The Reform of Family Law in France

Abstract

Family law is one of the select areas of comparative studies. As Dean Carbonnier wrote in Flexible Law, “all the societies of today, the third world apart, whether of industrial or consumer character, can appear to be extremely uniform though their laws are not unified—above all, not their family laws. It is a classical aphorism of comparative law, that while the law of property and obligations tends towards homogeneity, family law remains the seat of national idiosyncrasies.”¹ In truth, this peculiarity, which has been beyond dispute for some ten years, tended to diminish in western societies at the beginning of the last quarter of the twentieth century. The laws of the majority of the countries of Western Europe tended to converge towards a uniform model, and this evolution has been very rapid.