Members of the French National Assembly unanimously decided on Wednesday evening that there is no legal obligation for sexual relations between spouses. Consequently, the refusal of sexual relations in a divorce process cannot be a motive for finding a partner guilty of the breakdown of the marriage.
This officially declares sex in marriage to be optional or optional. As usual, sexual relationships between heterosexual or homosexual partners require consent. This is particularly important because in France, unlike in Germany, the question of guilt can still be raised in a divorce. This can have serious consequences for the person found “guilty” by the judge.
In 2019, a French woman in Versailles was found “guilty” in her divorce from her husband by an appeals judge with presumably conservative ideas. Her husband did not want to be satisfied with an initial divorce decree due to “disruption” and appealed.
He claimed that his wife, with whom he had been married since 1984 and had four children, had not wanted sex with him for years. The judge ruled in his favor. The woman was guilty of a “serious and repeated breach of marital duties”.
Patriarchal ideas
This argument had to be shocking, because the French Civil Code does not explicitly state that there is an obligation to have sexual intercourse in marriage. Was the judiciary referring to old patriarchal religious ideas in which marriage serves primarily sexual reproduction?
The judge was apparently able to rely on a certain lack of clarity. The law requires spouses to promise each other “mutual loyalty, assistance, support and life togetherness”. These are flexible terms if a judge wants to interpret “living partnership” as “bed sharing”.
Even a complaint to the Court of Cassation did not change anything for the convicted woman. She went to the European Court of Human Rights (EMHR). A year ago he agreed with her and stated that such an interpretation of a “marital duty” was “contrary to sexual freedom and the right to one’s own body”.
Antiquated ideas
The demand for sexual relationships without consent is therefore a form of sexual violence. This is also an important clarification, because it was only in 2006 that spousal rape was enshrined in France’s criminal code.
Based on this ruling by the ECHR, French Green MP Marie-Charlotte Garin submitted her application, which has now received the approval of all political groups. Civil law must state that marriage in France “cannot be a legal vacuum” in which the necessary consent to sex is excluded.
The lawyer Delphine Zoughebi, who represented the French plaintiff before the EMGR, hopes for an “educational” effect, especially in judicial circles. Antiquated ideas about marriage obligations still existed there.
After the National Assembly, the Senate must now also approve the law. The modernized version of the rights and obligations could then be read to the future spouses at the registry office.