Should a lack of mutual trust invalidate a marriage?
According to the 18th century French writer, Voltaire: “It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.”
Last year a first instance French court also considered the virtue of virginity and, thereby, caused a furore throughout the country. The facts before the court concerned the marriage of two French Muslims of North African origin. Their marriage, in July 2006, was short-lived. The couple left the wedding reception and retired to the nuptial bed where the husband discovered that his wife had lied about her virginity. The husband applied to the court to annul the marriage. Art 180 of the French civil code provides that a spouse may seek a decree of nullity if he or she has made a mistake about the person they married, or about an essential quality of that person. The husband maintained that the wife’s lie brought him within the ambit of Art 180. The wife did not oppose the application—she wanted an
