is one of dismissal, and the level of review is limited (the Court of Appeal “was entitled to infer”), which invites the commentator to caution.

But the solution adopted by the Third Civil Chamber may come as a surprise, on several counts.

First, because the Court conflates dependence and vulnerability. Article 1143 of the Civil Code sanctions only the abuse of dependence — not the exploitation of vulnerability. The clarification added in 2018, to the effect that the dependence must pre-exist between the parties, dispels the slightest doubt, if any there could ever have been: only the exploitation of the victim’s dependence towards the perpetrator is sanctioned. The legislature was, moreover, careful to specify that this amendment has an “interpretative character” (article 16, I, of the statute of 20 April 2018): deemed to have been part of the text from the outset, the requirement of a dependence between the parties was already binding from 2016. Dependence is assessed in the relationship binding the parties, and not in the contracting party considered in isolation.

Whether or not one agrees with article 1143 of the Civil Code, and whether or not one would have wished it more protective of the weak, is immaterial. The text permits annulment of the contract only where the perpetrator of the duress has exploited the dependence in which the victim stood towards it.

To assert, as the Court does, that “the state of dependence towards the other contracting party […] may result from a state of vulnerability, known to that party”, is a misreading and is contra legem.

Second, because the Court adopts an expansive conception of abuse. Once again it extends the scope of article 1143, by not requiring proof of pressure or threats. Once the abuse of dependence is inferred from the mere fact that the perpetrator obtained an imbalanced contract and was aware of the victim’s weakness, the burden of proof is greatly eased… but legal certainty is weakened.

If, on the moral plane, the result is understandable, legal orthodoxy suffers for it, and one may ask whether other mechanisms could not have been called upon, without any need thus to distort article 1143 of the Civil Code.

For, in truth, what remains of duress if one requires neither fear, nor threat, nor pressure? Is one not, in reality, sanctioning a qualified form of lésion?

Finally, the solution runs counter to the policy adopted by the Commercial Chamber, which has of late tended to promote legal certainty by restricting the scope of certain provisions of the “new” law of contract (contracts of adhesion, the pre-contractual duty to inform, and so on). On the very terrain of article 1143, the Commercial Chamber has indeed recently refused to characterise an abuse of dependence, the assignors having retained the freedom not to comply with the assignee’s demands.

To our knowledge, violence par abus de dépendance had until now remained largely theoretical. It had drawn more ink in the columns of the law reviews than in the judgments of the Cour de cassation. Setting aside a well-known decision concerning a lawyer compelled by his near-sole client to accept a reduction in his fees — a decision rendered under the former law — it seems to us that the Cour de cassation had never recognised the existence of violence par abus de dépendance.

The case law of the lower courts is scarcely more favourable to article 1143 of the Civil Code.

One will therefore remain wary of this judgment of the Third Civil Chamber, which appears to widen the scope of the text considerably, to the detriment of legal certainty.