An unwritten French agency mandate, registered for €6.05, just won €289,765.49.

Starting capital this week is €449.12 [$500], at the European Central Bank euro reference rate of 1 EUR = 1.1133 USD for 28 October 2026. The target, about $5,000 a month, is €4,491.15 a month or €53,893.83 a year. Evidence figures below stay in the currency their source states them in; only the derived rows convert, and they show the rate.

The official fee schedule in force since 1 March 2026 prices every French business register, and the cheapest line on it is the one nobody looks at. Immatriculation at the registre spécial des agents commerciaux, « y compris la radiation » [radiation included], is €6.05 HT. A sole trader entering the registre du commerce et des sociétés by creating a business pays €18.12, three times as much; immatriculation plus radiation for a natural person is €36.23, and for a company €44.27, 7.3 times the agent’s line. Only one of those four registers carries a statutory severance.

That severance is article L. 134-12 of the code de commerce, which transposes article 17 of directive 86/653/CEE. The directive’s article 19 says what makes it an asset rather than a hope: « Les parties ne peuvent pas, avant l’échéance du contrat, déroger aux dispositions des articles 17 et 18 au détriment de l’agent commercial » [the parties may not, before the contract expires, derogate from articles 17 and 18 to the agent’s detriment]. It cannot be signed away in advance. There is nothing to negotiate, so there is nothing to lose at the negotiation.

Nor is there a vesting period, and this is the part that reversed. On 23 June 2015 the Cour de cassation held, in pourvoi n° 14-17.894, that « Le statut des agents commerciaux, qui suppose pour son application que la convention soit définitivement conclue, n’interdit pas une période d’essai » [the commercial agents’ statute, which presupposes a definitively concluded agreement, does not forbid a trial period] — and the courts below read that as meaning no indemnity during one. The Court of Justice took the opposite view on 19 April 2018 in C-645/16, Conseils et mise en relations (CMR) SARL v Demeures terre et tradition SARL, ruling that the article 17 regimes apply « lorsque cette cessation intervient au cours de la période d’essai que ce contrat stipule ». On 23 January 2019 the chambre commerciale, Mme Mouillard presiding, Mme Laporte reporting, cassated its own line in pourvoi n° 15-14.212. The claim now exists from the first day of the mandate.

What it is worth is not in the statute. It is in the case law, and the Cour de cassation’s own Judilibre database returns 461 decisions containing the phrase « deux années de commissions ». Four of them were handed down in a single month this autumn: the tribunal judiciaire de Bordeaux fixed €40,610 on 24 September, the tribunal de commerce de Castres €50,610 on 7 September on an annual average of €25,305, the tribunal de commerce de Lille Métropole valued a claim at €88,615.22 on 9 September, and Nanterre awarded €289,765.49 on 22 September. On 14 October the chambre commerciale quashed a judgment in pourvoi n° 25-15.242 for failing to assess the indemnity at two years of commissions on the average of the last three exercices.

The Nanterre file is the one to read, because it shows what the trade actually is. SAS PEGASUS had represented the Spanish maker Woodys Eyewear around Paris since 2018 at 20% commission plus a 2% target bonus and a 3% bonus above 1,001 units, on nothing but a verbal understanding. In December 2023 Woodys dropped the 3% bonus. On 12 March 2024 it wrote to its agents cutting the rate to 18.5% retroactively to 1 January 2024 and to 17% from 1 January 2025, « applicable jusqu’en 2035 », and asked for an answer by 31 March failing which the agent would be taken to have ended the relationship. PEGASUS refused in writing three times. On 25 June 2024 Woodys terminated for faute grave. The court found no faute grave, in part because the grievance it leaned on was not in the termination letter, and awarded the indemnity in full, plus €36,220.69 of notice, €23,127.69 of withheld bonus and €20,000 of costs: €369,113.87.

That is the non-consensus reading. The commercial instinct when a principal cuts your rate is to protect the relationship and take the cut, because the alternative is no income. In France the alternative is a one-off claim measured in years of the income you are protecting, and the principal is the party with something to lose. Woodys’ own disputed 3% bonus on PEGASUS’ 2023 turnover of €521,563 was worth €15,646.89 a year. Refusing the cut and being fired for it was worth 18.5 years of that bonus — and 23.6 years of it counting the whole award.

Who is on the other side of this trade? Every principal with French agents, which is why the drafting energy in commercial agency contracts goes into trial periods, faute grave clauses and commission-rate variation clauses rather than into the indemnity itself — the indemnity is the one term that cannot be touched. The 2019 reversal closed the trial-period route. The chambre commerciale’s line since 2022, which PEGASUS relied on and Nanterre applied, closes the second: a faute grave not stated in the termination letter cannot be produced afterwards to defeat the claim. What is left to the principal is the rate, and the rate is exactly what the agent can refuse.