In view of article 1112 Code civil:

Given that Mme Kannas, having worked for the firm of Larousse-Bordas since 1972, first as assistant editor and then as salaried editor, and having agreed for a consideration on 21 June 1984 to grant her employer exclusive rights in a dictionary entitled “Mini débutants” which she had worked on in the course of her employment, had her employment, then as “editorial director in the French language”, terminated in 1996, and that in 1997 she sought avoidance of the transfer of 21 June 1984 on the ground that her consent was invalidated by duress, and also an injunction to prevent further exploitation of the work and the appointment of an expert to ascertain the sums of which she had been deprived;

Given that in acceding to her demands the court below held that in 1984 her status as employee put Mme Kannas in a position of such economic dependence on the firm Editions Larousse that she was forced to accept the contract without being able to object to the terms in it which she found contrary to her interests or even the rules which protect the rights of authors; that had she refused it would necessarily have rendered her situation precarious, given the employment situation in the firm at the time, when there was a serious risk of downsizing, as indicated by a press cutting in August 1984; and while it is true that her employer never explicitly threatened her with termination, nevertheless her duty of loyalty to her employer made it impossible for her, without putting her employment at risk, to offer her manuscript to a competitor; that this fear of losing her job affected her consent and prevented her discussing the terms on which she transferred her rights as author, as she could have done had she been less dependent on her employer, a dependency which ended only when her employment was terminated;

Given, however, that consent is vitiated by duress only when a situation of economic dependence is abused in order to profit from the dependent party’s fear of some evil directly threatening their legitimate interests; and that in deciding as it did without finding that at the time of the transfer Mme Kannas was under threat from the proposed downsizing and that the employer profited from this fact in order to persuade her to sign the court of appeal gave no legal basis for its decision;

For these reasons, QUASHES the decision of 12 January 2000 of the Court of Appeal of Paris and remands the case to the Court of Appeal of Versailles.

Subsequent Developments

Civ. 1, 03/04/2002 : The doctrine established by this judgement has not since been the subject of a confirmatory or contradictory decision at the level of the Court of Cassation. There has been a decision of the Paris Court of Appeal dated 28 June 2002 which considered that the mere fact that one of the parties was in a dominant economic position in relation to the other was insufficient to show that there had been coercion in relation to the signature of a contract of surety. This doctrine seems in fact to be solidly established in case law (Com. 20 May 1980: an abuse of compelling economic force does not constitute duress within the meaning of Article 1112 of the Civil Code, or Com. 27 February 2001, unpublished, application for review no 98-21075.