France votes to abolish marital debt

However, both social customs and a considerable amount of case law have internalised the idea that the existence of a marital relationship, or simply a stable partnership, entails an obligation to fulfil the sexual requirements of either member of that two-person community. 

Both the numerous voices that have denounced the alleged legal ambiguity and the firm and widespread belief in society that such an obligation was absolute have prompted the deputies of the French National Assembly to vote unanimously in favour of enshrining in law ‘the absence of marital duties within marriage’, endorsing the argument of the promoters that this ‘will better prevent sexual violence and, consequently, positively defend consent’. 

The authorship of the now approved bill belongs to Marie-Charlotte Garin, a member of the Ecologists party, and Paul Christophe, of the centrist Horizons party, founded by former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, himself a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic. In her closing statement, MP Garin referred to expressions deeply rooted in society such as ‘le droit du seigneur’ (the right of the lord), ‘meterse en la olla’ (to get into the pot), and ‘inalienable derecho de la primera noche’ (inalienable right of the first night) to explain the belief that ‘one must have sexual relations with the other or has the right to demand them within the framework of marriage, in particular, and of the couple, in general.’ 

The debates have repeatedly mentioned the general public's ignorance of the fact that the Civil Code does establish four duties for free parties to a marriage: fidelity, mutual support, assistance and cohabitation. However, although it does not establish any duty to have sexual relations, case law has often equated cohabitation with sharing a bed, thus perpetuating the general belief in a supposed conjugal duty. 

To put the information in this debate into context, the newspaper Le Monde, for example, recalls that in 2019, a man obtained a divorce on the grounds of his wife's exclusive fault, as she had stopped having sexual relations with him for several years. In 2020, the woman unsuccessfully appealed to the Court of Cassation, and the case reached the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which, in January 2025, ruled against France in the first judgement in favour of the man. 

This example served as a basis for MP Garin to denounce that ‘by allowing such a duty to remain in our legal system, we have collectively supported a system of domination, even of predation by the husband over his wife’. She concluded her argument with a call to the entire chamber to ‘change the law so that this notion no longer exists, either in the law or in people's minds; marriage cannot be a bubble where consent to sexual relations is acquired, definitively, for life’. 

For his part, the other speaker, MP Paul Christophe, pointed out that in France, one in four men consider it normal for married or partnered women to have sex out of obligation rather than desire, and ‘it is our duty to remind them, with the new law in hand, that they are wrong.’ In a society such as France's, which is so mixed with massive immigration from Muslim countries that interpret women's rights very restrictively, the application of this new law may provoke new and very heated cultural and social clashes. 

The bill now approved by the National Assembly will be sent to the Senate for review, so that it can be enacted and come into force before next summer. By then, in marriage ceremonies, it will be mandatory for the civil registrar who certifies the new union to read not only the main rights of the spouses, but also to instruct them on the issue of sexual violence. 

It should also be noted that the Socialist Party's proposal to remove the mention of fidelity from the article listing the obligations resulting from marriage was rejected from the wording of the new clarifying law, on the grounds that the notion of fidelity can also be interpreted as an obligation to maintain sexual relations between spouses. This is an amalgam that is deeply ingrained not only in French society but also in many others, which consider fidelity and sexual relations to be inseparable.