On the first ground of appeal, all three limbs: Given that La Quinoléine criticises the judgment under attack for holding it liable in damages to Maclet, who runs a nursery, for the damage he suffered from trying to protect his vine grafts by using a pesticide called Cryptonol, manufactured by the defendant company, which killed some of the wood on which they were grafted; that La Quinoléine criticises the court for failure to identify any fault on its part, for failure to apply the exclusion clause contained on the label of the product, for misinterpreting the documents lodged with it, for reversing the burden of proof, and for relying on an expert’s report submitted in a different case between different parties;

But given that in holding the company liable and refusing to apply in this case the clause which disclaimed liability in certain cases where Cryptonol might prove useless or harmful, the court of appeal held that the purchaser was entitled to expect that the product was suitable for the purpose for which it was designed and that it was therefore for La Quinoléine to avoid marketing its product in areas where local conditions made its use problematic, to state precisely the kind of plants for which it should not be used, or to ensure that the treatment took place under the control of trained experts; that having thus quite correctly held the manufacturer bound to supply a product which was effective and suited to the needs of users the court of appeal was within its sovereign powers of evaluating the facts in holding that La Quinoléine was in breach of this obligation by supplying a product whose use proved damaging to Maclet’s plants and in treating this as a serious fault (faute lourde) rendering it liable to Maclet and rendering inapplicable the exclusion clause it had inserted for its own benefit; that the judges below did not disregard or violate the rights of the defence and did not reverse the burden of proof, and so have justified their decision, so that this ground of appeal is baseless; ….

For these reasons

DISMISSES the appeal from the decision of the Court of Appeal of Nîmes dated 1 February 1977.

Subsequent Developments

This note on subsequent developments reflects the legal situation as of October 2004.

Civ 1, 22 November 1978 : A seller who neglects to warn that a product can cause harm in certain circumstances can make himself guilty of grave fault (faute lourde) which prevents him from relying on a no-liability clause (imposed for his advantage). Clauses exempting from liability are allowed in case law for slight fault (fautes legeres) (Civ 1, 20 December 1988, Bull no 373), but cannot apply when non-performance of the contract follows from dol or a serious fault on the part of the debtor (long-standing case law: cf Cour de cassation chambre des requetes, 19 January 1863), concepts which the case law understands in a wide sense. Any contrary idea would in fact run the risk of emptying the contract of the essence of its content. Grave fault, considered here as sufficiently grave to permit the presumption that its author had a complete lack of seriousness in the performance of the contract, in fact an intention to cause harm, results, at best, in the non-performance of the central element of the contract and, at worst, in its complete non-performance. A good number of decisions have confirmed the solution expressed by the judgment of 1978, the most famous being, without doubt, the case known as "Chronopost" (Com 22 October 1996, Bull no 261) deeming not to have been included a clause inserted in a contract of carriage providing for an indemnification in the form of a fixed sum in case of delay, when the carrier, a specialist in rapid transport, and guaranteeing the reliability of delivery periods, had, in not delivering the package within the period laid down, failed in the essential element of the contract.

Translation by Raymond Youngs

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