ON 8 July 2006, a marriage was celebrated in France between two young Muslims, an engineer in his early thirties and a student nurse 10 years younger. She had assured him she was a virgin, a condition he had insisted on for the marriage to take place. When he discovered on their wedding night that she was not what she claimed to be, he stormed out of the bedroom while their wedding party was still in progress, and returned his wife to her parents' house. He then went to court, seeking an annulment. He did so under Article 180 of France's Napoleonic civil code, according to which a marriage can be nullified once it is demonstrated that there was an error in the ‘essential qualities' of one of the parties. The law, however, does not define what these ‘essential qualities' are. The husband maintained that virginity was one of them. Once the wife admitted that she had lied, the marriage was annulled on 1 April 2008, by the decision of a court at Lille, in northern France. But the court passed its judgment not on the contentious grounds of an absence of virginity, but on the grounds of breach of contract – the wife had gone back on her word. It ruled that a married life which had begun with a lie was ‘contrary to the reciprocal confidence between the married parties.' The wife gave her consent to the annulment. Article 180 of the civil code had previously been invoked to nullify a marriage in only a handful of cases -- on the grounds of the prostitution of the wife, the impotence of the husband or his illness from HIV/AIDS. This, therefore, was a new and highly controversial departure. France's Minister of Justice, Rachida Dati, herself of North African origin, whose own marriage was annulled 20 years ago, first upheld the ruling, claiming that it could give girls, forced into marriages against their will, a way of separating rapidly. It was a way, she argued, to give such girls protection. But, having come under ferocious attack for what was seen as a challenge to France's secular traditions, she then backed down and ordered the local public prosecutor to appeal against the judgment. The young couple is, therefore, still officially married until the outcome of the appeal is known. Feminists were up in arms claiming that the court's decision would encourage the already flourishing medical trade in ‘hymen reparation'. It would reinforce the patriarchal powers of men, while robbing women of control over their own bodies – a control they had won in the hard-fought battle for women's liberation. Secularists and militant republicans accused Rachida Dati of surrendering to fundamentalist Islam. Women of North African origin, often second, or even third, generation immigrants to France -- who had no doubt enjoyed the sexual freedom ushered in by France's May 1968 ‘revolution' -- were now being forced to revert to the reactionary conventions of their parents or grandparents. Or so it was alleged. The case comes at a sensitive time when France, like several other countries, has been engaged in a prolonged debate over how best to integrate and assimilate its immigrant population. The suburbs of French cities have repeatedly been shaken by riots, largely the work of immigrant youths, bitter and alienated by the discrimination they claim to suffer in jobs, housing, education and general advancement. A related problem, which is being given high priority in France and in much of the European Union, is how to restrict illegal immigration, essentially from North Africa and Black Africa. Out of metropolitan France's total population of 62 million, an estimated 6.5 million – or about 10 per cent -- are of Arab-Berber background. Ségolène Royal, the Socialist who stood against Nicolas Sarkozy at last year's presidential elections, denounced the court's decision to nullify the young couple's marriage as a ‘regression.' She was not alone among centre-left politicians to object. The writer and feminist philosopher Elizabeth Badinter – whose husband, the prominent jurist Robert Badinter, was largely responsible for France's abolition of the death penalty – declared that ‘the judgment was a betrayal of France's Muslim women,' because it encouraged them to believe that virginity was important in the eyes of the law. A leading feminist lawyer, Gisèle Halimi, born in Tunisia of a Jewish mother and a Muslim father, wrote that the court's judgment was a perversion of civil marriage. Taking into consideration the religion of the husband was wrong, she said. It was an assault on France's secular republican laws, which guaranteed equality between the sexes and respect for an individual's private life. ‘We have been thrown back centuries into the past,' she lamented. ‘It would have been so simple for the couple to divorce by mutual consent,' as indeed a French law of 1975 would have allowed them to do. Gisèle Halimi won fame by founding a feminist group, Choisir (‘To Choose') in 1971 which, by its robust campaigning, greatly influenced the passing of a law in 1974 allowing contraception and abortion. For Muslims, the case of the young couple has proved a double-edged sword. Far from being seen as a legal triumph for the customs and conventions of immigrants, it has provided Muslim-haters with ammunition, fuelling the ‘Islamophobia' all too prevalent in some sections of French society. The case of the young couple has important political ramifications. Rachida Dati, the first person of North African origin to hold a top Paris government post, has come under attack for her handling of the affair. She is one of President Sarkozy's protégés, and was a close friend of his now divorced wife, Cécilia. Sarkozy promoted Rachida as a symbol of his attachment to the ideal of France as a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. But she has inevitably been weakened by the affair, casting a shadow over the President, who is himself struggling to climb back into the public's favour after polls indicate a sharp fall in his popularity. The gossip in Paris is that Rachida may not survive a cabinet reshuffle, which is likely to occur after the summer holidays. __
