France takes a historic step towards redefining rights within marriage. The National Assembly unanimously approved on Wednesday evening the end of the so-called “conjugal duty”. With 106 votes in favor and zero against, the deputies approved a transversal bill which aims to definitively eliminate any legal ambiguity: marriage does not imply the obligation to have sexual relations. The promoters hope for promulgation by the summer of 2026.
The end of legal ambiguity
Although “conjugal duty” was never explicitly provided for in the French Civil Code, the concept survived in the courtrooms. The four marital duties enshrined in the law – fidelity, assistance, assistance and “fellowship of life” – were often interpreted broadly. In fact, dated jurisprudence assimilated the “communion of life” to a “communion of bed”, therefore cohabitation, to the idea of a presumed sexual obligation between spouses. An interpretation that allowed judges to sanction a spouse who avoided intimacy.
Now with the new text, co-signed by the ecologist MP Marie-Charlotte Garin and Paul Christophe (Horizons), it is put in black and white that the communion of life “does not create any obligation for spouses to have sexual relations”.
But the legislative acceleration arises from concrete cases that have shaken public opinion. In 2019, a man obtained a divorce blaming his wife solely because she stopped having sexual relations with him for several years. After the rejection of the appeal in Cassation, the case reached the European Court of Human Rights, which condemned France in January 2025. According to the ECHR, the recognition of marital duty was equivalent to legitimizing sexual relations under duress, in that case under the threat of a fault-based divorce. Due to this precedent, the text introduces the impossibility of establishing a fault divorce based on the absence or refusal of intimate relationships, a motivation still sometimes invoked in judicial proceedings.
“Stop rape culture”
The political objective is clear: to put an end to what the promoters of the law have called a legalized “rape culture”. “I would like to address a thought to all the women who have forced themselves, who have suffered marital rape, we count on this text to be a starting point, for all this to really end”, Marie-Charlotte Garin declared in the chamber immediately after the vote.
The measure, supported by over 120 deputies ranging from communists to Républicains (the authors did not want to associate the far right with the text), must now pass to the Senate for consideration. The goal is to arrive at the definitive promulgation of the law before summer 2026. During the debate, Socialists and La France Insoumise attempted, without success, to also remove the reference to “fidelity” from marital obligations, arguing that this too could be interpreted as an implicit sexual bond, but the amendment did not pass.
