The French National Assembly has unanimously approved a bill to strengthen consent in the Civil Code and end the so-called “conjugal duty”, a legal figure interpreted in some divorce cases as the obligation to maintain sexual relations within marriage.
What the French Civil Code says
The French Civil Code currently stipulates in its article 215 that “spouses mutually commit to a life together”, a phrase used in the context of a divorce case concluded in France in 2019 in which a man obtained its dissolution alleging the sole fault of his wife, who had stopped having sexual relations with him. The case eventually reached the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled against France in early 2025.
To amend it, the text approved by the Lower House adds that “this life together does not create any obligation for the spouses to maintain sexual relations”, a phrase that will be read aloud in the town halls by the civil registrars during the ceremony of each marriage, as reported by LCP, the French state channel for the two parliamentary chambers.
Marriage “cannot be a bubble where consent for sexual relations is acquired, definitive and for life,” said the deputy of the Ecologist and Socialist Party Marie-Charlotte Garin, who has presented the bill together with Paul Christophe, of the center-right Horizontes formation.
