By 106 votes in favor and none against, the National Assembly has approved a law that ends the "marital duty" in France and dispels the idea that marriage entails the obligation to maintain sexual relations. The law, designed to reinforce the consent text approved last autumn, is considered as a further effect of the case of Gisèle Pelicot, the woman served on a platter by her own husband to be raped by over fifty strangers.
"I am thinking at this moment of the women who have been forced and who have suffered marital rape," declared the Ecologist deputy Marie-Charlotte Garin, co-author of the proposed law. "We hope that this text serves as a starting point, so that all of this ends once and for all".
The French Civil Code stipulated until now that "spouses commit to a life together", an argument used in a divorce case in 2019 by a man who claimed as a reason for separation his wife's refusal to have sexual relations.
The case reached the European Court of Human Rights in 2025 and ultimately prompted political action to amend the legal text that listed four obligations arising from marriage: fidelity, support, assistance, and life together.
The law approved this week by the National Assembly, which will soon go to the Senate, stipulates that from now on and at the time of entering into civil marriage, the following clause must be read aloud: "This life together does not create any obligation for the spouses to maintain sexual relations".
With the new legal text in hand, it will be practically impossible to cite lack of sexual relations as the sole reason for requesting a divorce. Although the impact in the courts may be relative, the promoter of the legal text believes that the law will serve to deter marital rapes.
"Marriage cannot be a bubble in which sexual consent is considered as something definitive and for life," declared Marie-Charlotte Garin. "Allowing that right or duty to persist is equivalent to approving a system of domination or predation of one's own wife by the husband".
During the trial of Dominique Pelicot, sentenced to 20 years in prison for the rapes orchestrated by him and committed against his wife, several defendants used the argument that even if his wife was drugged and asleep, they had the "permission" of the husband to touch her and sexually abuse her".
The new law complements the text approved last year that redefines the notion of rape to include the concept of "non-consent". Previously, rape was considered as a sexual act carried out "with violence or submission, under threat or by surprise".