The Woman Trader in French Law in the Nineteenth Century

The Commercial Code of 1807 derogated from that of 1804 in that it allowed married women, under certain conditions, to run their own businesses and thus to enter into legal arrangements of various types: purchase, sale, loan, mandate, bills of exchange, etc. Did such derogation amount to emancipation? Nothing is less sure, even if the jurisprudence did in part point towards it. In practice, both wife and husband sometimes employed judicial strategies that exploited the imprecision of the law in order to evade the contractual obligations into which they entered. As far as legal doctrine was concerned, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that the discourse would evolve in the direction of increased emancipation for married women, whether or not they were public merchants.