Definition
A recepisse de cotisation is a receipt issued under French law that sets forth the extent of the interest subscribed by a member of a mutual insurance company. The document functions as written evidence of a member's subscription stake — that is, the scope of their financial participation and corresponding liability within a mutual insurer. It is both a record of the member's contribution and a declaration of the limits of their insured interest.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in materials touching French commercial and insurance law, and researchers will encounter it primarily in comparative law treatises, historical surveys of mutual insurance practice, or in American sources that engage with French mercantile doctrine as persuasive or background authority. Black's 2nd edition is the chief anglophone dictionary source; later editions of Black's progressively trimmed non-English civil law terminology, so researchers using modern editions may find no entry at all.
The practical research trap here is terminological: the word recepisse (sometimes spelled récépissé in modern French) is a broader term for an acknowledgment receipt used across several areas of French commercial law — bills of lading, deposit acknowledgments, and warehouse receipts among them. A researcher encountering the standalone word recepisse in an older source must confirm whether the document in question concerns insurance subscription or one of these other contexts. The phrase de cotisation specifically anchors the document to the mutual insurance context, with cotisation carrying the sense of a subscription, assessment, or dues payment. Conflating this narrowly insurance-specific instrument with the generic recepisse found elsewhere in French commercial law can produce significant misreading.
For researchers working in the history of mutual insurance, this instrument reflects a structural feature of early mutual companies: members were both insured parties and co-underwriters, and their recepisse de cotisation served to define the ceiling of each member's assessed liability. Understanding this dual character — subscription as both benefit and burden — is essential context for reading French mutual insurance documents in the nineteenth century.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the only anglophone legal dictionary entry of substance, defining the term as "a receipt setting forth the extent of the interest subscribed by a member of a mutual insurance company," with attribution to Argou's French Mercantile Law (Arg. Fr. Merc. Law, 571). The citation to that treatise is the primary scholarly anchor for the definition. No other sources in the Law Mind shelf expand meaningfully on this entry. The definition in Black's is concise but functionally complete for its purpose: it identifies the document type (a receipt), the issuing context (mutual insurance), and the document's operative content (the member's subscribed interest). What the entry does not address — and what historical dictionaries generally omit — is the procedural role of the document within French mutual insurance governance, including how disputes over the scope of a member's interest were adjudicated or how the recepisse interacted with the company's articles of association.
Jurisdictional Note
This is a term of French civil and commercial law with no direct common law equivalent. It surfaces in American legal sources only in comparative or historical contexts. Researchers working in U.S. insurance law will not encounter the instrument in domestic doctrine; its relevance is confined to analysis of French-origin materials or transnational insurance history.