Frank Schubert meets Francois Truffaut. Citizens in seventy-five French cities formed “flash mobs” with a distinctively new-wave aesthetic sensibility to protest prime minister Francois Hollande’s plan to redefine marriage:
In every case groups of men dressed in black and women in white separated into two groups symbolizing the fact that every child needs a mother and a father. Holding up bright pink signs saying : “Daddy, Mommy, you shouldn’t tell lies to children”, the “daddies” and “mommies” alternately helped a blundering bird – symbolizing a new-born child – to leave its nest without falling.
Of course, by bird, they mean a bird mime:
The hip pop aesthetic extended to the music choices:
Meanwhile Joe Dassin’s sixties hit, “Tout bébé a besoin d’une maman” (“Every baby needs a Mommie to be loved”), and Abba’s “Mamma Mia” were played over loudspeakers.
“To tell a child it has two daddies or two mommies is telling a lie. You should never lie to a child,” said Tugdual Derville, the movement’s general delegate.
“Children have a right to know their origins, they have a right to a daddy and a mommy and not respecting that when they are already hurt through being orphans is just adding further mistreatment,” he said.
Rather than assembling outside a church with rosaries and images of the Sacred Heart, these protestors met beneath the Grande Arche de la Défense with some Abba LP’s and a mime. They went, to borrow George Weigel’s phrasing, with the cube rather than the cathedral, and that is significant. The assertion made by such a choice is that marriage is not just a particular religious inheritance but rather something indispensable in every kind of society: Modernity has not outmoded marriage.
We can cheer this canniness while lamenting that faith has become less central to France’s national life. It also reflects a real truth, for opposition to the prime minister’s plans is coming not just from the traditional quarters of society. Another protest, scheduled for November 7, has been signed on to by several left-wing and LGBT organizations. American nightmares of French socialism and liberalism sometimes forget that it’s a country where there are organized socialists for life and gay men and women against gay marriage.
October 26th, 2012 | 11:58 am
Of course, as frequent First Things commenter Michael PS has noted, France also has a well-established, legally-equivalent “civil union” option. That alters the stakes a touch.
October 26th, 2012 | 2:12 pm
I’m impressed that these French protesters are speaking in terms of the rights of children to have one father and one mother, as opposed to the harm they would sustain from same-sex arrangements. The harm argument isn’t working very well, yet that seems to be the only objection to the legalization of same-sex parenting we hear in America.
October 27th, 2012 | 1:02 am
[...] Social Conservatism, French-Style – Matthew Schmitz, First Things/First Thoughts [...]
October 27th, 2012 | 4:54 am
Ray Ingles
You are right to call attention to the PACS [« Le pacte civil de solidarité »] or civil union.
One important effect of the PACS, about 90% of which involve opposite-sex couples, has been to focus attention on what precisely is the difference between a PACS and a marriage.
In 2005, the French Senate did so, at least by implication, in the following terms: “Preserving the presumption ” is est pater quem nuptiae demonstrant ” – marriage points out the father, [Dig. 2, 4, 5; 1] adopted in all European legislation as Ms. Frédérique Granet-Lambrechts, professor at the Robert Schuman University of Strasbourg, told your reporter, Article 312 of Civil Code provides that a child conceived or born during the marriage has the husband for its father.
The presumption of paternity of the husband rests on the obligation of fidelity between spouses and reflects the commitment made by the husband during the celebration of marriage, to raise the couple’s children. The report presenting the order to the President of the Republic rightly points out that ” it is, in the words of Dean Carbonnier, the ‘heart of marriage,’ and cannot be questioned without losing for this institution its meaning and value.”” No similar rule applies to a PACS.
To summarise the view generally adopted by the jurists and the courts (1) Mandatory civil marriage, makes the institution a pillar of the secular Republic, standing clear of the religious sacrament (2) The institution of republican marriage is inconceivable, absent the idea of filiation, enshrined, not in Church dogma, but in the Civil Code (3) The sex difference is central to filiation.
It is significant that, in a country so committed to the principle of laïcité as France, no one has suggested that such views are either the result of religious convictions or an attempt to import them into the interpretation of the Code.
October 27th, 2012 | 7:55 pm
Michael PS, of course your observations are insightful, but if French jurists and the courts believe that marriage is “a pillar of the secular Republic,” clearly the French masses do not. More French children are born outside of marriage than within it, and over one-third of all “unions” in France are now Pactes civils de solidarité.
October 28th, 2012 | 7:16 am
Darel
The growing popularity of the PACS seems to have had little impact on the rise of births outside marriage. In 1979, they accounted for 10.03% of births. By 1989, this had risen to 28.2% and in 1999, the year the PACS was introduced, the figure was 41.7%. In 2009, the figure was 52.9%.
A significant factor is the growth in the number of second and subsequent children born outside marriage. The birth of a child is no longer a trigger for marriage.
It is important not to equate birth outside marriage with single parenthood. 85% of children under 15 live with both parents and some 82% of children born outside marriage are recognized by their fathers within one month; 94% of these are living with both parents. Of the nearly 420,000 children born in 2009, only some 15,000 (3.6%) have not been recognised. This is about the same number as in 1960, when only 6% of births were outside marriage.
The PACS is popular with opposite-sex couples for three reasons: (1) they do not require judicial proceedings to dissolve them (2) they do not limit the power of disposing of property by will. Accordingly, they are often preferred by couples, one or both of whom has children from a previous union (3) there is no obligation of financial support of one’s partner’s parents, as there is in marriage.
Marriage remains popular with the rich and the religious. A spouse can be provided for out of inherited property, which otherwise passes automatically to the next-of-kin, will or no will; a civil partner cannot.
October 28th, 2012 | 10:44 pm
MichaelPS,
All your comments are well received. However, none of them contradict the tremendous gulf which seems to exist between French jurists on the one hand and the French people on the other regarding the status of marriage as a “pillar” of French the Republic. French jurists seem to be trying to preserve an institution which the masses appear less and less interested in entering. If the PACS accomplishes the task of filiation as well as does marriage, then why are members of the French legal system hanging on to marriage?
October 29th, 2012 | 12:14 pm
Darel
The PACS does not “accomplish the task of filiation,” it excludes it. There is no equivalent to the rule that “the child conceived or born in marriage has the husband for father.” A man has to acknowledge his civil partner’s child to establish filiation, or he may decline to do so. Hence, whilst a PACS imposes a duty of « loyauté » [loyalty], there is no duty of fidelity, as there is in marriage.
That is the most significant difference between a marriage and a PACS and grounds the contention that the sex difference is essential to marriage, but irrelevant to a PACS.
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