You created your French company from London, New York, Dubai or Singapore, the Kbis (the official certificate proving your company is registered with the trade register) arrived, and life went on. Then something changed: you found a buyer for your stake, you disagree with your French partner, or you simply want your money back. In France, leaving a company is not the mirror image of entering it. Shares in a SAS (société par actions simplifiée, the simplified joint-stock company most foreign founders choose) and parts in a SARL (société à responsabilité limitée, the limited liability company) do not circulate like listed stock. The articles of association (statuts), the shareholders’ agreement (pacte d’associés) and the statute books decide whether you may sell, to whom, at what price, and what happens when the other shareholders say no. This guide explains the full exit path from abroad in 2026: the approval clauses that can block your sale, the statutory safety net that forces your partners to buy you out, how the price is fixed when nobody agrees, and the last-resort remedies when the company has become a trap. Every French acronym is explained the first time it appears, and every decisive rule is quoted from the official text read for this article.
I. Can you sell your shares freely, and who can stop the sale?
A. What do your articles and your shareholders’ agreement say about selling from abroad?
Before you negotiate with a buyer, read your own paperwork, because in a SAS freedom of contract comes first and the statute book comes second. Your statuts may require the prior approval of the company for every transfer: Article L.227-14 of the Commercial Code (Code de commerce) provides that “Les statuts peuvent soumettre toute cession d’actions à l’agrément préalable de la société.” The same articles may lock the door for longer: Article L.227-13 allows the articles to provide that shares cannot be transferred at all, “pour une durée n’excédant pas dix ans”, a lock-up clause (clause d’inaliénabilité) valid for up to ten years. Your pacte d’associés, examined in our companion guide on the clauses a foreign investor should negotiate in a French SAS shareholders’ agreement, often adds a right of first refusal (droit de préemption) giving your partners the right to match the buyer’s offer, a tag-along right (droit de sortie conjointe) letting you join their sale, or a drag-along obligation (obligation de sortie conjointe) forcing you to sell alongside them. Selling from abroad changes nothing about these clauses but changes everything about their practice: notifications must be sent to the registered office (siège social) by a means that proves receipt, powers of attorney must be translated and sometimes apostilled, and funds must travel through identified bank accounts because the bank will ask for the source of the purchase price. Map every clause before you sign a promise to sell, because the sanction for ignoring them is severe: Article L.227-15 of the Commercial Code states that “Toute cession effectuée en violation des clauses statutaires est nulle.” A sale completed behind the company’s back can be annulled, and the buyer who paid you can turn against you for the refund. The Cour de cassation (the French supreme court for civil and commercial matters) clarified the exact reach of this nullity in a decision of 21 June 2023 (appeals no. 21-25.952 and 22-12.045): “Aux termes de ce texte, toute cession effectuée en violation des clauses statutaires est nulle.” But the Court added an important boundary: “Ce texte ne régissant pas l’exclusion d’un associé et la cession forcée de ses actions qui en résulte, la nullité qu’il prévoit vise uniquement à sanctionner la violation de toute clause statutaire ayant pour objet la cession d’actions librement consentie par leur titulaire.” In plain terms, Article L.227-15 punishes voluntary sales made in breach of the articles, not forced transfers resulting from an exclusion decided under the articles. Check which category your operation falls into, because the buyer, the procedure and the judge are not the same. Where the articles are silent in a SAS, the default rule surprises many foreigners: shares are in principle freely transferable, and no approval can be improvised after the buyer appears. An approval requirement must exist in the articles before the sale, and it must describe who decides, within what time and what happens on refusal; a clause that simply says “the sale requires approval” without organising the buyback leaves the seller exposed, and recent practice shows courts reading vague clauses strictly against the party blocking the exit.
Distance adds a second layer of traps that have nothing to do with company law but decide whether your sale survives. The transfer of SARL parts must be recorded in writing (acte de cession) and notified to the company, either by service through a commissioner of justice (commissaire de justice, formerly huissier de justice, the sworn officer who serves legal documents) or by registration of the deed at the company’s registered office; the transfer of SAS shares is recorded by a book entry (ordre de mouvement) in the company’s share register (registre des mouvements de titres) and individual shareholder account. In both cases the company must then update its filings on the Guichet unique (the single online portal for all business formalities, run by the INPI, the French intellectual property and companies office), and the greffe (the registry office of the commercial court) publishes certain changes in the BODACC (Bulletin officiel des annonces civiles et commerciales, the official gazette where company registrations, sales of businesses and collective proceedings are published). A foreign seller who signs by private deed from abroad should therefore keep three proofs from day one: the dated notice sent to the company requesting approval or recording the transfer, the receipt proving the company received it, and the bank trail of the price. These three documents decide almost every later dispute about time limits, and time limits decide almost every sale. Our founding guide on setting up a company in France as a foreign founder, from bank account to Kbis, VAT and first hire describes the registers and filings your company already lives with; selling means using the same machinery in reverse, with the same registrar watching.
B. How does the statute protect you when the articles say nothing: the SARL safety net and the SAS gap?
The two company forms behave very differently once the articles are silent, and foreign sellers usually discover this too late. In a SARL, the statute imposes approval by default for any sale to a stranger: Article L.223-14 of the Commercial Code provides that “Les parts sociales ne peuvent être cédées à des tiers étrangers à la société qu’avec le consentement de la majorité des associés représentant au moins la moitié des parts sociales, à moins que les statuts prévoient une majorité plus forte.” The procedure is then locked into a timetable the majority cannot stretch. The draft sale must be notified to the company and to each shareholder, and “Si la société n’a pas fait connaître sa décision dans le délai de trois mois à compter de la dernière des notifications prévues au présent alinéa, le consentement à la cession est réputé acquis.” Three months of silence means yes. If the company expressly refuses, the statute does not leave the seller locked in: “Si la société a refusé de consentir à la cession, les associés sont tenus, dans le délai de trois mois à compter de ce refus, d’acquérir ou de faire acquérir les parts à un prix fixé dans les conditions prévues à l’article 1843-4 du code civil, sauf si le cédant renonce à la cession de ses parts.” The remaining shareholders must buy the parts themselves or find a buyer within three months of the refusal, at a price fixed under the expert procedure of Article 1843-4 of the Civil Code (Code civil), unless the seller gives up the sale. The same article organises the company’s own alternatives within that identical three-month period: with the seller’s consent it may reduce its capital and buy back the parts itself, again at the expert-fixed price, and “Un délai de paiement qui ne saurait excéder deux ans peut, sur justification, être accordé à la société par décision de justice. Les sommes dues portent intérêt au taux légal en matière commerciale.” A court can grant the company up to two years to pay, with commercial legal interest running. And the ultimate sanction falls on the blockers, not the seller: “Si, à l’expiration du délai imparti, aucune des solutions prévues aux troisième et quatrième alinéas ci-dessus n’est intervenue, l’associé peut réaliser la cession initialement prévue.” If nobody buys within the period, the seller completes the originally planned sale to the original buyer. One condition limits this safety net, and it matters for recent investors: “l’associé cédant ne peut se prévaloir des dispositions des troisième et cinquième alinéas ci-dessus s’il ne détient ses parts depuis au moins deux ans”, except in cases of succession, liquidation of community property between spouses, or gifts to a spouse, parent or child. A shareholder who joined less than two years ago cannot force the buyback after a refusal, and must negotiate instead. The rule for family transfers is more generous: Article L.223-13 of the Commercial Code states that “Les parts sociales sont librement transmissibles par voie de succession ou en cas de liquidation de communauté de biens entre époux et librement cessibles entre conjoints et entre ascendants et descendants”, although the articles may still require approval even there, with refusal triggering the same buyback machinery. A foreign founder who passes parts to children or inherits them from a co-founder therefore moves under a lighter but not absent control.
In a SAS, there is no equivalent statutory safety net, and that absence is the single most dangerous difference for a foreign minority shareholder. If the articles impose approval but organise no buyback on refusal, the seller who is refused has no automatic right to be bought out at an expert price; the remedy must be found in the articles, in the shareholders’ agreement, or before a judge. This is why the drafting reviewed in our shareholders’-agreement guide matters more in a SAS than anywhere else: a pre-emption clause without a price formula, an approval clause without a buyback deadline, or an exclusion clause without valuation rules leaves the foreign seller negotiating from weakness, from another country, against partners who control the company, the bank account and the information. Before signing anything in a SAS, verify four lines in the articles: which transfers need approval, who decides and within what time, who must buy at what price if approval is refused, and what happens if nobody buys. If the fourth line is missing, negotiate it before the dispute, because after the dispute your partners have no reason to grant it. For succession in a SAS, the articles decide everything as well; unlike the SARL, no default free transmissibility protects your heirs, so a foreign founder with French-based children should check the transfer-on-death clause now, not later.
II. At what price do you leave, and what if nobody wants your shares?
A. How is the exit price fixed when buyer, seller and partners disagree?
Most exits die on price, not on principle, and French law answers with a procedure many foreigners find strange: an expert appointed by a judge fixes the value, and the parties cannot simply walk away from that figure once they triggered the mechanism. Article 1843-4 of the Civil Code provides: “Dans les cas où la loi renvoie au présent article pour fixer les conditions de prix d’une cession des droits sociaux d’un associé, ou le rachat de ceux-ci par la société, la valeur de ces droits est déterminée, en cas de contestation, par un expert désigné, soit par les parties, soit à défaut d’accord entre elles, par jugement du président du tribunal judiciaire ou du tribunal de commerce compétent, statuant selon la procédure accélérée au fond et sans recours possible.” The expert is appointed by the parties together or, failing agreement, by the president of the judicial court (tribunal judiciaire, the general civil court) or the commercial court (tribunal de commerce, the court where business disputes between merchants are heard), ruling under the fast-track procedure on the merits with no appeal available. For a Paris company, that means in practice the president of the Tribunal de commerce de Paris or the Tribunal judiciaire de Paris, depending on the nature of the dispute, and a foreign claimant can instruct a Paris avocat (attorney) by power of attorney without boarding a plane for the appointment hearing. The decisive point for negotiation is what the expert must do once appointed: “L’expert ainsi désigné est tenu d’appliquer, lorsqu’elles existent, les règles et modalités de détermination de la valeur prévues par les statuts de la société ou par toute convention liant les parties.” The expert must apply the valuation rules and methods found in the articles or in any agreement binding the parties, where such rules exist. A price formula written in the pacte therefore binds the expert; a vague promise to agree later binds nobody. And the second paragraph of the same article extends the mechanism beyond cases where a statute refers to it: “Dans les cas où les statuts prévoient la cession des droits sociaux d’un associé ou le rachat de ces droits par la société sans que leur valeur soit ni déterminée ni déterminable, celle-ci est déterminée, en cas de contestation, par un expert désigné dans les conditions du premier alinéa.” Even where the articles provide for a transfer without fixing a determinable value, a disputed value goes to the same court-appointed expert. Foreign sellers should draw three practical conclusions. First, write the valuation method into the pacte before any dispute: earnings multiple, net asset value, discounted cash flow, reference to annual accounts, or a named independent valuer, with the accounting date fixed. Second, keep the company’s accounts current and approved, because an expert values on documents, and a seller living abroad who never received the annual accounts arrives disarmed; the right to information before the general meeting is the weapon, and it must be exercised in writing each year. Third, never trigger the expert lightly to test the water: once the court appoints the expert under a statutory buyback, the valuation binds the process, and the seller who hoped for a high figure may receive a reasoned low one.
The current wording of Article 1843-4 results from an ordinance of 31 July 2014 that reversed an extensive case-law interpretation, and the applicable version in time matters for older disputes. The Cour de cassation stated the transitional rule in a decision of 18 November 2020 (appeal no. 19-13.402): “la loi ne dispose que pour l’avenir ; elle n’a point d’effet rétroactif. Les effets légaux d’un contrat étant régis par la loi en vigueur à la date où ils se produisent, l’article 1843-4 du code civil, dans sa rédaction issue de l’ordonnance n° 2014-863 du 31 juillet 2014, est applicable aux expertises ordonnées à compter du 3 août 2014, date de son entrée en vigueur.” Since that date, the rule is that the expert applies the contractual valuation methods where they exist, instead of valuing freely; expert reports ordered from 3 August 2014 onward follow the new text. For a sale negotiated in 2026 this history rarely changes the outcome, but it explains why older valuations found online look different, and why your counterpart’s lawyer may cite pre-2014 decisions that no longer state the current law. Ask for the valuation date as well as the method: value at the date of the refusal, at the date of the expert’s report, or at the closing date can differ by a full year’s profit, and the articles rarely specify it. Where they are silent, the expert reasons from the purpose of the transfer, which is another reason to keep every notice, refusal letter and set of annual accounts: they fix the timeline the expert will read. Payment terms follow the same logic of proof. In the SARL statutory buyback the price bears commercial legal interest and the court may stagger payment; in a SAS the pacte should state whether the price is payable at closing, whether part is deferred, and what security the seller keeps until full payment, such as a retention of title or a bank guarantee (garantie bancaire). A seller living abroad who accepts deferred payment without security discovers the cost of distance when the buyer defaults: suing from another country for the balance takes the same time, but collecting takes longer.
B. What are your last-resort exits in Paris when the company has become a trap: forced buyout, exclusion and dissolution?
Sometimes no buyer appears, the partners refuse every candidate, and the company simply stops distributing while your money sleeps inside. French law offers three last-resort doors, in increasing order of violence, and each has a Paris address. The first door is the court-ordered buyout for a legitimate reason (retrait judiciaire), available mainly where the articles or the form of company allow it; in practice for SAS shareholders it runs through the exclusion clause if the articles contain one. Article L.227-16 of the Commercial Code provides that “Dans les conditions qu’ils déterminent, les statuts peuvent prévoir qu’un associé peut être tenu de céder ses actions.” The articles decide the grounds, the procedure and the price, and they may even suspend the targeted shareholder’s non-pecuniary rights until the transfer is completed. But the Cour de cassation polices the fairness of the vote itself. In a published decision of 29 May 2024 (appeal no. 22-13.158), concerning a cooperative organised as a SAS, the Court held: “Il résulte de la combinaison de ces textes que si les statuts d’une société par actions simplifiée peuvent prévoir l’exclusion d’un associé par une décision collective des associés, toute stipulation de la clause d’exclusion ayant pour objet ou pour effet de priver l’associé dont l’exclusion est proposée de son droit de voter sur cette proposition est réputée non écrite.” Any clause depriving the targeted shareholder of the vote on his own exclusion is treated as unwritten. A foreign shareholder pushed toward the exit by partners who vote among themselves should therefore demand the convocation, attend by videoconference or proxy where the articles allow it, vote against, and have the exclusion decision recorded; an exclusion voted without the targeted shareholder’s participation is vulnerable to annulment, and that vulnerability is negotiating leverage for a fairly priced voluntary sale instead. Symmetrically, a majority that wants to remove a disruptive foreign minority must run a clean procedure: written notice stating the grounds, access to the documents relied upon, a real deliberation with the targeted shareholder voting, and a price fixed under the agreed method or by expert. Skipping any step converts a quick exclusion into years of litigation about the exclusion itself, during which the unwanted shareholder stays on the register.
The second and heaviest door is judicial dissolution for just cause (dissolution judiciaire pour justes motifs), the legal equivalent of breaking the company because the partners can no longer live together. Article 1844-7 of the Civil Code lists the ways a company ends, including “5° Par la dissolution anticipée prononcée par le tribunal à la demande d’un associé pour justes motifs, notamment en cas d’inexécution de ses obligations par un associé, ou de mésentente entre associés paralysant le fonctionnement de la société”. The court ends the company early at one shareholder’s request for just cause, notably where a shareholder fails to perform obligations or where disagreement between shareholders paralyses how the company runs. The Cour de cassation confirmed the method in a decision of 28 May 2026 (appeal no. 25-14.596), approving judges who had found that “une profonde mésentente oppose” the two groups of shareholders, with chronic disputes over premises, refusal to admit new members, a major conflict over capital allocation since an extraordinary meeting, “laquelle s’est soldée par la paralysie du bon déroulement des assemblées générales ultérieures”, and one shareholder blocked for five years from leaving. From those findings the appeal court had sovereignly deduced that the disagreement paralysed the company, and the supreme court let the dissolution stand. Three lessons follow for a foreign shareholder. First, dissolution requires paralysis of the company’s functioning, not mere personal hostility or a bad dividend year; courts look at blocked meetings, unvotable accounts, unfillable management and frozen decisions. Second, the claimant must come with clean hands and a file: convocations ignored, meetings without quorum, accounts never approved, written protests kept year after year. A shareholder living abroad who silently stops opening letters for three years and then asks a Paris court to kill the company will be heard coldly. Third, dissolution destroys value for everyone including the claimant, since liquidation sells the assets, pays the creditors and shares only the remainder; it is credible as a threat precisely because it hurts both sides, which is why most dissolution writs settle into a negotiated buyout before judgment. In Paris and the Île-de-France region (the Paris metropolitan area and its surrounding departments), the practical path runs through identified doors: the greffe of the Tribunal de commerce de Paris for the company’s filings and Kbis, the Tribunal de commerce de Paris for commercial disputes between shareholders of a commercial company, and the Tribunal judiciaire de Paris where the dispute is civil in nature, for example for a civil company (société civile) or certain expert appointments. A foreign claimant acts through a Paris avocat with a translated and apostilled power of attorney, serves the writ on the company at its Paris siège social, and asks, in the alternative, for dissolution or for the appointment of an expert to value the shares for a buyout; judges prefer the buyout that saves the business over the dissolution that kills it, and framing the claim that way from the first writ increases the chance of leaving with money rather than with a liquidation balance years later.
Conclusion
Selling your stake in a French company from abroad follows a fixed order: read the articles and the pacte before speaking to any buyer, notify the approval request in a provable form, count the three-month periods the statute gives the company in a SARL, and fix the price method before anyone disagrees about value. In a SAS, where no statutory buyback rescues a refused seller, the articles you signed at entry decide the exit you get years later, including the valuation formula the court-appointed expert will be bound to apply and the exclusion procedure that must let the targeted shareholder vote. Where every door is shut, exclusion regularity and judicial dissolution for paralysing disagreement remain, but both reward the shareholder who kept written proof from abroad and punish the one who managed the dispute by silence. Prepare the exit with the same seriousness as the entry described in our formation guide, keep the notices, the accounts and the bank trail, and act within the time limits the texts state; in French company law the shareholder who writes and counts leaves, and the shareholder who waits stays.