Divorce, Decolonization, and the Crisis of International Family Law

In late nineteenth-century French Algeria, metropolitan politicians and social scientists began to raise questions about the “scandalous” legal effects of marriages between partners of different legal status (a French or a European civil status, on the one hand, and “Muslim” status on the other). While the number of official marriages between “Muslims” and “Europeans” remained low, jurists troubled over apparently messy “conflict of law” questions– exemplified, again, by polygamy– that were purportedly posed by these families. These often theoretical, and occasionally practical debates, refracted wider concerns about Muslim difference, the (sexual) dignity of French citizenship, the accession of natives to political rights, and the promotion of marriage between French citizens and “European” immigrants. After the Great War, these concerns sharpened, fueled by the increased presence of North Africans in the metropole and new reformist demands in Algeria.