What marriage obliges you to do

During the ceremony, the civil registrar reads several articles of the Civil Code to the future spouses, as Article 75 provides. The first of them, Article 212, states that spouses owe each other respect, fidelity, support and assistance.

These words seem to belong to morality more than to law. Yet they have effects: failure to observe them can be invoked in fault-based divorce proceedings, and some of them underpin financial obligations that the judge can set.

The duty of support is material. It obliges each spouse to provide the other with the means to live if they lack them, and it continues during divorce proceedings, where it can take the form of a maintenance payment made on a provisional basis.

The duty of assistance is of a different nature. It refers to the help and support that spouses owe each other in hard times, such as illness or the loss of a job. It cannot be quantified, and a breach of it can only be assessed in light of the concrete circumstances.

Adultery has not been a criminal offence since the law of 11 July 1975. It remains a breach of the duty of fidelity, but it is no longer an automatic ground for divorce: the judge assesses whether it makes continued life together intolerable, within the meaning of Article 242.

Respect was added to the list by the law of 4 April 2006, devoted to preventing and punishing violence within couples. Its placement at the head of the article marks a shift in the way the law conceives of the duties between spouses.

Article 215 provides that spouses mutually bind themselves to a community of life. This does not necessarily require a shared roof: Article 108 allows spouses to have separate domiciles without undermining the rules on the community of life.

Case law long included a sexual dimension in this community, which legal scholars called the conjugal duty. In January 2025, the European Court of Human Rights held that a divorce granted on the grounds of a wife's fault, because of her refusal of sexual relations, violated respect for private life.

None of these personal obligations can be enforced. The judge cannot compel a spouse to be faithful or to live together; the judge can only draw the consequences of a failure to observe them, through a divorce, damages or a financial contribution.

The content of these duties therefore depends largely on the interpretation the courts give them in each period. The words read at the town hall remain the same, but what they cover has changed, and continues to depend on trade-offs between individual freedom and mutual commitment.