Ten years ago, under the presidency of socialist François Hollande, more than a million people gathered at the gates of Paris, a stone’s throw from the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Elysées, to demonstrate against the bill that would establish same-sex marriage, inappropriately called ‘marriage for all.’ A movement was then born under the name of ‘Manif Pour Tous’ (Demonstration For All), known by the French as LMPT. Ten years later, its founders have chosen to transform it into the ‘Family Union‘.
March 24th, 2013 represented the climax of the demonstrations against the proposed institution of ‘marriage for all,’ aimed at enshrining same-sex marriage in French law and opening the possibility for same-sex couples to adopt. Ten years later, to the day, the founders of the movement met in Paris to give birth to a new formation that takes the name of Family Union. The objective put forward by its president, Ludovine de la Rochère, is to give a new dimension to the original fight—limited to the question of homosexual marriage—now expanded to defending the traditional family at all levels of political, educational, and cultural activity.
During her speech at a large rally organised on Friday, March 24th at the Parc des Expositions in Paris, de la Rochère was not afraid to recall the failures of the mobilisation for the family in France. The first of these was the passage of the so-called Taubira law instituting marriage and adoption for homosexual couples. But she recalled some successes as well. In the educational field, La Manif Pour Tous managed to secure the withdrawal of the “ABCD of Equality,” a curriculum aimed at teaching explicitly the theory of gender in school from the youngest age, and, in the health care field, the renunciation of medically assisted procreation for transsexuals.
The movement replacing La Manif Pour Tous is resolutely apolitical: “the family is neither Right nor Left. Its union is not either,” explains Ludovine de la Rochère. Nevertheless, many right-wing personalities were present for the launch of the new movement, or showed their support, such as Jean-Frédéric Poisson, president of the Christian Democratic Party Via, and Laurence Trochu, president of the Conservative Movement—both allied with Éric Zemmour during the presidential campaign of 2022. Zemmour was also present representing Reconquête, as was the head of its youth branch, Stanislas Rigault.
On the set of CNews, Ludovine de la Rochère defined the new challenges of the movement as follows:
We defend the family, motherhood, fatherhood, the rights and needs of the child, intergenerational solidarity. We want a ‘family’ approach from birth to the end of life, from education to health, from employment to culture.”
Emmanuel Macron’s policy is thus directly in the line of fire, whether on the question of euthanasia—a stated government objective—and the promotion of surrogacy, or the impasse made on the question of the birth rate during the debates on pension reform. Unlike other governments in the past, Élisabeth Borne’s government does not have a ministry dedicated to the family.
The commemoration of the mobilisation against same-sex marriage has been the subject of several comments in the French media. Rassemblement national deputy Bryan Masson said that demonstrating in 2013 had been “a mistake”… a viewpoint criticised by other deputies, also from the Rassemblement national, such as Frédéric Boccaletti, who said on Twitter that he was proud to have defended his convictions and his anthropological vision—proof that the national right-wing party remains deeply divided on social issues.
