Gay rights in France

...It was vigorously opposed by the rightwing opposition and also provoked considerable hostility among elected officials (in particular from small-town mayors), harsh criticism from the Catholic church, and systematic criticism from judges, lawyers, and many intellectuals...

...Marriage was dismissed because nearly all deputies in the National Assembly were opposed to it...

...This is, of course, a hypothesis...

...and films and books were censored...

...The End of the Battle...

...But PACS answered an obvious social need, and so it found many defenders...

...Perhaps French laws will henceforth be increasingly pragmatic and more adapted to the daily realities of the men and women who live, work, and love today in the country of Montesquieu and Rousseau...

...In Mitterrand's words, "homosexuality was no longer an offense...

...However, PACS still needs improvements if it is to satisfy many couples...

...Lack of recognition was a source of discomfort, sometimes of oppression, and always of low self-esteem...

...In any event, French constitutional jurisprudence would probably have blocked such legislation...

...The opposition did force some important concessions: a PACS is signed before a judge, not a mayor...

...PACS supporters, gay militants, and the French government favored a new legal status for unmarried couples...

...After the left came to power, with the election of Francois Mitterrand in 1981, things changed...

...It will be important to see if its popularity stays strong among heterosexuals...

...Should gay marriage be allowed, as some gay activists in the United States demand...

...Should there be a specific status for gay couples, as in Denmark, a kind of legal framework protecting them and particular to them...

...By providing genuine protections for both gay and straight unmarried couples, PACS represents an expansion of individual liberties and equal rights...

...FRÉDÉRIC MARTEL iS the author of The Pink and the Black, Homosexuals in France since 1968, recently published in the United States by Stanford University Press...

...It might even be suggested that to some extent, old republican France has come to an end...

...Gay marriage is a universalistic and not a communitarian position, but support for it is marginal in France and it is, for now, a risky centerpiece for gay political strategy...

...The battle has not been completely won, but these efforts foster the "modernization" of French society by making it more hospitable to the "Other" and more protective of individuals, similar or different...

...One might wager that the right will hesitate to reassert the subject, and that many of its deputies will even be more accepting of gay rights if it returns to power...

...Never before had homosexuality provoked such a wideranging debate...

...Never before had the media devoted so much attention to gays and samesex couples...

...This law gives a new status to unmarried couples, heterosexual and homosexual...

...Another major effect of PACS—perhaps the most unexpected and the most disheartening— was the intensity it stirred up in its foes...

...Discussion of PACS in the National Assembly between October 1998 and November 1999 was extremely volatile...

...It fits into a broader movement and is not the only recent law to show that France is trying to change its "model of integration...

...The force of this "counterrevolution" shows that homosexuality remains a deeply divisive subject in French political life and society...

...Approaches differ depending on history, culture, and laws, yet few countries have passed general laws dealing with gay unions...

...Most unions also backed it...

...Instead, it encourages an open display of gay identity, while making gays like everyone else...

...Although 1981 to 1983 saw the legal "normalization" of homosexuality, it was not until 20 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 the 1990s that the demand for recognition of gay couples achieved prominence...

...PACS combines the advantages of cohabitation and some of the rights of marriage, without the latter's constraint...

...It took place in daylight and was led by a government that, if hesiPOLITICS ABROAD taut at first, finally engaged in a direct public battle—led by the prime minister and a dozen other ministers, supported by three former prime ministers, and followed at all levels of government...

...DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 23...

...All segments of the left (Socialist Party, Greens, Citizens' Movement, Communist Party, Radical Left Party) backed the PACS, as did nongovernmental organizations, particularly AIDS research and activist groups, feminists, and all the human rights groups...

...With these concessions, the government finally succeeded in passing the law on November 15, 1999...

...PACS is a universal law because it affects all unmarried couples and rejects the creation of a specific status...

...All these proposals show that France is changing...

...Also, public opinion surveys showed a majority of the population to be hostile to the idea, and the French gay community was not really asking for it in large numbers...

...Although French republicanism and the French model of "republican integration" are conventionally "blind to differences," the French legislature last year approved a "civil union agreement," the Pacte civile de solidarite (PACS...

...Indeed, the logic of rights has in a sense reached its limits...

...Some of PACS's consequences are already clear...

...Confining homosexuality and homosexual relations to private life severely hampers the individual's social life...

...The age of consent for heterosexual couples was fifteen, for homosexual couples, eighteen...

...It is a good illustration of what "concrete universals" a la francaise ought to be—something very different from the "abstract universalism" defended by rigid republicans...

...With respect to rights, the two approaches are perhaps not so far apart...

...This is why PACS has also curbed, at least for the moment, the "communitarian temptation" of some French gay militants...

...Radio and television, particularly "youth" stations, publicized it, and according to the polls, a majority of the public always favored PACS...

...For example, aid can be provided to a category of workers containing many immigrants or to a school in an area in which immigrant workers are in fact a majority, but never to immigrants as such...

...The most progressive segment of the rightwing opposition is ready to allow rights for homosexuals in limited forms but refuses to go any further...

...It is probable that in "post-PACS" France there must be new strategies to fight prejudice, discrimination in the familial relation, and many forms of individual denigration...

...Laws on cohabitation alone were not adopted because they would not provide gay couples with a real contract or recognition of their union only an inadequate acknowledgment of it...

...PACS, its opponents insisted, threatened the family, marriage, parenthood, the symbolic order, the finances of the country, public order, and on and on...

...Despite the need for improvement, it does set out multiple concrete rights...

...But how to act...

...Perhaps the most important consequence of PACS is that it secured some recognition and not just rights...

...As a result, PACS joins major laws that modernized France: women's suffrage in 1944, abortion reform in 1975, abolition of the death penalty in 1981...

...The struggle for civil rights became the starting point of political mobilization and one of the most useful weapons against discrimination...

...Finally, any specific status for gay couples was vigorously rejected because it would inevitably have been seen as second-class status and the source of future discrimination...

...New legislation will enable many more women to obtain political positions (the law on "parity"), and laws are being prepared to deal better with integration of immigrants, ethnic discrimination, and the cultural diversity of the inhabitants of Corsica and New Caledonia...

...Origin of the PACS In 1981, discrimination against gays was still enshrined in French law...

...AIDS revealed many forms of discrimination as homosexuals were rejected by their dead partners' families or evicted from the apartments they had shared...

...Whether through demonstrations of visibility (gay pride marches) or other types of identity organizations, such as gay and lesbian centers, gays have sought a combination of rights and recognition...

...Efforts to improve PACS will galvanize gay militants and put laws against homophobic speech and job discrimination on the agenda...

...Success in the battles for rights has also produced the conditions for going beyond them...

...No gay group is now pushing for the creation of a specific status for gay couples...

...In the end, PACS is a compromise, but a good one that is open to further adjustment and that has provided new rights for unmarried couples...

...Supreme Court...

...in France it is not possible to grant benefits or legal status on ethnic, cultural, or sexual grounds, only on POLITICS ABROAD "social" or "geographical" ones...

...Never before had the left been so engaged in favor of gay rights...

...We still have to see if 22 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 public acceptance of homosexuality is fragile or now much more solid...

...Finally, both the Parisian and provincial press were generally favorable...

...Translated from the French by George Holoch...

...It is also very difficult to dissolve...

...Hesitant at first, gay associations joined battle in favor of it...

...joint taxation is subject to a waiting period...

...Legislation for all unmarried couples (not only gay ones) was needed simply because of their numbers and particularly because activists of the May 1968 era were reaching retirement age...

...This amounts to a gay rejection of both second-class status and self-regarding identity politics...

...no rights are automatically granted to someone who enters into a PACS with a foreigner...

...PACS has been popular with heterosexual couples, who make up 40 percent of the unions...

...it provides no rights to adoption or medically assisted procreation...

...Modernizing France...

...The individual is largely socialized through his or her matrimonial status (official forms often ask for details about the "spouse...

...But there is also a more optimistic way to read this: despite their vociferous opposition, the anti-gay forces lost the battle for public opinion (and even, to some extent, within their own political family...

...Demonstrations and debates highlighted the persistence of an "official" homophobia, which in part showed up in the National Assembly...

...Marriage is a more restrictive and symbolically stronger act (something many post-1968 couples, of any sexual orientation, do not want...

...Finally, it is cautious because it avoids direct questions of family relationships and adoption...

...So in the end, the goal was less the idea of rights than the idea that "we exist through recognition...

...Anyone who entered into such an agreement would have access to housing rights (for example, property transfers), public benefits (for example, health coverage, welfare), labor rights (for example, vacation time), the right to file a joint tax return, certain residence and naturalization rights, and rights of inheritance...

...It is "modern" because it is not encumbered by outdated restrictions and symbols...

...This goes some way toward explaining its success...

...It gives them genuine rights (including joint taxation and right of inheritance) without requiring them to marry...

...The name for this is not identity but equality...

...Yet equal rights gradually became one of the movement's chief demands, with calls for the decriminalization of homosexual acts in the early 1980s, for intensified struggle against discrimination against the sick during the "AIDS years," and, finally, for support for the rights of homosexual couples, which took shape as PACS...

...Between 1995 and 1997 the debate attracted so much media attention that the new left-wing government of Lionel Jospin was compelled to act...

...France thus gave no positive recognition to "difference" in this sense...

...In less than two years, laws were revised, police files expurgated, censorship abolished, and the law became officially neutral with respect to sexuality...

...For instance, waiting periods for some rights and different percentages in inheritance rights ought to be abolished...

...police kept surveillance files on people who had sex with someone of the same gender...

...Thus it does not provoke conservative heterosexuals by interfering with questions of marriage per se...

...More than thirty thousand such agreements have been signed since the law went into effect in November 1999...

...Yet, a society that says to individuals, "be yourself only in private" is a society afraid of itself...

...Resistance surfaced in vigorous speeches, articles, and demonstrations...

...So the left chose a forceful law that ensured for homosexuals not only tolerance, but also rights...

...The logic of "equal rights" was foreign to the early French gay movement, which DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 21 POLITICS ABROAD preferred subversive agitation in the 1970s...

...More than a hundred thousand people marched to support the law in Gay Pride parades in Paris in June 1997, 1998, and 1999...

...laws required civil servants and tenants to behave like "good family men...

...The first is that it represented a real victory for civil rights...

...Unlike all previous debates on homosexuality, the PACS debate was not carried out in secret...

...A principle motivating force for this change—though not the only one—was the AIDS epidemic...

...Neither the left nor the advocates of PACS could remain content with an idealized and abstract Republic, nor with the Jacobin solution of making everyone the same...

...With respect to recognition, however, PACS gives much wider scope...

...That winter, more than a hundred thousand people demonstrated against PACS in Paris...

...Some forms of discrimination cannot be undone by legal remedies...

...But although legal discrimination was done away with, the law did not recognize, define, or even acknowledge homosexuality...

...Should the legislature extend past cohabitation laws to homosexual couples, in order to supersede several negative decisions of the Cour de Cassation (roughly equivalent to the U.S...

...A scholar and journalist, he was one of the originators of PACS and one of its advocates for the Jospin government between 1997 and 2000...

...The French "solution" was thus to propose a law that was both original and in keeping with French traditions...

...It symbolized not the indifference of mere tolerance, but an undifferentiated recognition equal to that given to heterosexual couples...

...It was carefully tailored to fit a universal framework, but it also helped to reshape French attitudes toward "identity" The French have been pretty inhospitable to "difference...

...After long consideration and extended bargaining, the Jospin government finally decided to create a new legal status for all unmarried couples, and this became PACS...