Family law: the continuity of national characteristics

Abstract

Does the European family exist ? In response to this question, one might answer that the year 1994, proclaimed the International Year of the Family by the United Nations, was celebrated, late but universally, as much in Europe as in the rest of the world. The notion of family itself is not a difficult one: one or two parents, one or more children, ascendants and collateral relations with varying rights and obligations. Nuclear families and extended families are legal configurations known everywhere. But it is the existence of a child that truly makes a family. This is clearly so in France,where a poll conducted by SOFRES for a symposium of the “Droit 2000” foundation of the Paris Bar entitled “The New Family” Paris June 4th 1994, shows that for 85% of those polled, the definition of a true family requires the presence of one or more children. This may be generalized to all European countries, even if family policies, more or less demographic, clinical, or institutional in nature, differ depending on the country (Carbonnier, 1993). Very great similarities may be found in the evolution of family law, marked everywhere by economic crises, from which no country escapes the trail of insecurity and misery, the great social movements, the progression of female work that sharply addresses the question of childcare for young children and influences women’s strategies Commaille, 1993, lower birth-rates with the exception of Sweden, family policies seeking to allow women to have the number of children they desire whether working or not the French law relative to the family of July 25th 1994 is very explicit and that insufficient economic or social aid prohibits.