A French judge has annulled a marriage after it was found that the wife had falsely claimed to have been a virgin prior to marriage. The Times report the circumstances of the divorce are reported as follows:
Mr X went to court the following morning and was granted a annulment on the grounds that his bride had deceived him on “one of the essential elements” of the marriage. In disgrace with both families, she acknowledged that she had led her groom to believe that she was a virgin when she had already had sexual intercourse. She did not oppose the annulment.
Leaving aside the substance of the dispute, if marriage is viewed (correctly) as simply a contract between individuals then what is so outrageous or disagreeable about such a contract being dissolved when one party has misrepresented themselves?
The decision been met, naturally, with some controversy. However, as Lewrockwell.com write on the subject:
Of course many French people are outraged, as they so often are when private property and contract rights trump “secular” (that is, socialist) values.
43 comments ↓
It isn’t quite a private contract, though. The state recognises marriages and gives married people a different legal standing to unmarried people. If you want your marriage (or divorce) recognised by the state then the state has a say in it. And ultimately it’s the French people who constitute the French state.
The OP hasn’t mentioned it but others have said that the fact that the bride didn’t dispute the divorce means that she was “guilty”. Not at all – who would want to remain married to such a jerk? She has had a lucky escape.
Its important to note as well that this is far from anything “islamically” influenced. It is french law that allows for the annullment due to improper disclosure and misrepresentation. The couple married through civil contract and divorced through the same. It seems the only thing “islamic” about all this was that Muslims were involved.
Women’s group are in a huff about this, but if the man had claimed he was never sexually active, then the woman contracted a STD after marriage, would not the same groups make the annulment a case example of women’s rights?
The Lew Rockwell quote sums up the situation pretty well.
For what legitimate reason and purpose is marriage or divorce required to be ‘recognised by the state’? Absolute no reason whatsoever. Marriage, what constitutes marriage, and the question of who can marry who is none of the governments beeswax. Unwarranted and meddlesome government interference in yet another area of human interaction better handled privately.
Simple, if the government is going to be charged with handling disputes that arise from personal disagreements, the gov’t needs some sense of whats going on, and how to deal with those disputes.
Also, Eudi, there is no ‘requirement’ at all that marriage be recognized by the state, in Australia anyway. If you want your marriage recognized by the state you do it a certain way. If you don’t, you don’t.
Yeah but what happens should you have a huge and acrimonious split with your partner, whereupon the laws of the land must come into play? If your relationship is not recognised by the State, you can find yourself sitting high and dry.
Yep, ‘the market’ has decided that there are benefits from having a state-recognized marriage, as shown by the number of people who still use the state system.
J as long as the Islamic requirements are fulfilled in terms of witnesses and so forth it is Islamic. The fact that it is overseen by the state has no bearing on this, just as a divorce overseen by the state has full validity as one of the three permissible divorces if the man consents to it by signing the papers. To say otherwise is to undermine the intial validity of any of these marriages and surely you would not want to imply such a thing.
[i]“Today, the judicial system of a modern country cannot hold to these savage traditions, completely inhuman for the young woman,” said the rector of the Paris Mosque, Dalil Boubakeur.
He likened the court decision to “equating marriage with a commercial transaction.”
“We ask Muslims to live in their era,” he said.[/i]
I don’t know much about French family law or indeed about the shari’ (presumably maliki) law of annullment. Hence, I’m reluctant to comment beyond confessing ignorance.
A question asked on another forum – this is an anullment, not a divorce. Does Sharia have such a concept? If not, are they still legally married in the eyes of Sharia?
Antish, there is divorce (talaq) and anullment (khulu’) with different processes, requirements, etc. for each.
G-Man, just because something is viewed as a contract does not mean that a person can’t go before a court. On the contrary, if marriage was simply seen as a contract then the courts could still be involved in dispute resolution just as they are in a commercial contract.
Going further, the parties to the marriage contract might decide when the contract is formed that they would use a private arbitration or dispute resolution service initially with the court system being a last resort.
They might. And they do – it’s called a pre-nuptial agreement. However for some strange reason most people persist in choosing a form of marriage recognized by the state. The Market Hath Spoken.
The Market Hath Not Really Spoken when people never really had a choice because although there is nothing in law to compel them to register their relationships with the state, they would suffer an assortment of negative consequences if they don’t.
Anyway, Antish, do you have an objection to marriage being treated as a contract between individuals? Would this, for example, have an adverse effect on society or the individuals themselves?
You’re right. The Market regarding the choice of a state-approved married is as free as any market can be – which isn’t very. Mrs Thatcher was wrong – there IS such a thing as ’society’ and it means that property rights is never the only issue under consideration.
No, I don’t have any objection at all. I wouldn’t call it ‘marriage’, though. I’m old-fashioned like that.
Mrs Thatcher’s oft cited quote isn’t nearly has dramatic as that. She actually said the following:
“I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!” or”I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”
I see the context, but I also see her saying that there is no such thing as society.
It seems some people just cannot imagine a life where government doesn’t interfere in every aspect.
Eudie, I’ve asked you this before. I think that when encumbered with all the exceptions and over-rulings which you would have to put in place, you would end up with a system nearly indistinguishable from the current one. However I would like to debate this, and this blog isn’t the place to do it. Any suggestions?
The problem with not registering marriages with the state (and of course in Australia you can only register one at a time
is that it can leave a woman in with legal vulnerabilities if her husband does not live up to shari’a requirements i.e. payment of the mahr, financial support, decisions regarding health-care, death and inheritance etc. Wives no. 2, 3, and 4 in particular.
I heard a good argument for taking ‘marriage’ off the books and making them state contracts that are civil unions (which would allow for gay partnerships, polygynous arrangements etc.) and marriage then becomes a religious ceremony or commitment.
That way no-one is up in arms about gay marriage or multiple marriages (if your church/mosque offers it – great, but no-one’s forcing the issue) and the state can take a more pragmatic ‘contract-based’ approach to a variety of unions.
But aside from all that, the silly girl should have fought it. You can’t prove her virginity (or lack thereof) from the wedding night (a sizeable percentage of women do *not* bleed/experience pain on the first sexual encounter) anymore than you can prove his – unless she said “darling I’m not a virgin” in which case, there are other issues obviously at play there.
Umm Yasmin, I’m not sure that that is the case. AFAIK, the state gives ‘common law’ couples equal rights to state-sanctioned couples (in effect, common law marriages ARE state sanctioned).
The state demands equal responsibility to provide for your children whether you are in a ‘marriage’, a common law relationship or multiple relationships. Whether or not the same rights to the property of the relationship applies to multiple relationships I don’t know, but it certainly does for single common law ‘marriages’.
Eudie would have a point if he (or she, I’m only assuming that s/he is male) argued that it isn’t possible for a couple to live together in Australia without the pesky state regarding them as being in a legal arrangement which has the same rights and reponsibilities as a state sanctioned marriage.
Single relationships as ‘de-facto’ yes, but Australian law hasn’t come to grips with polygyny yet.
single-relationships = monogamous
I doubt that Australia will be coming to grips with polygyny anytime soon. Or polyandry for that matter, although funnily enough no one seems to be calling for that. Personally I couldn’t care less how many people you marry but it seems to me that multiple marriages are always advantageous to males who wish to have sex with multiple people. And the situation in the UK where people for whom bigamy is illegal are expected to support the wives and children of multiple marriages on the part of immigrants through taxes is outrageous.
Umm Yasmin, in what legal sense doesn’t the state (in Oz) cope with polyandry/polygamy? I’m genuinely curious.
GMan, polygyny actually favours the female. In simple terms, if a man can marry more than one wife then you will have increased competition for wives. This competition between men will result in a higher ‘bride price’ (what men need to offer their prospective partners). There’s quite a bit of research on the topic, such as the work of Gary Becker.
I suspect that he’s talking about polygamy – otherwise it would be hard to see how polygyny was a benefit to men who wanted to have sex with more than one partner. Unless they were bi, of course.
Antish, polygyny is marriage to more than one woman, which certainly allows the husband to have sex with multiple partners. I didn’t mean at the same time. And speaking of which, I don’t doubt there are studies and theories about the impact of polygyny on young men who are disadvantaged by it and will never be able to compete in the market and buy themselves a wife or four. We shall see the outcome of that sort of situation soon when some 30 million Chinese boys grow up with no hope of finding a wife because the females have all been aborted, killed or left to die.
Here in the land of fruits and nuts (California) we take marriage a little differently. The Golden State has had common law marriage since joining the union and now our supremes have granted same sex marriage.
As this was an uncontested divorce it would have sailed though the family courts with nary a hiccup. But the grounds for divorce would not be breach of contract. Other states in the union may have been a little stricter. Divorce rules vary from state to state here so it is always a spin of the wheel what you get.
France being France it come as no surprise that some people are protesting this divorce. It is that Liberty, Equality and Fraternity stuff again, mixed in with more than a little anti-religious fervor. Muslims should not take it too personally; France has a long history of Anti-Catholicism. The French come by it honestly as the Catholic Church was a deeply hostile to Republican government and to French liberalism. France thus practices a hyper secularism peculiar to Gallic race. It may not be very reasonable but it is very French.
G-man, I won’t attempt to untangle this, but I thiink we’d be both saying the same thing if I got my terms straight.
‘Breach of contract’ could, though be written into a pre-nup as grounds for a divorce, though, presumably.
Also, note that this was an anullment, not a divorce. The marriage is now regarded as not having taken place. I have no idea if the French would have reacted as strongly if it was a divorce, but perhaps not.
This is just a stupid story that has attracted way too much of attention.
I don’t agree that a condition of marriage should be that a woman should be a virgin but hey whatever floats your boat and if thats important to him and she agreed that she was a virgin then basicaly she misled him. And I’m sorry darling but if you going to start the marriage in a lie and if you were thinking you could pull the wool over his eyes, then you get what you deserve.
End of story
Another un-expected benefit of polygyny is that it allows women with different proclivities to have more than one set of needs fulfilled. For example, for women who are very career-driven but do want to have children, or for women who love heaps of kids but might have fertility issues, then a polygynous arrangement could work out very advantageous. Childcare is ‘in-house’ for the working woman and on the other hand, polygyny could provide a wider network of love and kids for women who are fertility-challenged.
Polygyny won’t work for everyone, but it does work for some. (I’ve got about half a dozen friends who are co-wives and none of them to each other.) Like any form of marriage, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Having said that, polygyny would probably highlight the difficulties in a bad marriage much quicker.
Problems with polyandry (as I see them, but hey whatever floats your boat): the fact that it takes nine-months to gestate a baby makes polyandry awkward and tiring for the woman if all the husbands want kids.
Polygyny is still a closed system, but if you allow polyandry too, then there is nothing to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (theoretically each man could have four wives, and each woman four husbands and so on and so on and so on).
As for the Australian government coming to grips with polygyny. There’s a good article on the reality of the plurality of legal systems in the UK but essentially, the reality is that polygyny *does* exist in Australia, and how Muslims and Aborigines (who practice polygyny) get around it is by simply not registering one or all of the marriages with the state. They have religious ceremonies only, or they have multiple monogamous civil marriages and divorces but without effecting any religious divorces.
The problem is that it can leave the women without legal protections, because these marriages are not recognised as existing (even though they do in reality). It is not unknown for a man to seek the rights and privileges of polygyny without sticking around for the burdens and responsibilities of multiple marriages. At least with a recognised shari’a system in play these men would be held accountable.
When polygny is outlawed and people who attempt to register >1 marriage get charged with bigamy, it means the people who have those relationships can’t register their second marriage and so the wife can claim single parent benefits (legally). Is that what people want?
Umm Yasmin, I know that’s the case, but I’m wondering what in fact the legal disabilities of wife/husband #2-n actually are. Or if any of these difficulties aren’t readily solvable by a good contract. (I know that for many the social recognition of a sanctioned marriage is important, I’m only wondering about actual legal impediments here.)
“The problem is that it can leave the women without legal protections, because these marriages are not recognised as existing (even though they do in reality).”
Not legally recognised in the sense of a marriage, but is there anything that a good contract wouldn’t solve? I suppose that if the father and mother both died, a child of a multi-partner relationship might not automatically remain in its custody, but you could put a pretty good case.
IM, is that correct? I know that it would be easy to cheat the social security system if you were in a multi-partner ‘marriage’, but wouldn’t still be against the law to not declare the income and support-in-kind you were receiving, whether married or not?
And anyway, plenty of homophobes would prefer that gay couples still had the opportunity to milk social security rather than have their ‘marriages’ recognised and lose that loophole. And there are a lot more gays in Australia than (straight) Muslims.
“or they have multiple monogamous civil marriages and divorces but without effecting any religious divorces.”
Each one of those divorces would be an irrevocable divorce.
What a traumatic experience for the woman. It would have been more gentlemanly for the man to have divorced her discretely. Everyone’s discusing the legal aspects, and forgetting the human one…
First off Auzie Aboriginals get away with Polygamy for two definite reasons. One, they were practicing before white settlers arrived. Two, they are still second class citizens in the land down under and thus get second class protection from the law. There is a weird two-tiered bigotry going on here. The bigotry of the right which is your standard bigotry of Aboriginals being less than, or sub human. Then there is the soft bigotry of the left. This bigotry goes overboard in the opposite direction. It holds native people as exemplars of prelapsarian man. Nether side wants to really deal with the facts on the ground; of a shattered people and their shattered culture. Before European contact the Aboriginal culture had mechanism to deal with polygamy and its attendant issues. Thanks to the injection of European culture that is no longer the case. Trading off one ill adapted monotheistic culture for another is a solution looking for a problem. It is very unlikely that the Austrolabe denizens would advocate the return of polytheistic religion to the Aboriginals. Thing is polytheism and polygamy went hand in hand in pre-European Aboriginal culture.
As for recognizing polygamy in Australia; it is not going to happen unless one recognizes polyandry. Not only polyandry but group marriage and partner swapping. This is best thought of as the Bob&Carol&Ted&Alice option. From an Islamic point of view of course it does not work. From an equal protection view it follows necessarily if you allow non-monogamous marriage.
From a human sexuality point of reference polyandry make much more sense than polygamy. From a public health point of reference neither Polygamy nor Polyandry make much sense. Each partner one adds to the equation increases ones risk from a STD point of reference. Only abstinence is fool-proof from a public health point of view. Faithful monogamy with condom use is the next best default. Monogamy without condoms is barely acceptable and least safe is multiple partners without using condoms. Having multiple wives does not decrease the odds of straying but does increase the odds of getting and spreading fungal based STDs. So even if you are faithful to your four wives the odds of catching a NSU (non specific urethritis) increase. Of course if you or your wife strays then the Typhoid Mary option comes into play.
Finally let us be real. Except in extraordinary circumstances polygamy has always ended up being misogynistic and patriarchal. That is the norm. The man lords over the woman in a cruel, despotic, and arbitrary manner. Young frightened girls barely into puberty (and sometimes not even in puberty) are handed over to much older men for their sexual debaucheries. Polygamy without fail reduces women (as an aggregate) to chattel. Only the best and most saintly of men can avoid becoming petty tyrants in their own home. Only the best and most saintly of men can treat multiple wives with the equanimity and respect due to each of them. The Islamic rules for multiple marriage are of very limited value; the law can only do so much to regulate the human heart. Even in the best of worlds polygamy without polyandry is at base unfair and places women at a disadvantage. In the world we live in polygamy is always a male power play over women. It is always a way to suppress women and degrade them. It is not a sign of holiness, it is actually often a sign of being out of god’s good graces. Just ask the original Suleiman (Solomon) of the bible ; multiple marriages can only cause you grief no matter how rich or wise you are. Remember Allah/God made Adam and Eve not Adam, Eve, Mary, Joan, & Britney.
You are going to have to qualify your polyandry statement.
And I wouldn’t mind some solid evidence on the Adam and Eve thingy.
Leaving aside the substance of the dispute, if marriage is viewed (correctly) as simply a contract between individuals then what is so outrageous or disagreeable about such a contract being dissolved when one party has misrepresented themselves?
Nothing. However we can’t really leave aside the substance. Fair enough it’s a contract and legally everything was handled justly. That doesn’t make this hang up on purity any less loathsome to enlightened people in the 21st century.
The outrage was at the stupidity of the man in thinking this was a big deal. It is a huge bummer that people feel the need to force people not to be stupid and often cry out that there “outta be a law” every time something lame like this happens but that doesn’t take away from the fact that this was a lame thing to do. It shows that the Man is an unenlightened and ungentlemanly clot without a shred of compassion.
Sarkozy is a populist tool for suggesting a change of the law. Why lumber her with this man for life? Sure the instinct to coerce, to ban is awful but I find the sentiment behind it to be spot on.
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