The French National Assembly on Wednesday ratified the end of marital duty by unanimously voting for a law clarifying the absence of obligation of sexual relations within marriage, to remove an ambiguity in the civil code.
The text must now be examined in the Senate. Its authors Marie-Charlotte Garin (ecologist) and Paul Christophe (Horizons, right) hope for promulgation before the summer.
Four duties arise from marriage in the French civil code: fidelity, help, assistance and community of life. It does not enshrine any duty to have sexual relations. But ancient jurisprudence has sometimes assimilated the community of life to a “community of bed”, allowing the idea of a so-called “conjugal duty” to persist.
Frustrated with sex, he got a divorce
This is how in 2019, a man obtained a divorce solely at the fault of his wife, on the grounds that she had stopped having sexual relations with him for several years.
The following year, the woman appealed to the Court of Cassation, without success, and the case was brought before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) which, in January 2025, condemned France on this subject.
“By allowing such a duty to remain in our law, we have collectively endorsed a system of domination, a system of predation by the husband towards his wife,” declared Marie-Charlotte Garin. “We must change the law so that never again can this notion exist either in the law or in mentalities” and say that “marriage cannot be a bubble where consent to sexual relations would be acquired, definitive, for life,” she added.
The text clarifies in the civil code that cohabitation does not create any obligation for spouses to have sexual relations. It also adds the impossibility of basing a divorce for fault on the absence or refusal of sexual relations, while this argument is still sometimes put forward by certain parties during the proceedings.
“Normal” to do it out of duty
Supporting studies, Paul Christophe also recalled that one in four men today consider it normal in France for a woman to have sexual intercourse out of duty and not out of desire. “It is our duty to remind them that they are wrong,” he said.
The goal is “to raise awareness among spouses of the problem of sexual violence during the celebration of marriage”, the reading by the registrar of the main rights constituting a favorable moment for this educational work, for its authors.
Left-wing deputies sought, without success, to delete the mention of fidelity in the article listing the obligations resulting from marriage, believing that this notion can also be interpreted as the obligation of sexuality between spouses.
