The PaCS debates: From ‘le retour à la barbarie’ to ‘le droit d’être ceux que l’on est’

On 1 March 1996, Le Monde published ‘Pour une reconnaissance légale du couple homosexuel’, signed, among others, by figures such as Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu and Didier Eribon. The appeal was inspired, first and foremost, by the case of an appelé undertaking his military service who requested an exemption on grounds of ‘soutien familial’ in order to be able to look after his partner who was HIV-positive. The Defence Ministry intervened in the case, granting the soldier his report d’incorporation but, as the authors of the 1 March text pointed out:

Cet exemple illustre à merveille la discrimination concrète, quotidienne, dont les homosexuels font l’objet dans notre société, dans la France d’aujourd’hui. Ce n’est pas diminuer le caractère insupportable et révoltant de la situation qui est faite à ces deux garçons de Saint-Étienne que de rappeler que leur cas, hélas, est loin d’être unique ou exceptionnel. (Bourdieu et al., 1996)

For the authors, redress – at least partial – in such situations could be assisted by the introduction of partnership legislation, for which a new proposal had just been introduced in the French parliament.

Several years later, in an interview for 3 Keller, the magazine of the Parisian Centre gai et lesbien, Eribon explained that, along with the Saint-Étienne case, a further key trigger for the publication of ‘Pour une reconnaissance’ lay in an absence of audible responses from the political left to statements made by Jacques Toubon in November 1995 during a debate in the Assemblée Nationale (see Eribon, 2000). In the early 1990s, initial attempts to introduce partnership legislation in the form of what was initially called the ‘Contrat d’Union Civile’ had failed. By the mid 1990s, the proposed legislation had resurfaced, under a slightly different name (‘Contrat d’Union Sociale’) and the Parti Socialiste deputy Jean-Pierre Michel posed a parliamentary question which sought to establish the government’s intentions with regard to the evolving legislation. In response, the then Justice Minister Jacques Toubon (cited in Eribon, 2000: 21–2) declared in no uncertain terms:

Je le dis clairement, il n’est pas question de créer le Contrat d’union sociale … L’ordre public s’y oppose … Il est au contraire question de faire en sorte que, dans ce pays, il y ait plus de mariages, il y ait plus de naissances, et qu’ainsi la France soit plus forte.

In other words, far from being a tabula rasa that implies an absolute equality of all citizens in the eyes of the law, in what would appear to be strict accordance with Article 1 of the 1958 Constitution, ¹ Toubon’s République was firmly embedded in structures which are at once heterosexual and hetero-normative, an early embodiment of what subsequently came to be termed ‘l’ordre symbolique’.

Despite Toubon’s best efforts, partnership legislation was finally introduced and approved by the French parliament in 1999: the ‘Pacte civil de solidarité’ or ‘PaCS’, as it has more popularly come to be known. Alternately praised and feared as a stepping stone towards gay marriage and access to rights in the areas of adoption and fertility treatment for same-sex couples, the significance of the legislation has come to extend far beyond the confines of the legal sphere into such realms as family structures, kinship relations, national belonging and ultimately national identity. In the wake of the debates provoked by the legislation, an ever-increasing number of scholars working at the intersections of French studies, legal theory, queer studies and sociology have embarked on a contemporary interrogation of traditional models of the Republic and Republican citizenship.

It is perhaps unsurprising that the impact of the partnership legislation, and – equally significantly – the decade of debates that preceded its passage into law, should be felt quite so keenly across French political structures in such a way as to point towards a remoulding of conceptions of citizenship. After all, as Sudhir Hazareesingh (1998: 4) has identified: ‘Among the key characteristics of the French polity we might reasonably include its constitution, its public and administrative institutions, its distinct democratic and Republican political culture, and its collective sense of national identity.’

It would surely be difficult for any consideration of the impact of the PaCS not to be expressed in terms of the influence it has had on developments across precisely these areas and, as Hazareesingh (1998: 4) further states: ‘the conceptual link between these different elements lies in the notion of citizenship’. In other words, at its very core, the PaCS legislation can be understood to be contributing to an ongoing critical interrogation of traditional notions of citizenship and their relevance to, or intersections with, the socio-political realities of contemporary metropolitan France.

Such ‘traditional’ models of Republicanism and Republican citizenship are by no means restricted to the views above, as expressed by Jacques Toubon. We might consider, for instance, the position encapsulated by Régis Debray (1998 : 7) when he states that ‘la République française est composée de citoyens, non de communautés’:

La République connaît mais ne reconnaît pas tout ce qui tend à morceler, séparer, démanteler la communauté civique … Elle respecte les folklores et les cultures, mais elle soumet à la loi commune ce qu’on appelle ailleurs les ‘minorités. (my emphasis)

Or we could turn to the online Observatoire du Communautarisme, founded in the summer of 2003 by Frédéric Beck, François Devoucoux du Buysson and Julien Landfried, a trio who describe themselves as ‘trois personnes issues d’horizons politiques variés mais réunies autour de la volonté de défendre une conception exigeante de la République’. For the Observatoire (2003) and its founders:

le communautarisme, par lequel des individus sont amenés à se concevoir en premier lieu – voire exclusivement – en vertu d’une ‘essence’ particulière … constitue la négation de la tradition républicaine derrière laquelle nous nous rangeons, laquelle repose sur un contrat stipulant que la dignité d’être humain s’exprime et se réalise dans la citoyenneté, c’est-à-dire la participation à un projet commun qui dépasse les appartenances particulières.

In other words, by ‘traditional’ model of Republican citizenship we refer here to a framework within which individuals are abstracted from their ‘particularities’ in order that they become, and are viewed as, universalisable citizens of the Republic.

Against this ideological backdrop, I would suggest that we could take Hazareesingh’s model of analysis further and that it can offer another useful insight into the significance of the PaCS. For Hazareesingh, examining the emergence of modern French democracy from the structures of the Second Empire, it is processes of decentralisation that lie at the heart of the political and ideological debates that shaped notions of citizenship in the mid nineteenth century. These debates were bolstered bolstered by an active engagement with these processes across the breadth of the political spectrum and, crucially, by their coincidence with the emergence of cheap press publications. As a consequence of this overlap between political debate and a shift in means of mass communication, Hazareesingh (1998: 23) suggests that ‘the debate on decentralisation and citizenship was one of the first examples of a new departure in the articulation and presentation of ideas to the wider public’.

Where Hazareesingh places decentralisation at the core of political and ideological debates in the Second Empire, I argue that same-sex partnership legislation played a similar role in the late twentieth-century Fifth Republic. Just as Second Empire decentralisation had been carried into the public imagination via the pages of cheap new press publications, so too the emergence of the PaCS debates coincided with shifts in media consumption in the shape of the burgeoning internet era and the dawn of an age of digital media. It is perhaps for these reasons that we can see a whirlwind of anxieties, hopes and challenges being whipped up by discussions around the PaCS. And this digital whirlwind has not decreased in force in the decade following the implementation of the legislation: Youtube videos celebrate the tenth anniversary of the PaCS or show footage of the Salon du Mariage et du PaCS; websites have been set up which collate all manner of practical information on the rights and responsibilities which come with the signing of a PaCS; ² and arguments for and against the PaCS continue to be rehearsed across the blogosphere. ³

Furthermore, just as Hazareesingh outlined the ways in which decentralisation drew responses from across political divides, so too the new legislation focused – and indeed often polarised – debate across the contemporary political spectrum. Indeed, in many ways it galvanised appeals for a resurgence of the left in mid-1990s France, through the combined efforts of established public intellectual figures and those who were to become their heirs: Frédéric Martel, Éric Fassin, Didier Eribon et al. Opinions on the proposals for same-sex partnerships were expressed across a broad swathe of the political spectrum. At each key stage of its development, the legislation was presented and supported by political figures and groups of the left from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s initial attempts to introduce a proposal in 1990 to Jean-Pierre Michel’s follow-up attempts in 1992 and beyond (see Velu, 1999; Mamère, 2001). As might be expected, particularly in light of views such as those expressed by Jacques Toubon, much opposition to the evolving legislation in the lead-up to its introduction came from parties on the right of the political spectrum, including the UDF, the UMP, Philippe de Villiers’s Mouvement pour la France and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National. ⁴ De Villiers was particularly vehement in his opposition to the legislation, declaring, during parliamentary debates in November 1998 (Observatoire du PaCS, 1998):

Votre innovation du PaCS, c’est tout simplement le retour à la barbarie. Vous vous inscrivez dans la suite de ceux qui, pour saper la société, ont commencé par saper la famille. La loi la mieux établie de notre vieille civilisation, vous vous apprêtez à la violenter! Vous touchez là aux fondements de la société! Mais un jour les victimes se lèveront et se tourneront vers vous en vous disant, une expression terrible: vous êtes le socialisme démolisseur! L’opposition fera tout pour vous empêcher de démolir la société, la famille, la France!

The overlap between the greater fears which the PaCS seems to channel for de Villiers in 1998 and for Toubon in 1995 is striking. For both, it is France itself that is at risk of destruction from the proposed legislation.

The focus of those who interrogate such models of Republicanism and the citoyens who emerge from them, has turned to the impact of an increasing visibility of sexual minorities within the French politico-legal sphere – a ‘hypervisibility’ to use Julianne Pidduck’s term (2003) – on notions of citizenship, in particular as this was triggered by the PaCS debates, and has continued to develop since the introduction of the legislation. We might turn here to recent works such as Denis Provencher’s Queer French (2007), Scott Gunther’s The Elastic Closet (2009), Maxime Foerster’s La Différence des sexes à l’épreuve de la République (2003) or the works of Éric Fassin (1998, 2005; Fabre and Fassin, 2003) in which this argument often takes the form of an understanding of the Republic as ‘always already’ queer – ‘une Marianne travaillée de l’intérieur’ to quote Foerster (2003: 94). Against this backdrop, the partnership legislation is seen to offer a practical political and social means for a queering of citizenship, and it is these processes of queering that this article seeks to examine. Borrowing Gunther’s term, we will examine the ways in which the ‘elasticity’ of key notions at the heart of French Republican citizenship, such as the assertion that a particular vision of citizenship precedes – and indeed supersedes – all other characteristics, have been highlighted by the PaCS debates and their continuing aftermath. ⁵

What is at stake in these discussions around the legislation is a traditional and dominant Republican model of citizenship, whose roots can be traced back, first, to the French Revolution and, second, to conceptions of nation and citizen that emerged within the Third Republic. If, however, we read Gunther, Provencher and Foerster in conjunction with scholars like Hazareesingh, who suggest, however tentatively, that there may be more to Republican citizenship than this model suggests, we find the potential to circumvent the dominance of the traditional framework. Without denying the role played by both the Revolution and the Third Republic in processes of nation- and state-building, they do not offer ‘the only way in which France came to acquire a sense of collective identity. Indeed, such feelings can emerge alongside and even independently of the state-led process of bureaucratic incorporation of different social groups into one community’ (Hazareesingh, 1998: 12). Rather,

being part of the same political community is also about living together in a localized space: defining proper relations with one’s neighbours, creating institutions of sociability, administering communal properties, electing local councillors and representatives, and articulating the relationship between localities and the political and administrative center. In short, powerful notions of the rights and duties of citizens are embedded in experiences (and expectations) about local and territorial life. (Hazareesingh, 1998: 12)

I argue that these facets of collective identity-building can be found in the expressions of a desire for recognition of same-sex partnerships, but also, more generally, that they find their reflection in what Didier Eribon (2000: 83) has described as a means of trying to: ‘se situer non pas ailleurs … mais à côté, en inventant d’autres formes de vie, d’autres formes de personnalités et d’autres modèles sociaux’. Indeed, on Eribon’s model, the potential for queering emerges from the outset as these ‘nouvelles formes de sociabilité et les nouvelles formes de subjectivités qui s’y inventent ne resteront pas limitées aux seuls homosexuels, mais offriront aussi de nouvelles perspectives aux hétérosexuels qui étouffent dans les carcans de la normalité’.

A key turning point from which we can begin to understand the overlap between the development of, at the very least, the possibility of a queering of conceptions of citizenship, comes in 1995–6, with a series of interventions that span theory and practice, politics and academia. And crucial to an understanding of this turning point, is an analysis of the role played by the notion of ‘l’ordre symbolique’, implicitly evoked in Toubon’s reference to ‘l’ordre public’, and which was to recur throughout the PaCS debates on both sides of the divide. Indeed, the expression is used in the 3 Keller interview when Eribon discusses the refusal of some public intellectuals to sign ‘L’appel des 234 pour une reconnaissance légale du couple homosexuel’ which appeared in the pages of the Nouvel Observateur (Adami, Adler, Adrien et al., 1996) two months after ‘Pour une reconnaissance du couple homosexuel’ had appeared in Le Monde. Eribon refers, in particular, to the refusal of sociologist Robert Castel who ‘s’inquiète … de défendre “l’ordre symbolique” contre les revendications homosexuelles’ (cited in Eribon, 2000: 23).

The irony of such fears was further underlined by Eribon in an interview published in the Swiss newspaper Le Temps in 1998, where he commented (cited in 2000: 35):

La marginalité, c’est désormais ce qui est accordée aux homosexuels, y compris par ceux-là mêmes qui dénonçaient il n’y a pas si longtemps leur ‘communautarisme’, mais dont on voit bien qu’ils préfèrent malgré tout ce qu’ils appellent le ‘communautarisme’ à la volonté manifestée aujourd’hui par les associations gays et lesbiennes d’obtenir l’égalité des droits, et notamment le droit à la famille.

The paradox Eribon highlights here is by no means limited to the French context but finds its echo in the US context, as can be seen, for instance, in Morris B. Kaplan’s article ‘Intimacy and equality’ (1997: 204) where he points to the fact that ‘the seriousness with which lesbians and gays urge their capacities to share in the responsibilities of family life [could] provide a surprising locus for potential reconciliation with the defenders of traditional community norms’. As we shall see below, parallels with the US context can be, and have been, drawn at a number of points throughout these debates since, as Fassin (2001: 216) has noted:

Throughout the 1990s, the ‘rhetoric of America’ was constantly invoked in French public discourse, especially in debates regarding minority issues – ethnicity as well as gender and sexuality. Today as much as ever, America is indeed good to think, as a model or (more frequently) a countermodel for French identity politics.

Indeed, in the same article, Fassin goes so far as to suggest that ‘the language of queer politics is (American) English, albeit with a French accent’.

To return, though, to the turning point of the mid 1990s, a month after the Nouvel Observateur’s publication of the ‘Appel des 234’, public debate continued with the publication in Le Monde of ‘Vers une meilleure citoyenneté: le contrat d’union sociale’ (Aubry, Delanoë, Guigou et al., 1996), the title of which underlines from this early stage the potential impact that the evolving legislative package was perceived as having on citizenship. Alongside such interventions in the mainstream press came the publication of Frédéric Martel’s Le Rose et le noir (1996) – itself subject to a good deal of press coverage – which attempted to offer a comprehensive history of gays, and to a far lesser extent lesbians, in France from 1968 to the year of its initial publication.

Le Rose et le noir’s 1996 epilogue offered an explicit, critical engagement with the traditional French Republican framework by which it was informed, setting forth a position opposed to the perceived imposition of an American-style community-based model of society. As Éric Fassin has described, in the mid 1990s, ‘l’épouvantail américain sert … à opposer rhétoriquement la République universaliste, réputée française, au communautarisme, supposé américain’. Fassin (Fabre et Fassin, 2003 : 26) further notes that ‘le débat sur les questions sexuelles se détache sur fond d’un autre débat, l’immigration, qui interroge la définition même de la nation, qu’on dit alors menacée de fragmentation sous l’effet du communautarisme “à l’américaine”’. Here once again, we find ourselves in the overlapping domain between sexuality and nationality evoked with such terror by Toubon and de Villiers.

Martel’s position changed with respect to partnership legislation between 1996 and the subsequent re-edition of the book in 2000, a year after the implementation of the PaCS legislation, and accordingly he rewrote the final stages for the second paperback edition. Indeed, by the 2000 edition he had tempered his position to include a positive, and perhaps less ideologically insecure, discussion of three levels of community: ‘la communauté de destin’, ‘la communauté de fait’ and ‘la communauté “pour soi”’, the first of which explicitly involves ‘quelque chose comme une conscience commune à nombre d’homosexuels et d’abord une mémoire collective commune mais aussi la conscience d’un dialogue plus complexe avec l’environnement familial et social’ (Martel, (2000 [1996]: 709). Even here, Martel (2000 [1996]: 712) remains cautious, in particular in relation to the ‘communauté “pour soi”’, and continues to ‘privilégie l’individu avec son libre choix, sur le groupe et ses consignes’. Indeed, the 2000 version of Martel’s epilogue is particularly interesting because it offers him an opportunity to engage head-on with the debates which emerged, first, around his own book, and, second, around events such as Gay Pride and the evolving partnership legislation, which he characterises as opposing ‘des républicains crispés’ and ‘des communautaristes aveugles’ (Martel, 2000 [1996]: 712–13). The futility of debates posed in such rigid binary terms is evident 2000 [1996]: 713): ‘Un républicanisme incantatoire, négateur des réalités sociales et des projets de vie différents, ne me convient pas davantage qu’une communautarisme aveugle.’

Despite the post-PACS rewrite, though, the arguments put forward in both the 1996 and the 2000 versions are relevant here insofar as they encapsulate a traditional Republican stance still adopted by many in the French political arena. In the earlier version, we find an avowed fear of ‘la tentation communautaire’ (Martel, 2000 [1996]: 398), the expression of an anti-communitarian stance, firmly against the recognition of cultural difference on an individual or collective level and one which would seem to be at odds with Eribon’s appeal in 1998 that ‘il faut se battre en même temps pour l’indifférence du droit à l’égard de ce que sont les individus et pour le droit à la différence dans les modes de vie’ (cited in Eribon, 1999). On Martel’s 1996 reading, the American communitarian model is a product of ‘une société qui cultive sa propre fragmentation au bénéfice de communautés juxtaposées’ (1996: 406). Even by the time of the 2000 epilogue, with Martel’s careful explication of his definitions of communitarianism and Republicanism, and the relationship he posits between the two, he still favours a vision of Republicanism with a distinctly French twist:

On comprendra que je ne me retrouve nullement à travers de telles argumentations qui falsifient l’idée de la République et masquent mal, sous couvert d’une défense inconditionnelle du ‘modèle républicain d’intégration’, une volonté d’interdire les manifestations d’identité collective et d’éradiquer les diversités. C’est oublier, en outre, la spécificité de ce modèle français: garantir à chaque individu le droit de se prévaloir d’une appartenance, sans pour autant l’y contraindre (comme, pour partie, le système américain). (Martel, 2000: 713)

Following Martel’s comments here, it seems clear that Éric Fassin is right to suggest that ‘le Pacs … [a] bousculé la rhétorique républicaine’ (Fabre and Fassin, 2003: 224, my emphasis).

However, while fragmentation as described by Martel provides a potential source of fear and anxiety, it can also be seen as representing a welcome breath of fresh air for staid and static Republican values, and with them Republican citizenship. In other words, the fragmentation and juxtapositions Martel speaks of do not necessarily imply a breakdown of any order, be it ‘social, symbolique ou sexuel’. Rather, if understood as a performance of queering, they represent a means not only to ‘revendiquer le droit d’être ce que l’on est’, as Eribon phrased it in an interview in Ex-Aequo (cited in Eribon, 2000: 27), but rather, to paraphrase Foerster a few years later, ‘revendiquer le droit d’être ceux que l’on est’ (2003: 12). I would argue that the roots of this plurality can be found in the pages of Le Rose et le noir, where Martel (1996: 404) talks, for instance, of ‘La plupart des individus [qui] se situent … sur des positions qui sont des combinaisons de particulier et de l’universel,’ describing ‘une position intermédiaire, restant précisément à définir – sinon à inventer – qui combinerait multiculturalisme avec défense de l’État républicain.’

What is particularly interesting in the way Martel expresses this ‘position intermédiaire’ is the intersection he highlights between the politics and gender and sexuality which underpin his work and other forms of political struggle, brought into the frame via his reference to ‘le multiculturalisme’. ⁶ Martel is by no means alone in pointing to such intersections between political movements and struggles. In a paper given in 1999 at the École normale supérieure following the publication of Au-delà du Pacs (Borrillo et al., 1999), Didier Eribon stated:

Je pourrais dire que l’homosexuel est, mutatis mutandis bien sûr, comme l’immigré, une personne toujours déplacée et qui a toujours tort, qui est toujours suspecte. Tort lorsqu’il affirme sa différence, tort lorsqu’il revendique l’égalité, tout simplement parce qu’il a tort d’être ce qu’il est. (2000: 153)

Éric Fassin (Fabre et Fassin, 2003: 26) describes how questions of sex and sexuality impact upon the very idea of the Republic as conceived in public discourse ‘à la fois parce qu’elles se situent à l’articulation des sphères publique et privée, mais aussi parce qu’elles s’inscrivent dans le spectre des politiques minoritaires’. More recently, Maxime Cervulle and Nick Rees-Roberts have published Homo exoticus (2010) which seeks to question ‘le rôle que jouent l’histoire coloniale et les rapports sociaux de race dans les représentations, ainsi que dans les relations sentimentales et sexuelles contemporaines’. In this formulation, once again, we see an overlap between public and private, but also an overlap between questions of sexual identity and those related to other identity-based struggles.

What this tells us, I would argue, is that the impact of the PaCS legislation and the debates to which it has given rise reaches far beyond the limits of same-sex partnerships. Indeed, perhaps it should be noted that this was always going to be the case in the French context, since the partnerships are accessible to couples regardless of the gender of the partners involved. The first article of the texte de loi states: ‘Un pacte civil de solidarité est un contrat conclu par deux personnes physiques majeures, de sexe différent ou de même sexe, pour organiser leur vie commune’.

Putting that practical note to one side, though, the frequency with which protest movements and debates around the PaCS were equated with, or placed in the lineage of, other political struggles is striking. It would seem to point towards a reframing of concerns beyond the new domestic partnerships into a far broader range of debates focusing on the nation, and crucially nation as understood or conceptualised via the ideological prism of ‘filiation’. After all, as Kaplan argues (1997: 203) ‘the emphasis on lesbian and gay associations and families presents a more complex conception of the relations among sexuality, citizenship, and domesticity than that implied by arguments for decriminalisation or for protection against discrimination’. In other words, transposing Kaplan’s analysis of the US to the French context, the PaCS debates can be seen as having served to position the family as a site of wider social crisis and thus to engage with the overarching question of a challenge to dominant Republican ideology in its contemporary form.

Fassin (2001: 225) identifies ‘filiation’ as the ‘cornerstone’ of rhetoric in public discourses on the PaCS and in the wider debate it provoked, due to a perception that ‘filiation structures the human psyche (as a symbolic link between parent and child) and at the same time culture itself (as consanguinity complements affinity)’. Its importance is underscored by Hazareesingh’s observation (1998: 3) that:

Attending to questions of origins is a natural part of the political and intellectual historian’s trade. In France, however, this is not a mere matter of abstract speculation: lineage is indeed regarded as a critical determinant of contemporary political identities.

And the heteronormativity of notions of kinship and filiation is foregrounded by Judith Butler (2002: 14) in ‘Is kinship always already heterosexual?’ which she begins by describing the conflation, in US popular opinion, between gay marriage and gay kinship: ‘We hear not only that marriage is and ought to remain a heterosexual institution and bond, but also that kinship does not work, or does not qualify as kinship, unless it assumes a recognisable family form.’

The significance of links between filiation and a dominant model of Republican identity and citizenship, between family and nation, has become increasingly pertinent in the decade or so that has followed the introduction of the PaCS. And in this context then, Fassin (2001: 225) is right to link debates on filiation in the context of the PaCS legislation to broader concerns related to ‘the French nation and nationalité through citizenship’ and the search for a relevant response to the question ‘who is French, and who is not?’ What is changing in the post-PaCS era is that the answers to these questions are no longer necessarily to be phrased in national or ‘ethnic’ terms, but stretch to encompass the traditional Republic’s multiple others.

It is the existence and visibility of this plurality of others that gives rise to the possibility of a queering of the dominant model of Republican citizenship. Not a queering that is imposed from outre-Atlantique as Martel and others so feared in the mid 1990s, nor one that seeks ‘le démolition’ of France itself, which so terrorised Philippe de Villiers in the debates of the late 1990s, but rather a queering from within, a queering that reshapes the Republic on the basis of what is already there. On this reading, I would agree with Scott Gunther (2009: 126) when he argues that:

‘queer made in France’ will be responding to French republicanism in one way or another – and if the recent history of gay political strategies serves as an example, the Republic will be elastic enough to accommodate the subversive aspects of these new ideas.

Some may quibble with the notion of ‘subversion’ Gunther employs here, but his underlying assertion – namely that ‘queer’ and ‘Republican’ will inevitably be brought into dialogue – points to the possibility of the emergence of new visions of citizenship.

These new visions would shift discourse beyond the ‘ordre symbolique’ so often evoked during the PaCS debates. From Irène Théry’s statements that ‘filiation without sexual difference would … undermine a symbolic order that is the very condition of our ability to think and live in society’ (cited in Fassin, 2001: 119, in English in the original article) or that ‘la famille doit rester le lieu de la ‘“différence symbolique” des sexes’ and that ‘il pourrait être dangereux de nier les conséquences sur la filiation de la différence biologique des parents’ (cited in Gélard, 1999), to Élisabeth Guigou’s reassurances that ‘the PaCS does not concern the family. Accordingly, how could it possibly have an effect upon the rules of filiation?’ (cited in Stychin, 2001: 361).

Scholarly and public debate on these issues continues to evolve and to flag up shifts in the definitions of the key terms involved, from ‘queer’ to ‘French’ to ‘citizen’ to ‘community’. This is perhaps to be expected, insofar as Judith Butler (1993: 19) warned that:

As much as it is necessary to assert political demands through recourse to identity categories, and to lay claim to the power to name oneself and determine the conditions under which that name is used, it is also impossible to sustain that kind of mastery over the trajectory of those categories within discourse.

But this ongoing struggle with terms and their meanings does not only lie with the so-called ‘minorities’ involved here. Indeed, as Eribon has underlined (2000: 151) ‘l’universalisme est un combat. Car l’universel ne saurait être défini une fois pour toutes. On voit bien, au contraire, qu’au cours de l’histoire il n’a cessé d’être élargi, reformulé par les luttes politiques.’ And if one impact of the PaCS debates is a recognition that the universal is not a static entity, then surely we have an indication that the ‘queering’ of Republican citizenship has already begun.