Last week, the French National Assembly voted unanimously to abolish the legal concept of “devoir conjugal” (marital duty) in the Civil Code.

Traditionally, marital duty implied that spouses had a legal obligation to engage in sexual relations — a notion rooted in old interpretations of marriage law, even though the Civil Code never explicitly spelled it out.

The new text has now clarified that the shared life of spouses (“community of life”) does not create any obligation to have sexual relations. Notably, this is intended to help prevent sexual violence in marriage, as well as a lack of sex from being used as grounds for a fault-based divorce, closing a loophole that courts sometimes exploited, writes Le Monde.

Lawmakers say the reform strengthens the legal protection of consent within marriage and aligns the law with modern views that consent must be freely given and can’t be presumed because people are married. 

“By allowing such a duty to remain in our legal system, we have collectively endorsed a system of domination, a system of predation by the husband over his wife,” said Marie-Charlotte Garin (Rhône, Les Ecologistes), who co-wrote the bill with Paul Christophe (Nord, Horizons).

The bill also reflects concerns raised by a European Court of Human Rights ruling that fault-based divorces tied to sexual refusal violated personal rights. In a case from last January, the court had sanctioned France for its use of “marital duty,” ruling that refusing to have sexual relations with one’s husband does not constitute a “serious or repeated breach of the duties and obligations of marriage.”

The civil code establishes four duties arising from marriage: fidelity, mutual support, assistance, and shared life, Le Monde points out. 

Having now been passed in the lower house of the French Parliament, the bill will go to the Senate