Understanding bonds, your own included

The French Civil Code neither defines nor regulates engagement. The courts have nonetheless drawn a few rules from it, on breaking off as well as on gifts.

A spouse who is sole owner cannot sell the family home without the other's agreement. This little-known rule is one of the most protective in family law, and it does not apply to everyone.

Marrying the person you love looks like the natural order of things. It is a young idea, a minority one on the scale of history, and long held to be unreasonable.

Cohabitation has been defined by French law since 1999, and creates almost no rights between the parties. That freedom has precise consequences, generally discovered at the worst possible moment.

Residence is set with the mother in a large majority of cases, and the law provides for that nowhere. Understanding the gap means distinguishing what is adjudicated from what is agreed.

Banned for seventy years, confined to fault for a century, settled without a judge since 2017: the history of the exit from marriage throws light on what is expected today of the entrance.

Created in 1999 amid a parliamentary debate of rare violence, it is today entered into mostly by different-sex couples. Something its designers had not foreseen.

No woman has ever changed her name by marrying, in French law. What she acquires is something else, and the distinction has very concrete consequences.

The procedure is the same for everyone, with a few extra documents and a check the law frames strictly. What the administration can do, and what it cannot.

A specific set of measures has been built up over fifteen years. Its fastest remedies are also the least known to those they concern.

A joint account, a loan taken together, an unequal contribution: each of these decisions produces legal effects that couples almost never measure at the moment they take them.