France in 1970, the notion of paternal authority was abolished and replaced by that of parental authority,5 shared equally between the father and the mother, to whom were enjoined responsibilities toward their children in matters of health, education, safety and morality,6 even in the event of separation or divorce. Parental authority is thus considered to be a function of public order, guaranteed by the state.
In 1975 divorce by ‘mutual consent’ was made possible in France. In 2009, thirty-nine per cent of all marriages ended in divorce. To this figure must be added the large number of separations that do not go through divorce. This is obviously the case for the separation of cohabiting couples. Hence the growing number of single-parent households, and ‘recomposed’ families, which are not an alternative model but simply social configurations that occur at different stages in people’s lives, as the spectacular increase in longevity compared to the nineteenth century now allows individuals to contract several kinds of alliance in their lifetime.
Generally speaking, then, in our society, marriage is no longer the act that founds the couple.7 The couple forms before the marriage, which, if they eventually decide to marry, often takes place only after the couple becomes convinced of the necessity to stabilize their union. But marriage alone no longer makes a family. The family truly comes into being only when a child or two are born. It would therefore be false to claim that we are seeing a wholesale rejection of marriage when the institution has merely lost some of its social importance. At the same time, negative attitudes toward cohabitation have largely disappeared, as has the opprobrium cast on children born out of wedlock.
Networks of related families exist and continue to lend support to their members, beyond the boundaries of their birth or conjugal families, especially in times of economic recession or youth unemployment. But these networks are beginning to shrink, contracting around the axes of direct descent, and increasingly excluding close or distant collaterals. The same is true of the kindred to which an individual feels attached, which also tends to dwindle to a small number of relatives by blood or by marriage with whom he or she has chosen to keep up ties.
What are the forces that have modified the forms and practices of kinship in Western societies since the mid twentieth century? The first is the emphasis on the right to freely choose the other with whom to found a couple. This choice has been freed of social constraints and conventions such as the moral duty to marry within one’s class, to transmit a family name or perpetuate a social group, etc. Desire, love and sentiment now prevail over other, less subjective, more social criteria. In addition, teenage lovemaking is no longer taboo, and everything points to a new attitude toward sexuality. In this context, the loss of desire and/or love for the other have become sufficient reason for splitting up and making oneself available for new ties and a new life.
The second force helping to reshape kinship relations arose out of changes in gender relations and the increasing social pressure for greater equality between the sexes in all areas of social and personal life. The establishment of parental authority and divorce by mutual consent attest to this change.8 The pressure for greater sexual equality can also be explained by the fact that increasing numbers of women are entering the economy and making an essential contribution to the material life of their couple or family. In doing so, they (also) acquire greater material autonomy with respect to their spouse or partner.
The third force that gradually affected the field of kinship and the family was the progressive valorization of the child and childhood, whereby the child was no longer seen as a being more or less ‘incapable of reasoning’ but as already a person, one whose arrival in the family was no longer endured but rather desired and even, thanks to medical progress, programmed. The child thus came to occupy a much greater place in the family’s affective and economic life. But, at the same time, and as an effect of the action of the two previous forces, many couples made an effort to create a space for themselves alongside and beyond their parental tasks and duties. Obviously, women have the most to gain from family life not being reduced entirely to their mothering role. Finally, having a ‘big’ family is no longer an ideal – if it ever was – and for many groups the new model is instead that of a family comprised of working parents and two children, a boy and a girl.
All of these changes are borne along by a deeper current that did not arise in the field of kinship but which flows through it and continuously acts within it, just as it courses through all areas of social life and acts on them. It is the current that propels promotion of the individual as such, independently of his or her initial attachments to family or social group, that lends value to autonomous behaviour and the capacity to take the initiative, to accept responsibilities, and that enables the individual to rise within the public and private institutions that constitute the economic and political structure of our societies. This upward propulsion of the individual occurs in a historical context where acts of authority on the part of power holders in the state or private companies, regarding persons in their control, spark criticism, resistance and opposition when forcibly imposed without room for dialogue. In short, Western society increasingly prefers deserved or negotiated authority over the kind that is inherited or imposed. The positive side of this trend can be seen in the abolition of paternal authority and the promotion of shared ‘parental’ authority ‘guaranteed’ by the state. To this must be added the fact that children, recognized as beings who must be treated as persons from birth, remain ‘children’ for a shorter period, since they become ‘adult’ at the age of eighteen. Parents have thus been forced to invent forms of authority that did not exist when they themselves were children, forms designed to convince rather than to coerce, based on dialogue rather than violence.9
It has become harder to be a parent, and we are now seeing many families undergoing a profound crisis of parental authority, one that affects the father more than the mother in so far as he was traditionally the one who embodied the law and authority. We thus sometimes find, when the parents separate or divorce, a veritable dissolution of the father figure: eighty per cent of children of separated or divorced parents live with their mother, as compared to eight per cent with their father and six per cent with someone else. Furthermore only twenty per cent of children who live with their mother see their father at least once a week.
If the father and/or the mother remarry, the children find themselves in families composed of fragments of former families. The child then lives with a stepfather or a stepmother, has half-brothers and/or half-sisters if the couple have children together, and stepbrothers or stepsisters if the person with whom the father or mother has chosen to live brings children from a previous marriage. Children in recomposed families therefore have a hard time finding their bearings and their place in these new configurations of persons and ties, and first of all deciding what to call their new ‘parents’. Finally, as separation and divorce become more widespread, many children fear that their parents are going to split up and that they will only see their father or mother once a week, on Sundays, or for part of a vacation.
In short, pulled hither and thither by these opposing and even contradictory currents, the family at the dawn of the twenty-first century certainly no longer looks like the stable basis or keystone of society, if it ever was. And the increasing numbers of homosexual couples demanding the right to raise children they themselves did not engender add new uncertainties about the future of parenthood, the family and marriage.
Globally, and with hindsight, all of the changes that have recently occurred in the family appear to be in keeping with the overall evolution of Western democratic societies, which favour individual initiatives and interests, and which therefore in principle reject despotic forms of public – but also private – authority. To these features must be added other, more specific traits, which can be explained only by the influence of the Christian tradition, either because it continues to affect the lives of individuals and institutions or because it has prompted reactions and breakaways specific to the Western world, particularly in the areas of sexuality or the family. One such example is the institution of civil marriage, which has become the only legal form of marriage in a number of European countries (making religious marriage a matter of personal and private choice).
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