Insurance Contract Law, French Law, Insured Sums, Subrogation, Life Insurance, Abusive Clauses, Insurance Legislation, European Comparison, Third Republic
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Abstract
Extract
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Abstract
The development of a unified legal framework for insurance contracts in France, driven by the need to protect insureds and codify insurer practices.
Extract
[...] In fact, at the beginning of the twentieth century, France was significantly lagging behind in Europe: while Switzerland (1908), Germany and Belgium (1874) had already legislated on insurance contracts, multiple and successive French attempts (projects of 1920) ultimately failed due to the political instability of the Third Republic2. Or the need for a unified legal framework to synthesize jurisprudential contributions in the objective of protecting insureds and codifying the practice of insurers became quite significant, particularly in the face of the development of abusive clauses, as highlighted by the historical drafting of article 5 of the aforementioned law3. [...]
[...] While the foundations of the first article focused on the general principle of contractual freedom in a context of monetary instability and financial risk of speculation4, The exclusion of subrogation on the basis of the second article sparked debates between mutualists and trade unions on one side, and private insurers on the other, in a context of balancing interests; thus the establishment of the two-year prescription which 'constitutes a means of freeing oneself from the obligations arising from an insurance contract by the effect of the passage of a two-year period5 ». [...]
