DEFINITION AND OBJECT OF COOPERATIVES

PRELIMINARY REMARKS

General Cooperative Law and Special Cooperative Laws

It is difficult to comprehend cooperative French law as a whole because it is a mix of general law and several special laws dealing with specific kinds of cooperatives. The general law is Act 47-1775 of 10 September 1947 known as the’ cooperation statute‘. The purpose of the legislature at that time was to provide a cooperative common law to replace the various previous special laws laid down over a span of fift y years. Indeed, article 30 of the law still states that there will be a codification of cooperative law, and that the 1947 Law will be the first title of the new code. The 1947 Law also contained an original provision regarding normative coordination, since its Article 2 provided that general law would have greater strength than special laws, contrary to the traditional principle specialia generalibus derogant, non generalia specialibus. However, that objective was not achieved, and the provision on codification is still in force. The exceptional solution of article 2 has since been repealed by L. 92-643 of the 13th of July 1992, article 2.1.

The consequence is a large number of special laws of such an extent that it is pointless to enumerate them all. Some of the most important examples are the following:

Banking cooperatives: code mon é taire et financier (C.mon.fin.), art. L.512-1 to L.512-10, precising that, in the chapter dealing with these cooperatives in this Code, each banking cooperative is submitted to different provisions; for example: C.mon.fin., arts. L.512-2 to L.512-13 for‘banques populaires’.