THE NEW YORK TIMES

June 13, 2004 Sunday
Late Edition - Final

With Gay Marriage, La Belle France Turns Conservative

BYLINE: By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for The Financial Times.

SECTION: Section 4; Column 1; Week in Review; The World: A Sexual Divide; Pg. 14

ON June 5, Stephane Chapin and his longtime boyfriend, Bertrand Charpentier, emerged from the city hall of Begles, in southwestern France, with tears in their eyes and wedding bands on their fingers. They were the first gays to live out this scene in France.

The televised ceremony, complete with demonstrators pro- and anti-, had a familiar look to Americans who since last winter have watched similar ones in San Francisco and New Paltz, N.Y. Like the mayors of those American cities, the mayor of Begles, Noel Mamere, who was also the Green Party's candidate for president in 2002, had held the wed-ding in violation of the law. Like his American counterparts, Mr. Mamere was accused of having staged a publicity stunt. Newspapers revealed that the couple didn't even live in Begles, and had sold their story for 5,000 euros to the weekly magazine VSD.

But the spectacle quickly ceased to follow the American script, for it appeared that Mr. Mamere could be in real trouble. Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin, a member of President Jacques Chirac's conservative party, announced he would pursue sanctions against the mayor. Dominique Perben, the justice minister, declared the marriage null and void, and Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said it ''would be weak not to act'' in the face of such ''illegal comportment.''

Gay marriage may be sweeping the Western world, but in France it has brought out a conservative impulse that will surprise those used to thinking of France as a progressive counterweight to a reactionary America. While there are exceptions to this script -- unlike President Bush, who promised to back a constitutional amendment to oppose gay marriage, Mr. Chirac has remained silent on the issue -- France has had difficulty digesting gay marriage.

This is partly because of France's republican tradition, which is absolutist on the question of equality before the law and insists that every citizen of France be treated exactly the same. Republicanism a la francaise forecloses any wide use of affirmative action in schools, just as it forecloses any special autonomy for provinces like Corsica, which has a troublesome independence movement. It is unthinkable that Mr. Mamere should confer rights in Begles that cannot be conferred in Paris (where the openly gay mayor, Bertrand Delano, has shown no zeal for same-sex marriage).

But many distrust this appeal to neutral principles. ''You'll find all kinds of people who invoke the traditions of the Republic,'' says Eric Fassin, a professor of sociology at the Ecole Normale Superieure, who has argued in public debates in favor of gay marriage. ''But often it's not an explanation -- it's a justification.''

Mr. Fassin said the gay marriage debate in France has been marked by a ''conservatism of the left'' that uses the left's rhetoric to traditionalist ends. The 1999 Civil Solidarity Pact, for example, resembles Vermont's civil-union law, permitting shared health benefits and simplifying inheritances. But rights of adoption -- a bureaucratic ordeal in France, even for heterosexuals -- were not granted to gays.

That has left France in a very different position from the United States. In retrospect, Americans effectively committed themselves to gay marriage when all states except Florida permitted gay adoption. Once children enter the equation, the state must protect them as best they can, and allowing their guardians to marry takes on a logic previously absent.

France still has its options open. Even with 43 percent of children born out of wedlock, according to the demo-graphic agency Ined, the link remains strong between marriage and a traditional idea of childbearing. Surrogate mothers, for instance, are almost unheard of in France. Medically assisted procreation is not a cultural norm. Nor is late-term abortion: In 2000, feminists won an arduous legislative struggle to raise the cutoff point for abortions from 10 to 12 weeks. (In the United States, by contrast, only the ban on what critics call partial-birth abortion, which is now blocked, restricts a woman's right to an abortion at any time in her pregnancy.) Sexual harassment is another area where the French believe American laws go too far.

The French political class, it often seems, likes to argue for the most conservative possible policies using the most liberal possible rhetoric and examples. Thus the novelist Benoit Duteurtre, writing in the left-leaning daily Liberation, objected to the Begles wedding on the grounds that it was disappointingly petit-bourgeois of gays to want marriage in the first place. And in the current controversy, many of the politicians working most arduously to block gay marriage are shoring up their progressive bona fides by sponsoring legislation to outlaw public expressions of homophobia.

Last winter's legislation banning the Islamic head scarf in schools was passed not on nationalist or religious grounds, but on feminist ones. While many women choose the veil freely, the argument went, those intimidated into wearing it by the men in their household or neighborhood must find a sanctuary in state institutions from such bullying.

One of the strangest outcomes of gay marriage in Begles is the way opinion in the Socialist Party -- the natural home of change when it comes to sex issues -- has split along gender lines. Mr. Mamere's initiative was backed almost unanimously by Socialist men, figures as diverse as the flamboyant former culture and education minister Jack Lang, the conservative former finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the present head of the party, Francois Hollande. The only prominent Socialist male who has opposed Mr. Mamere is former Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, the father of the Civil Solidarity Pact, who holds that marriage is ''the union of a man and a woman [that] reflects the duality of the sexes that characterizes our existence.'' It is Socialist women -- the regional leader Segolene Royal, former Justice Min-ister Elisabeth Guigou, and former Labor Minister Martine Aubry -- who led the opposition.

They may have been following the ''differentialism'' (an important strain of French feminism) associated with the philosopher Sylviane Agacinski, who happens to be Mr. Jospin's wife. Ms. Agacinski has argued that the human condition cannot be understood in any universal way without reference to both sexes . This argument has been a mighty tool for left-wing reforms. It provided the intellectual underpinnings for mandating sexual parity in French legislative elections. Today, it provides the intellectual underpinnings for arguing that a marriage that lacks either a man or a woman is no marriage at all.


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LOAD-DATE: June 15, 2004