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France and Germany do not only have very prominent private law codifications, but are also countries which have taken the EC Sales Directive 1999 (among other EU developments) as an invitation to engage in an overall reform of their old Codes at the wake of the 21 st  Century. This invites to a comparison, namely because one reform occurred when transposing the directive, within two years – the other, however, after almost 1 ½ decades of considerations and discussions. The common thrust is orienting the Codes more towards international models – the CISG in one case and different sets of principles developed during the 20 years around the turn of the Millenium (and to some extent inspired by the CISG) in the other. Another common thrust is simplification, in one case mainly the drastic reduction of forms of breach, their streamlining and the installation of a (more) coherent regime on the breach of contracts; in the other – later – case a more extensive overall endeavour of simplification – in many parts of the Code and its institutions. The most striking difference may well be that Germany, in its reform, chose to integrate consumer law into the old Civil Code – thus bringing the main part of European contract law into the Civil Code –, while France stayed with the model it had installed as a true protagonist in this respect. This is the model of splitting contract law into a Code civil and a Code de la consommation. Two different models of why parties in contractual relationships should be protected – for instance why and when they should be protected against ‘unfair’ contract terms – can be sensed behind these choices. Many other changes, albeit of high importance, may be seen as being more specific and narrower. In France, the most important single change seems to us not to be the one most severely criticized, the ‘abandon de la cause’, but the move towards a system where the good faith principle inspires all questions and all phases of contracting and thus assumes the role of a truly overarching principle. The development named second (but also the one named first) moves France more into the direction of what seemed to be a distinctive as well as a somewhat peculiar feature of the German development. Altogether, the two countries seem to be more internationally oriented and closer to each other in their grand Civil Codes after the respective reforms. The ‘grande réforme franҫaise’ – rather a step towards a common European model than one of splendid national isolation.

The French and the German Reforms of Contract Law