DIVORCE RATE IN FRANCE IS STILL FALLING

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 October 1948, Page 5

DIVORCE RATE IN FRANCE IS STILL FALLING

(From Edwin Hooker, Reuters Correspondent) (By Air Mail) ' PARIS. Fewer French people are getting divorced, but France's divorce rate, about the same as that of the United States in recent .years, is still high. The Tribunal' of the Seine, which hears cases from Paris and suburbs, granted 1,600 divorces in June this year. June is a heavy month in the Court, but it is estimated that about 12,000, will have been granted by the end of the year. What this means can be gathered from the records of the number of, divorce cases brought in the same Court in previous years:— 1939—6445, 1944—7419, 1945—22,216, 1947—14,979. The figure for 1945 was a record for any year since 1884 when divorce was made legal in France following the separation of Church and State. The reasons for this high divorce rate in the postwar years go back to France’s defeat in 1940. About 1,000,000 Frenchmen became prisoners of war when the German armies over-ran France and organised resistance collapsed. By 1944, the year of liberation, political deportations and conscription of French labour, for German industry had brought the total of expatriates to nearly 2,000,000. Thousands of these exiles returned to find their wives and families waiting for them with open arms and were able to take up life again where they left off. But many another, less fortunate, had returned after four'years’ absence to find that his wife had grown tired of waiting and sought consolation with someone else. The problem was recognised by Parliament which provided a specially simplified, speed-up procedure for ex-prisoners’ divorces. It was this clearing of the wreckage of warshattered marriages which swelled the 1945 divorce total, and the tailing off of the ex-prisoners’ rush accounts for the fall of the divorce rate since. Getting divorced is not particularly easy in France, nor is it particularly cheap. Stamps and registration fees alone come to 18,000 francs ( £l2 7s 2d), fees for the solicitor who prepares your case and the barrister who presents it will total about 15,000 francs (£l7 7s 8d) each. Add a few incidentals, and the simplest, cheapest utility model divorces will' cost at least 50,000 francs—say £6O.