Liberté, Égalité, Hétérosexualité: Race and Reproduction in the French Gay Marriage Debates

On November 7, 2012, Christiane Taubira, the Minister of Justice of the recently elected government of Francois Hollande, presented the first version of a bill that would eventually be known as the mariage pour tous or “Marriage for All.” The lawwas designed to comply with one of Hollande’s campaign promises to open marriage and adoption to same-sex couples — a seemingly uncontroversial proposition that, according to 2012 surveys, was backed by two-thirds of the French population. The bill proposed to keep the current marriage and adoption law intact and to simply include same-sex couples, thus replacing the terms husband and wife with spouse and father and mother with parent. A few days after Taubira’s announcement a group calling itself theManif pour Tous (“Demonstration for All”), led by an eccentric and charismatic leader, Frigide Barjot (a wordplay on Brigitte Bardot), gathered in Paris to challenge the bill. After 6 months of heated debates in the Senate, the Assembly, the courts, and the media, the law was eventually passed on May 17, 2013. Throughout the spring of 2013, the Manif pour Tous organized massive street protests throughout France, some of which reached 300,000 to 500,000 participants, depending on which source one consulted. As themovement against gaymarriage grew, its leaders fought over the message and the strategies that the protests should embrace. In November 2012, Civitas, a self-described traditionalist Catholic lobby advocating the rechristianization of France and Europe, judged the Manif pour Tous too soft and the figure of Barjot too wild, and subsequently called for its own protest against homopholie (homomadness). Led by Alain Escada, the former leader of the Belgian National Front, the protests staged byCivitas attracted other extreme-right organizations, from royalist groups such as the Action Francaise and the Alliance Royaliste, Christian fundamentalist organizations such as la Renaissance Catholique, and neo-fascist associations preaching revolutionary nationalism and the “third way”, such as the Jeunesses Identitaires, the Renouveau Francais, and the Groupe Union Defense. Eventually, many of these groups gathered under one umbrella organization that called itself the Printemps Francais, or French Spring. Claiming Gandhi, Solidarnosc,Martin Luther King, andAntigone as their symbols, the Printemps Francais issued a manifesto in which same-sex marriage was never mentioned. Instead, it claimed to be an avant-garde movement, a pacifist insurrection “from the bottom, against the neoliberalism (pensee unique) of a political, financial, and media oligarchy,” a “democratization of the critical spirit,” a fight for the defense of “humanism.”1 In the weeks leading up to vote of the law, the protests became increasingly violent. Claude Bartolone, the speaker of the House, received an envelope filled with gunpowder with a message threatening war unless he suspended voting. Politicians were harassed in their homes, scholars and journalists were heckled, and gays and lesbians physically attacked in public spaces. Wilfred de Bruijn, who was thrown to the ground, punched, and kicked in the head in the streets of Paris as he was walking home with his boyfriend, blamed the leaders of the protests for his five fractures, abrasions, and lost tooth. The night of the attack, he displayed pictures of his wounds on Facebook with a note that claimed: “This is the true face of homophobia.” A few days later, Clement Meric, a 19-year-old student from the prestigious university Science Po who had been involved in left-wing politics — including in the fight for gay marriage — was beaten to death by four skinheads close to the Jeunesses Nationalistes Revolutionnaires, one of the groups that regularly marched with the Printemps Francais. Although political leaders hurried to denounce these acts as marginal and extremist, Frigide Barjot also proclaimed around the same time: “If Hollande wants blood, he’ll get some,” and Christine Boutin, a right-wing deputy who had publicly supported and accompanied the protestors, called for civil war. Formany people inside and outside France, the scope and the intensity of the protests came as a surprise given the relative acceptance of homosexuality in French society and the apparent widespread disinterest in the institution of marriage.2 Numerous experts were solicited by the media to account for these rallies and elucidate the motivations of their actors. Several explanatory frameworks— political, historical, and psychological — were offered. For some, the protestors merely reflected the increasing radicalization of the right in France, a process that had begunwith Nicolas Sarkozy’s calculated attempt to attract National Front voters by bringing security and immigration to the forefront of his political agenda. In the words of Jean-Francois Cope, the leader of the right-wing party Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) who regularly participated in the