The French divorce law of 1792 was one of the Revolution’s modest reforms of family life, relaxing marital ties at a moment when inherited privileges were being challenged. In The Second Sex, its significance lies as much in its limits as in its enactment: a change in law could loosen the marriage bond, yet women remained constrained by family authority, economic dependence, and political exclusion.

Revolutionary reform

The law appears within a brief period of change. In 1790, the rights of primogeniture and masculine privilege in succession were eliminated, making girls and boys equal in inheritance; in 1792, divorce law was established. These measures weakened some of the legal arrangements that had bound family property and marital life together, but the account describes them as feeble conquests rather than a transformation of women’s position.

The reform took place amid women’s visible participation in revolutionary politics. Women joined demonstrations and riots, and the 1789 march to Versailles forced the royal family to leave for Paris. Some bourgeois women supported the cause of freedom, while feminist efforts demanded the abolition of masculine privilege. Yet women’s participation did not ensure that they would lead the Revolution or share in its fruits: political alliances were often absorbed by men, and the interests of women across class lines did not readily converge.

Unequal power within marriage

The law’s limited reach is set against a longer history in which marriage and family structure organized women’s dependence. In the Roman example, the introduction of marriage with manus placed a wife under her husband’s authority, while the later development of marriage without manus altered the balance among husband, father, and paternal kin without making the woman fully independent. Across these arrangements, formal legal status alone did not determine women’s concrete power.

The book’s wider argument is that reciprocal dependence does not itself produce equality. Men’s dependence on women for sex and posterity had not freed women, just as economic need between master and slave did not cancel domination. The same distinction clarifies why a reform easing marital ties could matter without overturning the conditions that made women socially and economically subordinate.

Reversal and longer aftermath

The period of revolutionary freedom did not last. As society was reorganized, the Napoleonic Code restored and strengthened women’s subordination within marriage. Wives were required to obey their husbands; husbands controlled the family residence and held greater rights over children, while their authorization was generally required for wives’ contracts. The 1792 reform therefore stands between an unsettled revolutionary opening and a legal order that again made marital power rigorous.

The subsequent history underlines how slowly the change in divorce law translated into practical equality. The Restoration abolished divorce in 1826, and the 1848 Constitutional Assembly refused to restore it. Divorce returned in 1884, but remained difficult to obtain, and the law preserved a sexual double standard: adultery was an offense only when committed by a wife. The sequence makes clear that access to divorce, when available, was neither stable nor equally administered.

Significance in the book’s argument

The law serves as a concrete instance of the distinction between abstract rights and lived circumstances. A legal reform can alter the terms of marriage, but women’s ability to use that change depends on material resources, social custom, and their standing within the family. In the book’s existential framework, the central issue is whether a woman can act as an autonomous subject and pursue projects of her own, rather than being confined to a role defined by others.

The 1792 law is thus presented neither as a complete emancipation nor as an empty gesture. It briefly loosened a binding institution, but the later restoration of restrictions reveals how readily formal gains could be reversed when the surrounding structure of power remained intact.