The French National Assembly unanimously approved a bill on Wednesday that ends so-called “marital duty” following criticism about its use to ignore sexual consent in marriages.
This cross-party bill, backed by more than 120 MPs, enshrines the fundamental principle that consent remains essential for any sexual act, including within marriage.
Spearheaded by the MP Marie-Charlotte Garin and the president of the Horizons group Paul Christophe, the law is designed to definitively rule out the idea that spouses are obliged to have regular sexual relations.
This notion is absent from the Civil Code but remains entrenched in certain court rulings and social representations.
Putting an end to legal vagueness
Under French law, marriage is broadly based on four obligations: respect, fidelity, support and community of life.
The last notion has long caused confusion, with critics arguing it is too vague and that it was sometimes interpreted as “community in bed,” creating the idea of an implicit sexual obligation between spouses. This interpretation is now explicitly rejected by the new law.
The adopted text specifies in article 215 of the Civil Code that community of life “creates no obligation for the spouses to have sexual relations.”
In an interview with Euronews, Garin explained that the aim was to “put an end to the interpretation of community of life as community of beds and therefore to this notion of conjugal duty that persists in law and in society.”
The French lawmaker pointed out that the notion was found “both in divorces for fault and in the idea, still very present, that one should force oneself to have sexual relations as a couple.”
This legal ambiguity has had very real consequences. In recent years, a number of courts have handed down fault-based divorces on the grounds that a spouse, most often the wife, refused to have sex, considering this refusal to be a breach of marital obligations.
A ruling by the Versailles Court of Appeal on 7 November 2019 referred to the wife’s “continuous refusal” of any intimate relationship, described as a “serious and repeated breach of the duties and obligations of marriage making it intolerable to continue living together.”
On 23 January 2025, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled against France on this basis. Referred to by a 69-year-old woman, the court had ruled that the granting of a divorce for fault, on the grounds of her refusal to have sexual relations, constituted an infringement of her fundamental rights.
‘Sexuality should not be a constraint’
For Doctor Emmanuelle Piet, president of the Collectif féministe contre le viol (Feminist Collective Against Rape) and the doctor who supported the applicant before the ECHR, this development was essential.
“It’s better when it’s in writing, sexuality shouldn’t be a constraint”, she told Euronews. “It has to be clear that we don’t have to have sex. It sounds trivial but it’s very important.”
In the field, she still sees the consequences of marital pressure on a daily basis.
“I’m a doctor and for years I’ve been issuing medical certificates to women asking them not to have sex. I do this three times a week. I’ve been practising for 50 years. And even with that, one woman in two comes back to tell me that she feels obliged,” she explains.
The law comes at a time when sexual violence within couples remains largely under-reported.
According to an IFOP survey published on 11 September 2025, 57% of women said they had already had marital sex without wanting to, compared to 39% of men.
For Marie-Charlotte Garin, these figures explain the urgent need for legislation. “It’s a notion that’s very deeply rooted culturally and today one in two French people has already had sex without wanting to within the context of a couple.”
While she welcomes the adoption of the text, Emmanuelle Piet believes that other advances are still necessary.
“We’re also in favour of crimes no longer being subject to the statute of limitations and we’d like investigations and the reception of victims by the police to be carried out by competent officers trained in rape and domestic violence. Today, we still need to make progress on recognising what victims have to say.”
Adopted by the National Assembly, the text must now be examined by the Senate under an accelerated procedure. If it is approved, it could be passed into law in the next few months.