Opinion of Mr Advocate General Mancini

Mr President,

Members of the Court,

1. In this application, brought on 19 January 1984 under Article 169 of the EEC Treaty, the Commission of the European Communities claims that the French Republic has failed to respect the prohibition on measures having an effect equivalent to quantitative restrictions on imports.

2. Thus the French Government did not set out its arguments in defence of the contested rule until the action was brought. Its chief argument is very simple: it claims that the rule has nothing to do with Article 30. The preparation and marketing of a publication may roughly be divided into three stages: supply of the paper, printing and distribution of the printed product. The first and third stages concern goods which, as such, must be allowed to circulate freely. That is not the case of the middle stage, since printing certainly cannot be described as a substantive product. It is a service and is therefore subject to the rules laid down in the Treaty in relation to services. It follows that the claim that the French Republic has infringed Article 30, which is intended to ensure the free movement of goods but not of services, is unfounded and must be dismissed.

3. Although the arguments put forward by the parties both contain an element of truth, they are in my view rather weak. There is no need to recall that masterpiece of Renaissance printing, the famous Mainz Bible, or the lawsuit brought against its creator, Johann Gutenberg, in order to recognize that printing is not a mere service but a difficult and refined art, even as regards the preparation of a periodical review. Nor can it be denied that publications are products or goods, since they clearly appear under heading No 49.02 of the Common Customs Tariff. However, the problem in this case does not concern the definition under Community law of the publications referred to in Article 80 of the French Finance Law. The Court is asked whether that provision, by limiting the grant of certain tax benefits for French publishers, constitutes a measure likely to hinder, directly or indirectly, actually or potentially, intra-Community trade in the periodicals produced by such publishers.

4. We are entitled and obliged to close our examination of the provision in question at this point. The Commission has several times stated that by this action it intended only to criticize the restrictive and discriminatory nature of Article 80 (5) of Law No. 80-30 of 18 January 1980 and not the entire system of tax relief provided for by Article 39 bis of the General Tax Code. The discussion between the parties as to whether the contested rule may be regarded as aid within the meaning of Articles 92 and 94 of the Treaty and as to the resulting procedural consequences are therefore superfluous: they involve an interesting question of interpretation but are extraneous to the matter in dispute, as defined by the applicant.

5. On the basis of the considerations set out above, I propose that the Court should rule as follows: By providing that publishers are not to benefit from tax relief in respect of any part of their publications printed in other Member States, the French Republic has failed to fulfil the obligations laid down in Article 30 of the Treaty.

1 Translated from the Italian.