Study sheet: Entreprise et société

📋 Course Outline

1. Economic Activity and Enterprise
2. Choosing a Legal Structure
3. Legal Personality of a Society
4. Legal Definition of Society
5. Individual Enterprise and Patrimony
6. Categories and Legal Forms

📖 1. Economic Activity and Enterprise

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Economic activity : An activity through which a person or entity conducts business, such as selling goods or providing services.
• Enterprise : CJCE, 23 avril 1991 — Any entity exercising an economic activity, independently of its legal status and its method of financing.

📝 Essential Points

• Selling goods, such as clothing or chocolate products, and providing services, such as website design, are forms of economic activity.

💡 Memory Hook

Enterprise is the economic activity; society is the legal structure.

📖 2. Choosing a Legal Structure

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Legal structure : The legal organization chosen for carrying out an economic activity, and the course uses the term society for these structures.

★ Must-know

• Choosing a legal structure requires considering:
  • the number of participants
  • the need for financing
  • the desire to make profits
  • the nature of the activity
  • marital status
  • existing assets

Further detail

• A commercial activity may involve buying and reselling goods, whereas a civil activity may be carried out by a notary, and agricultural activity constitutes another type of economic activity.

💡 Memory Hook

People, funding, profit, activity, marital status, and assets guide the choice.

📖 3. Legal Personality of a Society

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Legal person : A subject of law distinct from the natural persons who may constitute or represent it.

★ Must-know

📌 A society is a legal person and a subject of law, whereas an enterprise is an economic notion and is not a subject of law.

• A society has its own legal personality, separate from that of its members.

• A society has its own patrimony, separate from the patrimony of its associates.

Further detail

• A society is governed by specific legal rules known as company law.

💡 Memory Hook

A society stands beside its members with its own legal identity and separate patrimony.

📖 4. Legal Definition of Society

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Society : Code civil — Formed by two or more persons who agree by contract to allocate property or their work to a common enterprise in order to share its profit or benefit from the resulting savings, while undertaking to contribute to losses.

★ Must-know

📌 A society may be established by the unilateral act of one person only in cases provided for by law. — Code civil

Further detail

• The purpose of a society may be to share profits or to benefit from savings resulting from the common enterprise.

💡 Memory Hook

Contributions to a common enterprise → benefit-sharing or savings, with participation in losses.

📖 5. Individual Enterprise and Patrimony

📝 Essential Points

📌 An individual enterprise is not a subject of law because it has no legal personality distinct from the entrepreneur, who remains the subject of law.

• Since 14 February 2022, an individual entrepreneur has had professional assets distinct from personal assets following the abolition of the EIRL.

💡 Memory Hook

The individual entrepreneur is the legal subject; the company has a distinct legal personality.

📖 6. Categories and Legal Forms

★ Must-know

• Societies may be lucrative, such as an SA, or non-lucrative, such as an association.

• Societies of capital include SA and SAS, whereas societies of persons include SNC.

• Commercial societies include SA, SNC, and SAS, whereas civil societies include SCI and SCM.

• Unipersonal societies include EURL and SASU, whereas pluripersonal societies include SA, SARL, associations, and GIE.

Further detail

📌 Societies may be private-law legal persons, such as SA, SARL, SAS, and SNC, or public-law legal persons, such as public establishments including schools and hospitals.

• The listed legal forms include:
  • EI
  • EURL
  • SARL
  • SAS
  • SNC
  • SCA
  • SCS
  • SCI

💡 Memory Hook

Lucrative/non-lucrative, private/public, capital/persons, commercial/civil, one-person/multi-person.

📊 Synthesis Tables

Enterprise and Society

Notion	Legal status	Patrimony
Enterprise	Economic notion; not a subject of law	Not specified as separate from an entrepreneur
Society	Legal person and subject of law	Separate from associates' patrimony
Individual enterprise	Entrepreneur is the subject of law	Professional and personal assets are distinct since 14 February 2022