Stratégies contentieuses et femmes en affaires au xixe siècle

Abstract

In commercial litigation, contentious strategies that take advantage of the paradoxes of 19th century unequal legislation are developed to support businesswomen interests. Through the study of a corpus of courts decisions and reports of hearings drawn from the Recueil Dalloz, it is possible to identify these strategies aimed on the one hand at rejecting the benefit of a legal status a priori favorable to women and, on the other hand, at invoking legal status which a priori consign women to a position of inferiority. These contentious strategies highlight the contradictions of a law based on the fiction of a legal incapacity of the married woman not representative of an intellectual and moral incapacity. The study proposes more broadly to question the ambivalences of the civil and commercial legislation enshrined in the Napoleonic codification.

Keywords

• women
• commercial law
• 19th century
• strategic litigation
• incapacity