Law, Culture and Divorce in France
This article explores some of the most pressing issues facing secular societies nowadays, which all embark in one way or another in a project of consolidating a harmonious living together. More specifically, it proposes to study the normative role that the civil law should give to religious rules, and the impact of these rules on women in the context of French society. The followers of the strict French secularism typically bind these two premises by the following correlation: religious rules oppress women and should therefore be excluded from the administration of civil justice. In order to provide a critical analysis of this position, this article is based on field research with Jewish and Muslim French women who used the civil and religious legal systems in the context of divorce proceedings. The interviews with women involved in this debate, although not constituting an exhaustive sample, suggest that total evacuation of all religious law is based on a simplistic and inadequate design of the actual scope of religious rules. The evidence reported in this paper suggest a relevant narrative against the pro-secular Republican discourse and demonstrate that religious standards may be used, manipulated and re-appropriated by women for emancipatory purposes that the civil law does not necessarily allow. This does not affect the normative goals of secularism. However, it warns against the oversimplification of the relationship that women develop with religion, and argues for a careful and sensitive understanding of the complex intersection between law and religion.