Abstract
Theorizing the importance of the state in regulating sexuality and how sexuality shapes the state has been key to understanding state control and definition. Monogamy has been treated as an implicit aspect of sexual regulation, but its significance in defining the state has yet to be theorized. The lack of explicit attention to monogamy dovetails with a lack of attention to colonial and racial histories in state boundary-work. This article theorizes the monogamous state to uncover a grid of intelligibility that connects colonial understandings of perverse sexuality to polygamy, in contradistinction to moral and productive monogamy. Drawing on the case of France, I examine how the state defined itself against a racialized, polygynous Other as part of its civilizing mission to make monogamy central to citizenship and public order. I identify three historical periods that demonstrate the building, consolidation, and reinforcement of the monogamous state.
The multiplicity of husbands or wives may be authorized in certain climates, but it is legitimate in none; it brings about the servitude of one sex and the despotism of the other. . . . It introduces confusion and disorder into families that soon spreads to the entire social body; it shocks all ideas, it distorts all feelings. . . . Finally, it is repugnant to the very essence of marriage, to the essence of the contract by which two spouses give each other everything, body and heart. By approaching countries where polygamy is permitted, it seems that we move away from morality itself.
Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis, a French jurist and politician, was one of the chief drafters of the Civil (Napoleonic) Code of 1804, the foundational framework of the French legal system. In his preliminary discourse on the Code, he points to the conjugal union of one man and one woman as a legal principle grounded in nature. Polygamy (or polygyny), 1 by contrast, may be “authorized in certain climates,” but it is found in countries where “we move away from morality itself.” Drawing on discourses of “Oriental despotism,” Portalis (1844:173–74) associates polygamy with the “stupid brutishness of certain at once corrupt and semi-barbarous nations of Asia.” In conceiving this foundational code, Portalis’s characterization of natural monogamous marriage against the immoral and unnatural practice of polygamy—a dominant understanding of monogamy and civilization circulating globally—exemplifies the construction of “monogamous states,” a theoretical framework that expands the idea of “sexual states” in which sexuality fundamentally governs state definition in uneven and contradictory ways (Puri 2016:6).
Theorizing the monogamous state builds on modern state theory that understands the state as a process rather than a “thing” (Connell 1990:509). As a sovereign territory, the state encompasses cultural institutions that create and apply administrative laws and policies as well as generating ideologies that reinforce state power based on race, class, gender, and sexuality (Rosanvallon 1990). Recent theorizations of the state note that instead of a monolithic, rational, and static entity, states are networks of relationships based on wider configurations of human practice, historically variable, subjective, and often contradictory (Puri 2016). Thus, it is important to conceptualize the “state” as processes that evolve rather than as a fixed and transhistorical entity.
The concept of monogamous states seeks to understand how monogamy is central to historical shifts in definitions of statehood that enable states to regulate sexuality (Canaday 2009; Puri 2016). Scholars have examined the relationship between sexuality and the state to identify how the state modifies, expands, and justifies power by focusing on sexuality and its disruption of the social order. For example, Puri (2016:11) analyzes the movement to decriminalize homosexuality in India to demonstrate how sexual governance is central to state control, shaping the state as it seeks “to define sexual normality, discipline bodies, and control populations.” Sexuality is further tied to colonialism and Western European state conquest of American, Asian, African, and Pacific territories and populations (Patil 2018). Sexual discourses have been key in the creation and maintenance of empire (Le Cour Grandmaison 2019). The relation between sexuality, the state, and colonialism has received scholarly attention, but the importance of monogamy in state definitions tied to empire and colonialism is undertheorized.
In this article, I theorize the monogamous state as constituting a grid of intelligibility where the definition and meaning of the state relies on upholding monogamy as central to defining itself. I argue that not only does the state regulate sexuality through monogamy but also that monogamy is an essential component in shaping state definition. I use the case of France as an example of how monogamous states define themselves by embracing mononormativity to contrast themselves against a racialized, colonized, and predominantly Muslim subject, what I call the “polygynous Other.” Analyzing French laws, policies, and texts from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, I examine three periods in which the state defines itself based on monogamy, each with its own configurations and internal contradictions that intersect with imperial ideals of whiteness, patriarchy, and domination. I begin by introducing the literature on the intersections of gender, sexuality, and the state, including the importance of compulsory monogamy. Based on this literature, I then introduce the concept of the monogamous state and discuss the case of France as an example. Finally, I analyze how monogamy is important in three periods of French governance that demonstrate the nature of state definition based on the historical evolution of colonialism and understandings of monogamy.
Sexuality, Monogamy, Colonialism, and the State
A substantial literature on the intersections of sexuality and the state demonstrates the importance of state regulation in shaping sexuality among diverse populations (e.g., Canaday 2009; Foucault 1978; Rubin 1984). Scholars have pointed to the importance of heterosexual marriage as a key institution in state regulation of nonnormative relationships, the distribution of benefits, and producing power and domination (Canaday 2009; Fassin 2009; Heath 2012). This literature can be traced back to Simone de Beauvoir’s (1949) Le Deuxième Sexe, a foundational feminist text that exposes how the social, legal, and political structures of the state enforce gender and sexual norms through marriage. In the 1980s, Andrienne Rich and Monique Wittig problematized the idea of the “second sex,” noting how de Beauvoir assumed heterosexuality as the backdrop of gender relations. Rich (1980) argues that heterosexuality is not just a personal preference but also a political institution enforced by social, cultural, and state mechanisms. Likewise, Wittig (1992) understands sexuality, monogamy, and the state as interlocking systems of control that naturalize heterosexuality and patriarchy.
Building on Foucault’s (1978) concept of “biopower,” sexuality scholars argue that modern states maintain authority not only through legal regulation, political intervention, and social policies but also through the regulation of bodies, identities, and populations. Rubin (1984) builds on Foucault, demonstrating how power produces sexuality as historically constructed and marks what counts as “normal” and “perverse.” For Rubin, the state is not a neutral arbiter of rights but key to producing and policing sexual norms. French sociologist Fassin (2006) offers a foundational analysis of how the state is not external to sexual norms but is active in articulating differences between law and custom, public and private, and natural and social. Overall, this scholarship brings together the study of sexuality, state power, and citizenship to demonstrate how the state regulates, shapes, and produces the categories of sex and sexuality.
The state clearly regulates and defines sexuality, yet the reverse is also true. Sexuality shapes the state through struggles over the meanings of sexuality, often resolved in contradictory ways. Canaday (2009) makes this point in her analysis of U.S. federal government regulation that shaped the historical construction of the category “homosexual,” which was tied to policies of immigration, the military, and welfare. Regulating gender and sexuality ultimately led the state to construe the citizen as heterosexual in the postwar period to create what Canaday (2009) calls the “straight state.” Consequential federal policies that disenfranchised lesbians and gay men were the result of state-building processes around regulating sexual nonconformity. Puri (2016:6) offers a postcolonial example of the way sexuality shapes the state, mapping out how the Indian state became “thoroughly imbued with considerations of sexuality.”
Research on race, immigration, and sexuality also points to the reciprocal ways sexuality and the state shape one another. Studying the governance of lesbian migrants, Falquet (2011) argues that states use migration policies to reinforce nationalism by manipulating the rights discourses of sexual minorities. In France, claims of gender equality and tolerance toward lesbians are mobilized against racialized others (e.g., Muslim migrants), and French migration policies exclude and discipline lesbian migrants. Fassin and Salcedo (2019) analyze how immigration and asylum policy structure sexuality through the state’s demand to identify “true” from “false” homosexuals, making it necessary for applicants to prove their “homosexuality” to be granted protection. The state thus creates sexual subjects by forcing migrants into LGBTQ+ identities. The reverse is also true: Sexuality shapes the state by construing “sexual democracy” in opposition to the “sexually backward,” defining certain states in terms of sexual progressivism in contradistinction to “nonprogressive” others.
The ability to define the sexual Other has been central to colonial projects and imperialist expansion (Le Cour Grandmaison 2019; Patil 2018). State and institutional supports have upheld heterosexuality through policy and law by policing the lives of nonheterosexuals and those outside the monogamous norm (Heath 2023), and the construction of sexuality has been inherent to empire-building projects. Stoler (1995) laid the groundwork for the study of sexuality and empire, arguing that the fabrication of sexual normalcy and deviance was foundational to colonial rule. European colonial expansionist ideas about heterosexuality, whiteness, and gender fostered a sense of national identity, specifically locating the normative family in the west. Regulation of normal sexuality juxtaposed colonial sexualities as deviant, especially those of African and Indigenous descent (McClintock 1995; Patil 2018). Christian missionary efforts further developed ideals of normative sexuality and gender, implicit to the civilizing mission of countries like France from the fifteenth to twentieth century onward (see Le Guay de Prémontval 1751–1752:23).
Scholars studying sexuality and colonialism point to how the modern state relies on discourses of universal and biological sexuality to maintain and enhance its disciplinary and regulatory power (Le Cour Grandmaison 2019). Concerning French republicanism, Dorlin (2009) examines how modern statehood is built on the control of bodies and sexuality through medical, legal, and moral apparatuses. States have relied on colonialism as a sexual regime to construct colonized populations through discourses of sexual excess (e.g., “licentious” Muslim sexuality), thereby justifying colonization as a civilizing project. Massad (2007) describes how representations of Arab sexual desires have been linked to questions of civilization and modernity. Studying how western states and international nongovernmental organizations have framed the “progress” of Arab societies based on the adoption of western forms of sexuality, Massad argues that the state enforces sexual categories, local elites reproduce them, and “deviant” subjects are then policed by them. By imposing western sexual identities, elites incite state crackdowns against those newly categorized as “gay” or “deviant,” thereby strengthening state surveillance and violence.
Sexuality scholars have examined the relationship between sexuality and the state in some depth, but research on the relationship between the state, sexuality, and monogamy is more limited. Cott (2000) argues that in the founding of the United States, political actors worked to ensure the prevalence of monogamy based on Christian principles. Government policies endorsed a national model of marriage as “lifelong, faithful monogamy, formed by the mutual consent of a man and a woman, bearing the impress of the Christian religion” (Cott 2000:3). Examining the racial aspects of anti-polygamy legislation, Ertman (2010) analyzes political cartoons from the nineteenth century that depict polygyny as a form of marriage that was “natural” for people from Asia and Africa but “unnatural” for descendants of white Northern Europeans. Likewise, Denike (2010) provides a genealogy of anti-polygamy sentiment in North America, grounded in racism and nationalism that has allowed the state to enforce heterosexual monogamy. Turning to Canada, Carter (2008) challenges the idea of the naturalness of monogamous marriage given the diversity of family arrangements among First Nations and newcomers, and Lenon (2022) describes the colonial reasoning of Canada’s anti-polygamy law. Sidhoum-Rahal (1985, 1986) and Poiret (1992, 1996) examine the ways polygamous families, in contrast to monogamous ones, have been othered in France as generally racialized, poor, and Muslim.
Conceptualizing the importance of monogamy to regulating sexual norms, scholars have theorized mononormativity and compulsory monogamy as constitutive elements of hegemonic regimes of sexual normalcy (Alarie and Bosom 2022; Schippers 2016). According to Ritchie and Barker (2006), Robin Bauer and Marianne Pieper coined the term “mononormativity” in the first International Conference on Polyamory and Mononormativity, held at the Research Centre for Feminist, Gender and Queer Studies at the University of Hamburg in 2005, to highlight how dominant discourses in the west privilege monogamy, based on taken-for-granted ideas of coupledom, sexual exclusivity, and the predominance of love relationships. Schippers (2016) demonstrates the role of compulsory monogamy as a form of gender and race privilege. This focus on mononormativity has pushed forward thinking on the intersections of monogamy, race, and sexuality, but much of this scholarship focuses on modern forms of nonmonogamy, such as polyamory, carving off polygyny by pointing to its inegalitarianism. 2 I argue for the need to theorize the monogamous state to shine light on the ways monogamy defines state power through the construction of the polygynous Other.
Theorizing the Monogamous State
To theorize the monogamous state, I draw on historian and sociologist Rosanvallon’s (1990) nonreductionist definition that understands the state as an administrative organism, a network of relations and institutions within society, a diverse range of intervention methods, a means of economic regulation, and a set of symbolic representations. I bring in sexuality scholars’ focus on how the state organizes, regulates, and legitimizes sexual behaviors, identities, and relations in the name of public order, morality, and national identity. Building on this, I understand the monogamous state as constitutive of the sexual state—with its divide between normative and nonnormative sexualities—and defining itself in terms of heterosexual, monogamous relationships. Along with laws, administrative policies, and coercion, the monogamous state also maintains its power through discipline and surveillance of racialized populations based on colonial and racial symbolic representations of polygamy. As historical studies show, polygamy is tethered to colonialism: European colonizers brought Christian ideals of monogamy to colonized lands and named polygamy as “barbaric” and “uncivilized.” The monogamous state thus encompasses institutional processes that rely on mononormativity—and its westernized conceptions of “civilized” marriage—to reinforce and expand state power. Monogamy is central in shaping state definition by identifying and demonizing a polygynous Other in contrast to western ideals of political and social citizenship. This article examines the explicit work of one western state, France, to defend its imperial efforts as enlightened and moral by positioning a polygynous Other as repugnant and anti-democratic.
France offers a compelling example of a country with a colonial legacy that has long sought to repudiate and regulate polygynous populations in former colonies and the metropole. As in other parts of Europe, early French thinkers considered the question of polygamy as part of broader efforts to ban it. Polygamy was prohibited as early as the twelfth century in Europe (Coontz 2005). In Christian doctrine, where marriage was upheld as the exclusive and indissoluble commitment between one man and one woman, bigamy—or contracting a new marital union when already in an undissolved marriage—was a serious crime, in line with other sexual sins such as adultery. Early Christianity denounced divorce and polygamy, and it was definitively condemned by the doctrine of the Council of Trent in 1563. Men did keep mistresses, which was not viewed as polygamy given that “mistresses had no legal rights or social standing. By the fifteenth century the children of mistresses had lost the inheritance rights they had had in the early medieval period” (Coontz 2005:124).
In France, the Edict of Blois of 1580 followed the tenets of Trent to ban polygamy in faith and law. Still, it is well documented that France’s “informal plurality of households” and its willingness to accept “bastards” made regulating monogamy difficult (Blum 2002:78). It was not until Louis XVI that the Church was able to enforce monogamy for the monarchy. McDougall (2010:441) argues that bigamy being treated as a crime, especially in the later Middle Ages in northern France, was mainly applicable to men, who were prosecuted in much higher numbers than women: “Male bigamy brought to mind things Jewish and Mohammedan, things unchristian. Christian identity required male monogamous marriage.” Early on, France sought to demarcate differences between western and gendered ideals of monogamy and racialized, colonized, and Muslim subjects who could be marked as polygamous (Le Cour Grandmaison 2019).
My theorization of monogamous states is based on research I conducted from 2015 to 2016 in France as part of a larger comparative project (for a broad discussion of methods, see Heath 2023). For this article, I draw on archival data I collected in 2016 at the Ministry of the Interior in Paris, which houses government documents and administrative texts, including documents on immigration and polygamy in France. I was able to access publications that are not otherwise available to the public, such as the extensive reports of Sidhoum-Rahal (1985, 1986) on the legal and social aspects of polygamy in the context of French colonization, Poiret and Guegan (1992) examining regulation of polygamous immigrant families in France, and 52 articles dealing with immigration and polygamy. The reports provided hundreds of pages of historical and contemporary analyses that allowed me to identify the key texts to theorize the monogamous state. I was granted permission to photograph relevant texts, and I took extensive notes on how polygamy has been conceptualized over time. I conducted additional searches on key figures in the history of statecraft based on these documents, confirming I had located the essential writings on polygamy, such as pertinent volumes of the Jesuit Relations, a collection of annual reports written by the Jesuit missionaries on their efforts to evangelize in New France and to end “problematic” practices such as polygamy among the First Nations between 1632 and 1673. I also used secondary sources by historians and sociologists that analyze various texts regarding polygamy to confirm the archival materials I gathered best represent the approaches to monogamy and polygamy from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.
I analyze three time periods in which regulation of polygamy shaped the construction and evolution of monogamous states. The first marks a period in which the state—defined on traditional modes of representation of the monarchy and divine rule—expanded to stake out a “public sphere” in the eighteenth century (Blum 2002:2), spurring debates over the benefits and harms of polygamy as practiced in Christianity and Islam. The monogamous state consolidated into a modern form as an amalgamation of empire and state in the second phase, during the height of colonialism in France in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Burbank and Cooper 2008). During this period, France began to specifically define itself against a polygynous Other. The third phase marks the institutionalization of monogamy in the second half of the twentieth century as definitional to the French state (Poiret and Guegan 1992). Regulating polygyny as a social problem in the metropole required boundary-work based on conceptions of a polygynous Other that made racialized and Muslim subjects always suspect of being polygamous (Le Cour Grandmaison 2019). Monogamy shaped state definition differently in these three periods: The political structure moved from absolutist monarchy to a postrevolutionary democracy and the expansionist empire-state of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Building the Monogamous State
The French state under the ancien régime—especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—was a system of absolute monarchy that justified a rigid social hierarchy by the divine right of kings, and regulating family was central to state power (Bernard 2007; Tuttle 2010). Monarchic state-building in early modern France was based on a “complexe famille-État” (family-state compact) of gender distinctions that placed men as heads of households (Hanley 1995:47). The state relied on the Catholic Church as the First Estate of the realm in promoting monogamous, Christian marriage and condemning polygamy in its global mission (Bernard 2007; Mousnier 1974). Medieval secular and ecclesiastical laws condemned bigamy, or marrying a second spouse with the knowledge the first was still alive (McDougall 2010). By the time of Louis XIV, French rulers increasingly sought to take legislative authority over the Church to regulate the domestic realm. In 1666, Louis XIV proclaimed a pronatalist edict, the “Edict on Marriage,” that encouraged reproduction by providing incentives to have families of 10 to 12 children and promoted indissoluble, monogamous marriage to stabilize the French political order (Hanley 1995; Tuttle 2010). France believed itself to be endangered by a failure to procreate, a false presumption given that the population had “grown from about 22 million in 1700 to about 28.1 million in 1801” (Blum 2002:2). The pronatalist edict allowed the state to increase its military and fiscal power (Tuttle 2010).
The monarchic state also interested itself in monogamous marriage as political figures considered succession and polygamy. Unformalized plural marriages and the need for orderly royal succession made the question of polygamy especially pertinent. These debates fueled French Enlightenment critiques of the Church and the state for its policies that weakened reproduction (Blum 1998). German theologian Johann Leyser, who published the treatise Polygamia Triumphatrix in 1682 (translated into French in 1739), was influential during this period (Blum 1998). Leyser (1682) drew on biblical passages, such as the Genesis pronouncement to “grow and multiply,” to promote the idea that men are obligated to reproduce. Because men can father several children in a year and women cannot, he argued that limiting men to only one woman violated the natural and divine law of God. Other thinkers reconciled Christian monogamy with the “profertility imperatives of nature and statecraft” by arguing that monogamy served the best interests of reproduction and children (Tuttle 2010:39).
In the seventeenth century, Louis XIV extended his pronatalist policy to New France, where he hoped to promote monogamous marriage in French-style households in North America (Tuttle 2010). In New France, Jesuit missionaries and colonial officials discovered a range of marital regimes among Native groups—particularly polygamy, which they viewed as perpetuating brutality and instability. The missionaries proselytized and imposed marital and sexual norms to advance the French political order (De Castelnau 2009). Thwaites (1896–1901) published the Jesuit Relations, 73 volumes of reports from Jesuit missionaries in New France from 1610 to 1791. These documents—recounting interactions between missionaries and Native populations and early French colonization efforts—were presented to the king, potential donors in France, and a general population who enthusiastically read passages about the “savages” whom missionaries met, especially of their native sexual and conjugal customs (Tuttle 2010:81).
Pierre Biard was one of the earliest missionaries who wrote about polygamy as it was practiced by some Acadian Micmac families. Biard discussed the fact that the custom allows men to have several wives, and this is justified by the need to retain authority and power in the community by having large numbers of children and the need for household labor: “So for these reasons some of the Savages try to defend their Polygamy, further alleging that otherwise there would be an extinction of the family for lack of descendants; ignoring the blessings of Christian marriage” (Thwaites 1897:103). Biard connected polygyny to savagery, arguing that Micmac men beat their wives “unmercifully, and often for a very slight cause” (p. 103). For Biard, the “Savages are not so stupid” as to point to the injustice of the Jesuit request to give up polygamy and live like Christians because they had a duty to their wives to remain in their marriages (p. 150).
Paul Le Jeune, first superior of the Jesuits, wrote about Makheabichtichiou, who had three wives and was leader of a collection of Algonquin and Innu (or Montagnais) refugees who lived north of the St. Lawrence River (Thwaites 1898a). To develop diplomatic ties with the French, Makheabichtichiou converted to Christianity and repudiated all customs the Jesuits condemned except one: He refused to renounce his polygamous wives, citing his duty to them all, which meant he could not be baptized. Le Jeune noted: “I can readily believe that he keeps only one of them as his wife, and that he loves her very much, hating the other two; but we must avoid scandal, and give these barbarians the impression that Christians can have only one wife” (Thwaites 1898a:177). The goal was to evangelize Christian monogamous marriage, but Jesuits like Le Jeune recognized the challenge of convincing “barbarians” of its benefits. Vimont also wrote that polygamy was the one Christian law the Native populations could not abide: “They no longer look upon Christian marriage as an aid and comfort of human life, but as a servitude full of vexation and bitterness” (Thwaites 1989b:247–248). Ultimately, colonial policies intended to create social order based on monogamous, indissoluble marriage were unsuccessful among Native populations and colonial households. Instead, by the eighteenth century, officials were lamenting the colony’s conjugal disorder (Tuttle 2010). Overall, the French state used Biard’s the Jesuit Relations as an instrument of propaganda and intelligence (Belmessous 2004).
Back in the metropole, numerous writers on polygamy viewed it as exotic and attributed the idea to Islam (Gilles 2013–2014). These writings drew on Orientalism—the practice of adopting and repeating representations of the Orient to consolidate western authority—to uphold the ideal of monogamy (Said 1979). French philosopher Pierre Bayle wrote about polygamy extensively in the Dictionnaire (Bayle 1697) and the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (Bayle 1684–1687), arguing that to allow some men to marry multiple wives would expose other men to celibacy. Bayle’s writings on “Mahomet” in his Dictionnaire followed other Christian apologists who juxtaposed the alleged lascivious sexual morality of Muslims with the “civilized” morality of Christians and the “lustfulness of Mahomet with the purity of Christ” (van der Lugt 2017:42). Bayle (1697:480) stated that Mahomet’s “lechery was undoubtedly the reason why he permitted polygamy with some limits, and concubinage without any limits.” For Bayle, Mahomet instrumentalized God to legitimate his desires, and he relied on the Quran to claim the right to marry any woman of faith who gave herself “for the Prophet,” which according to Bayle is a “propudium hominis”—Latin for a man’s shame (p. 481). Bayle wrote many passages focused on Mahomet’s relations with his wives, remarking on his “force” and “vigeur” to please his wives, who were alleged to number up to 21. Bayle discussed the “excessive joy” of Mahomet’s many wives to contribute to the “entertainment of their great Prophet” while the Prophet maintained the ability of 40 men to please his wives (p. 480). Bayle’s writing on Mahomet provides an early example of using Islam’s prophet to construct a polygynous Other, construed as a licentious imposter and fanatic.
French political philosopher Baron de Montesquieu, whose Esprit des lois (The Spirit of Laws; Montesquieu [1748] 1979) became one of the most important works of political theory and jurisprudence from the Enlightenment, wrote extensively on polygamy and harems. Comparing the slavery practiced in Spain’s New World colonies to “Oriental” polygamy, Montesquieu argued that both lead to inequality and the subordination of others (Le Cour Grandmaison 2019). In a chapter devoted to polygamy in the Esprit des lois, Montesquieu ([1748] 1979:413) considered the practice as tied to climate—or cultural geography—viewing it to be too “brutal for our climates” but not for climates in Asia and the Orient. For Montesquieu, polygamy exacerbated men’s carnal appetites and lustfulness: “The possession of so many wives does not always prevent their entertaining desires for those of others. It is with lust as with avarice, whose thirst increases by the acquisition of treasures” (p. 413). Montesquieu’s words suggested men’s virility, but his assessment of the degradation polygamy causes put into question men’s ability to satisfy many wives. He implied that having many wives might culminate in homosexuality: “May I not say that a plurality of wives leads to that passion which nature disallows? For one depravation always draws on another” (p. 413). For Montesquieu, polygamy was linked to an exoticized practice that relied on the power of the flesh, corrupting morals in a context where nothing stands in the way of the transgression of essential moral rules (Le Cour Grandmaison 2019).
Scholars have elucidated how Montesquieu’s interest in the structure of “Oriental” government and its “despotisms” such as polygamy was fueled by his opposition to the authoritarianism of the Bourbon monarchy and to the perceived population crisis (Blum 2002). In his Lettres Persanes (Montesquieu 1721), an epistolary novel that offers a subversive correspondence between the Persian traveler Usbek and his wives and eunuchs, who stay in his seraglio in Isfahan, Montesquieu denounced both Islam and the Catholic Church for their antinatalist practices (Blum 2002). In the story, Usbek leaves his seraglio to journey to France, accompanied by his young friend Rica, leaving his five wives in the care of several Black eunuchs. During the trip and long sojourn in Paris, Usbek and Rica provide commentary in letters exchanged with Usbek’s wives, friends, and mullahs on Christian society in the west and French politics. In these exchanges, Montesquieu depicts the harem as an exotic domain of “sexual and despotic license” and an institution that hindered childbearing (Blum 2002; Lowe 1991:52).
The story portrayed the Persian harem, and its dictator, as the opposite of French liberal governance, and the enforced chastity of Usbek’s wives is envisioned as the inverse of French women’s sexual liberty. Montesquieu (1721) projected French debates onto a polygynous Other through the eyes of Usbek, who describes his experiences of French institutions and the Church. The effect is a representation of “an Orient overtly fictionalized to elucidate the Occident,” contrasting its tyranny to the rationality of French law and governance (Lowe 1991:55). Whereas Montesquieu used the harem to criticize the absolutist monarchy, his portrayal of the infertility of Usbek’s harem, which produced only one child, also fueled concerns about the negative effects polygamy could have on the perceived declining population in France.
Montesquieu’s writings on polygamy and the depopulation crisis inspired many subsequent treatises on these topics. Many writers openly contrasted the benefits of French governance to the disorder of societies where “savages” practiced polygamy. For example, the mathematician André-Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval (1751–1752) argued in favor of monogamous marriage in La Monogamie. Ridiculing those who favored Islam to justify the maxim of the benefits of polygamy, Prémontval (1751–1752:249) stated:
Such maxims can be received among half-savage people who know no laws but violence and who act only in cruel and tyrannical ways. But that among civilized nations there should be men . . . philosophes and even Christians who dare to justify the principle, this is in truth the greatest frenzy in human reasoning.
Aligning polygamy with savages, despotic rulers, and vice, philosophers and political writers reconciled Christian monogamy with pronatalist thinking that legitimized the monarchy’s regulation of marriage and sexuality.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the French state under the ancien régime had established monogamy as a key element in state-building. This was accomplished first through its colonial efforts in New France, which established a divide between “savages”—defined by immoral sexuality and polygamy—and Christian monogamy. In the metropole, monogamy shaped the state’s efforts to promote fertility and marriage, particularly as philosophers and others debated the evils of polygamy. Some early thinkers argued in favor of polygamy, but strong rejections, such as that of Pierre Bayle, established the context for identifying a polygynous Other, equating sexual laxity and polygamy with Islam.
In later years, influential scholars wrote from an Orientalist perspective on the harem and polygamy, suggesting a racial hierarchy that contrasted Oriental polygamy against monogamous marriage. Monogamy was needed for a sound political order. These writings on monogamy and polygamy defined the ideals of sexual norms, moving beyond Church teachings to create a public sphere that identified the “civilized.” Under the ancien régime, the monogamous state centralized, coordinated, and shared power across the rival institutions of the church and state. The monogamous state relied on polygamy to create a racial hierarchy that identified the otherness of Muslim populations. After the Revolution, the rhetoric of monogamy enabled a consolidated construction of the monogamous state in the evolving modern period.
Consolidating the Monogamous State Through the Polygynous Other
Debates among theologians and philosophers over polygamy helped build the monogamous state during the ancien régime and into the Revolutionary period. The rise of the modern state and its governance of family law consolidated the importance of the monogamous marital regime in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Gilles 2013–2014). As the Revolutionary government stripped the Catholic Church of its powers, secularized government representatives put the issues of divorce, polygamy, and patriarchal gender relations on the table for legal regulation (Blum 2002). According to Fage (1953:331), the Revolutionary assemblies ratified the “new concept of marriage,” defined in the 1765 Encyclopedia as the “voluntary union of a man and a woman entered into by free persons to have children,” noting the importance placed on this “most beautiful” institution to allow the state to increase its population. As the state had once worked closely with the Church to consolidate power, it now turned to the nascent field of science to promote fertility, defining itself in relation to monogamy as central to the reproduction of the population (Brian 1994).
Political thinkers like Montesquieu provided perspective for the Revolutionary government on the importance of monogamous marriage as a central component of French universal values. In 1792, the First Republic professed its support of a very liberal right of divorce, expressing a distinction between divorce and polygamy, even though some characterized the divorce law as “serial” polygamy (Blum 2002:172). With the advent of the first French Empire, preparatory documents leading to the 1804 Civil (Napoleonic) Code—the foundational framework of the modern French legal system that remained unchanged until the 1960s—marked polygamy as “an unnatural, tyrannical custom outside the modern French legal order” (Surkis 2019:55). Portalis (1844:23), a chief architect of the Civil Code and who is cited at the beginning of this article, pointed to the importance of monogamous marriage as a legal principle that derives from nature to impose “the rule and limit” on men’s “irresistible penchants.” French civil law thus viewed the “civil state” [état civil] as fundamentally a familial state that must stave off sexual excesses of polygamy (Bernard 2007). Portalis (1844:23) drew on Montesquieu’s assessment of the importance of “climate” when considering polygamy:
It has been said that, in certain climates and in certain circumstances, polygamy is less revolting than in other circumstances and in other climates. But, in all countries, it is irreconcilable with a commitment by which one gives oneself, body and soul. We have therefore established the maxim that marriage can only be the commitment of two individuals, and that for long as a first marriage subsists, it is not permitted to contract a second.
In thinking about the importance of marriage, Portalis argued that monogamy is the best standard even if in some climates it is seen as less “revolting.” This argument conceptualizes a polygynous Other that might be tolerated among less “civilized” populations but that higher moral principles would reject. Portalis’s (1844:174) writings point to the consolidation of the monogamous state in France that contrasted “semi-barbarous” nations that permit polygamy with the “universal law of well-governed nations” built on monogamous marriage.
The importance of public order and good morals (bonne mœurs) is articulated in Article 6 of the Code against private conventions that contravene the general will (Fenet and Ewald 1989). Portalis offered the language for Article 147: “marriage can only be an engagement of two individuals; as long as one marriage exists, it is not possible to contract a second one” (Surkis 2019:55). The Code focused on establishing monogamous marriage centered on paternity “because it is through paternity that families perpetuate and distinguish themselves from one another. As one of the bases of the social order, we must strengthen and support it” (Fenet and Ewald 1989:222–23). A child was legitimate if the father and mother were married at the time of conception, “protecting” fathers from women and their illegitimate children. Men could father children with multiple women, but this practice was not polygamy because it did not involve multiple marriages. Under Napoleon, there was little desire to recognize concubines or bastards (Bernard 2007). Institutionalizing monogamous marriage allowed the state to ignore or counter such “particularities” as concubinage in favor of the universal value of monogamy. The family represented the body politic, and all French citizens were expected to submit to universal principles of monogamy, heterosexuality, and patriarchy, with the husband as the head of the household (Coontz 2005).
A key element in consolidating the monogamous state was the rise of the second French colonial empire (1830 to 1962), which established citizenship and monogamy as central components of what it means to be French (Le Cour Grandmaison 2019). In the eighteenth century, the idea of civilization developed in opposition to barbarism, which had historically been linked to non-Christians (Snoussi 2011). These ideals fostered a sense of right and duty that justified France’s expansion outward, including conquering Algeria (1830), the first Arab territory annexed by a Global North nation; islands of the Pacific (1853); Senegal (1854 to 1865); Cochinchina (Vietnam, 1862); and Cambodia (1863). France’s “mission civilisatrice” (civilizing mission) justified this empire-building project to civilize “primitive” peoples (Blévis 2003–2004:39). The apex of this mission occurred during the Third Republic (1870 to 1940) when France expanded into the Maghreb (Morocco and Tunisia) and parts of West and East Africa. The stated goal was to improve the living conditions of colonial subjects.
Regulating the family based on the ideal of monogamy was central to France’s broader colonial order and its civilizing mission, a history that shaped its relationship to its colonies and its conceptualization of republicanism (Le Cour Grandmaison 2019). Contemporary thinkers such as Saint-Simonian economist Michel Chevalier argued that polygamy hindered the evolution of social institutions in Africa and explicitly condemned it as a “source of radical inferiority, the cause of debasement, and an obstacle to progress” (quoted in Surkis 2019:85). The coupling of civilization to monogamy became a justification for usurping the political sovereignty of countries with Muslim populations where polygamy was practiced or even where it was not. Le Cour Grandmaison (2019:200) assessed the “othering” that was at the heart of colonialization:
A process of othering based on racialization turns [the “Native” of North Africa] into an absolute foreigner whose differences are, therefore, deemed irreversible by most contemporaries since they resist any attempt at assimilation. Attributed to Islam, which shapes the obtuse, proud, and hateful character of the “Arab,” and to his ancestral customs, these resistances are, for many, synonymous with immediate or future risks. In the possessions of the Imperial Republic, they make the “conquest of hearts” difficult, if not impossible.
What is at the heart of this resistance? Le Cour Grandmaison (2019:198) argued that French officials blamed polygamy and the “reputedly exacerbated sexuality” of Muslims—pointing to the construction of the polygynist Other.
Evidence of the state defining itself as monogamous through the creation of a polygynist Other is exemplified by France’s earliest and most important colony—Algeria. After its annexation in 1834, Europeans began to settle in Algeria in large numbers. The same year, the Ministries of War and Justice jointly promulgated an ordinance that established a formal military colonial administration and granted a military governor-general the power to rule inhabitants of the ex-regency—called “indigènes” (natives)—by decree. Blaise Bekale Nguema (2009) argues that designating the local population as indigène led to a rationalization of citizenship law in the French colonies in North and sub-Saharan Africa. An objective criterion was now used to denote a category of noncitizens, based on access to polygamy and other customary practices, that allowed for the usurpation of land. Algeria served as the model in which colonial officials created a plural legal order that recognized local religious law and culture, labeled “personal status” (le statut personnel), while institutionalizing French civil law that applied to real property (le statut réel). This model enabled France to appease local populations by “respecting” their customs as they stripped Algerians of their land (Sari 1973; Surkis 2010).
Based on the Otherness of the indigènes and their sexual excesses, French officials recognized Muslim and Mosaic law, the latter applied to most Algerian Jews until 1870, to demarcate Algerian men’s difference from French men. The legal sexual privileges that local law offered—particularly polygamy—were in evident conflict with the French Civil Code, creating a “sexualized hierarchy of civil status that simultaneously disqualified Algerian men from citizenship and made Algerian women’s legal status a recurrent problem” (Surkis 2019:4–5; see also Blaise Bekale Nguema 2009). The focus on men’s sexual “privileges” in Muslim marriage was central to colonial governance. This two-tiered system was further codified in the Sénatus-consulte of 1865, which established a separation between nationality and citizenship in Algeria by distinguishing citizens from “French subjects.” This law, adopted by the Senate under the Second Empire, required Muslim men to renounce the customary law of polygamy and divorce all wives except one to become full citizens (Blévis 2003–2004).
The French colonial administration issued a set of discriminatory laws after 1865, including the indigénat, first codified in 1881 in Algeria to control the indigènes, creating an inferior legal status that enabled summary punishments, restricted rights, and a legal framework of colonial violence and exploitation (Blaise Bekale Nguema 2009). Concurrently, French authorities extended citizenship rights to various populations to reinforce the distinction between “citizen” and “Muslim.” In 1887, the Third Republic instigated double jus soli, defining French citizenship as having been born in France or having a parent born in France, which included Algeria, except for those who held Muslim personal status (Blévis 2003–2004). A law passed in 1889 mandated jus soli for the white population of Alegria. French officials relied on the specter of polygamy to fuel French fears of Muslim sexuality, justifying a narrow path to citizenship for Muslim Algerians (Blévis 2003–2004). Extending citizenship rights to the indigènes was seen as an acute threat to the racial hierarchy of Algeria.
Monogamy shaped France’s self-definition as the French colonial government contrasted the moral superiority of monogamy to the polygynous Other, epitomized by the purported sexual lasciviousness that Islam authorizes for Muslim men. As the government hardened lines to ensure the inferior status of Muslim Algerians, officials made conscious efforts to fight against the attractions of polygamy among citizens in Algeria and other colonial territories. Writings of numerous French colonial officials pointed to the importance of polygamy in conceptualizing who can be French. Villot (1888), a French colonial officer who wrote the extensively cited Mœurs, Coutumes et Institutions des Indigènes de l’Algérie, documented the institutions and social mores of the indigènes in Algeria from a French military and administrative vantage point that focused on family, marriage, and other aspects of Algerian society. For Villot (1888:87), monogamy represented the natural and moral ideal, whereas polygamy meant social and moral degradation:
Monogamy is the only guarantee of a healthy, hardworking life, one useful to the nation, and even more so to the spouses themselves. Having only one wife and living with her in accordance with the laws of nature is the infallible way to live honestly and forcefully [virilement].
Villot contrasted this with polygamy, which from a moral point of view brings “debauchery and degeneration” and from a political view produces servitude and leads to “cruelty, hypocrisy, and revolts” (p. 93). Villot described two opposed civilizations: Mohammedanism, which favored the unions and customs that condemn the “Muslim family” to a “semi-barbarian state” incompatible with progress, and Christianity, which instilled superior values of reserve, modesty, and the ability to sacrifice (pp. 93, 184).
Debating whether polygamy could be compatible with French citizenship continued to animate discussions over political and legal reform in Algeria into the twentieth century. Paul Morand, a colonial administrator and jurist in Algeria, wrote what was known as the Code Morand, an attempt to rationalize and modernize Islamic family law from within its own framework (Arabi 2000). Morand (1903:8) tied the lack of progress in Algerian society to the lack of evolution of the “Muslim family.” He argued that progress could be marked in the ways (western) states focused on the individual over the family, shaping the evolution of the family to become more internally oriented. In contrast, the Muslim family “has almost entirely retained its political role and social importance; one observes that in all of them the constitution of the family has undergone, so to speak, neither modifications nor transformations” (pp. 7–8). Morand suggested this lack of change was due to marriage being understood as “fundamentally polygamous” and that the institution of patriarchy “gives the family a quasi-military organization and thus ensures it its maximum strength and power” (pp. 74, 77). For Morand, polygamy and its ties to patriarchy hindered Algerian progress, in contrast to “modern people,” where women had gained equal rights in marriage and the family (p. 75). With these arguments, Morand completely effaced “French women’s subordinate legal and political status” (Surkis 2019:231). Many French officials repeated this strategy in their efforts to introduce Algerian reform.
Debates over who could be a citizen intensified after World War I, especially as Algerian soldiers and other populations in North and sub-Saharan Africa were conscripted. Socialist deputy Moutet (1918:348) proposed a path to citizenship for elite Algerians, allowing for “exceptional” cases for those who did not renounce their personal status that authorized “polygamy” and “the absolute right of a father over his children.” These provisions were debated from 1917 to 1918, with polygamy as a central contention (Surkis 2019). Journalist and feminist activist Séverine (Caroline Rémy) gave a speech to the Ligue des droits de l’homme in 1917, pointing to the hypocrisy of legislators who denied that polygamy existed in French society: “[I]f we look around ourselves well, it might be possible to detect a certain Occidental phariseeism: the thing is practiced, but the word is denied [la pratique de la chose, le refus du mot]” (quoted in Surkis 2019:241). In order words, decrying the evils of polygamy practiced by Algerians was duplicitous considering the nonmonogamous practices among French citizens. Moutet also critiqued French hypocrisy, contending that the refusal of rights based on polygamy obscured the fact that polygamy was already embedded in French colonial law and its governance structure. Polygamous marriages were registered for taxation, military recruitment exemptions, inheritance, subsidies, and civil documentation purposes. Moutet (1918:330) further questioned the superiority of “western” monogamy: “Can we seriously ask whether, based on our conceptions, our monogamous societies are more moral than polygamous societies? Is there less adultery, fewer illegitimate children [enfants naturels]?” However, these arguments concerning French duplicity were largely ignored.
Debates over the place of polygamy in French society point to how it shaped the state. In response to the idea that Algerians could be allowed to practice polygamy, the secretary-general of the Algerian Conseil declared it unacceptable that a criminal practice contrary to public order would be “tolerated among indigènes who are French citizens” (quoted in Surkis 2019:243). Ultimately, the second article of the Jonnart law, a reform passed in 1919 to expand voting rights to some Algerians, included language that required all Algerians who wanted citizenship to be “monogamous or a bachelor” (Être monogame ou célibataire; Surkis 2019:244). Colonial officials used polygamy to enact a strict boundary to justify a racial hierarchy that demarcated the polygynous Other against the superior monogamous French citizen. Ultimately, the monogamous state was predicated on the idea that French women were equal to men and not subjected to patriarchal practices like polygamy. Polygamy became the single aspect of Islam that officials drew on to differentiate Europeans from Algerians, a policy that was implemented in other colonial contexts. With the disintegration of France’s empire in the 1940s and migratory flows of African male workers from former colonies, polygamy became not just an issue to regulate in the colonies but also a problem in the French metropole, creating the need to fortify the monogamous state.
Reinforcing the Monogamous State in Metropolitan France
Issues of colonial rule and postcolonial immigration reinforced the boundary-work of the monogamous state in the twentieth century, shaping who could belong in the French metropole. The French colonization of large swaths of Africa solidified the construction of a racial hierarchy where Black Africans were relegated to the lowest rung as “savages” but were also seen as potentially “good, tamed, and domesticated” (Le Cour Grandmaison 2019:25, 26). Muslim North Africans occupied an intermediate position, superior to Blacks but inferior to Europeans. Not savages but “barbarians,” they were thought to embody a dangerous alterity as a people who have a history and civilization but one incapable of progress due to being mired in customs like polygamy (Le Cour Grandmaison 2019:25). This racial hierarchy shaped not only how France dealt with its colonies before and after the French colonial empire ended but also how it dealt with its need for immigrants to replenish its lagging workforce in the metropole.
Fear of depopulation and a shortage of workers moved policymakers to consider immigration as a solution, with a focus on assimilable migrants who could produce (white) French citizens to counteract the demographic strength of Africans and Asians (Weil 1991). According to Weil (1991), by the Second World War, France had become the leading country of immigration in the world in terms of the proportion of foreigners in its population. To deal with this influx of immigration, France relied on the heteropatriarchal, monogamous citizenship model to decide who is assimilable (Robcis 2016). The Haut Comité de la Population was key in establishing a comprehensive immigration policy based on demographic studies to assess assimilability (Robcis 2016; Weil 1991). The committee proposed quotas that prioritized northern Europeans as assimilable, in contrast to Jews, Algerians, and those from sub-Saharan Africa (Weil 1991). However, relying on “assimilable” immigrants to mitigate the population crisis became less tenable as immigration from former colonies increased.
The ordinance of November 2, 1945, marked the first significant regulatory policy on immigration, establishing residence permits with durations of 1, 5, and 10 years (Weil 1991). Individuals from Algeria began migrating in large numbers after Algerian independence in 1962, making them the third largest group to migrate by 1968, after Italy and Spain (Weil 1991). Migrants from Morocco, Tunisia, and former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa (particularly Mali and Senegal) also increased in the 1960s (Poiret 1996). During this period, men came as temporary guest workers without their families and were expected to return to their countries of origin. They worked in poorly paid jobs in industry, construction, and agriculture and were housed in bidonvilles (shantytowns) with no electricity or running water or in squalid and overcrowded hostels, hotels, or apartments (Poiret 1996).
Sweeping change occurred to these migration patterns in 1974, when the French government terminated foreign labor recruitment and annulled bilateral agreements that had permitted former colonial subjects to move freely in and out of France. During the 1970s and 1980s, under the family reunification policies of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, men began to bring their wives and children, and many moved into public housing apartments (cités) once largely inhabited by white French working-class families. Although not explicitly promoting polygamy, these policies inadvertently allowed for the immigration of polygamous families from former colonies because marriages performed abroad were generally recognized and visas were granted to family members, particularly from Gambia, Mali, Mauritania, and Senegal (Poiret 1996). The 2006 National Consultative Commission for Human Rights estimated that 16,000 to 20,000 polygynous families and upward of 120,000 individuals had migrated to France (Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme de l’Assemblée Nationale 2006).
During the 1970s, French civil law underwent significant changes concerning divorce and filiation that contributed to the denaturalization of the institution of marriage and made it important to again define the boundaries of monogamy (Surkis 2010). For some jurists, these laws authorized what they called “successive polygamy,” allowing any person to divorce and remarry. Other changes in civil law led to what some viewed as a greater tolerance of certain forms of polygamy: The effects of concubinage became recognized, such as compensation for the “concubine” of a married man who is the victim of an accident; adultery was no longer viewed as an offense or as peremptory cause for divorce; and a child born from an adulterous partnership could lay claim to inheritance rights even if there was a “legitimate” child (Farge 2003). A social security law passed in April 1978 allowed sickness and maternity benefits to be distributed to several wives of the same insured person. This provision was subsequently restricted, and beneficiary status was granted only to women living on French soil (Hajjat 2021).
These policies opened the door to recognizing the rights of several wives, but they did not call into question the principle of monogamy as lawmakers and scholars did boundary-work to morally condemn polygamy as Muslim and not French (Hajjat 2021). Carbonnier (1950:341), one of the great jurists of the twentieth century who was a key player in renewing family law in the French Civil Code, stated in an early publication:
The depth of our civilization is the monogamous regime. Islam, with its polygamy, even if theoretical, is more alien to our soul than any other system of law. From Moscow to New York, the repulsion for polygamous marriage traces the true line of the unity of civilization.
According to Carbonnier (1996:268), as “[marriage in French law] had resisted the insidious contagions of the colonial period, [it] must now resist the pressure, which is much more obsessive, of Muslim immigration.” These thinkers believed that such reforms to family law would throw the institution of marriage into disarray. These debates intensified in the mid-1900s as France tried to regulate Muslim populations in metropolitan France. Private international law—called “conflict of laws” in the United States—recognizes the right of foreign nationals to be subject to their own personal status based on laws in their country of origin. However, public order exceptions make it possible to block someone from entering a territory or having benefits when foreign laws offend a country’s social and legal principles (Hajjat 2021). In France, polygamy was one of these exceptions. Polygamous marriages contracted abroad were not necessarily prohibited but could be recognized in limited ways. For example, second wives could claim maintenance and spousal support from their husbands while living in France even if the marriage was polygamous under foreign law.
Based on this legal reasoning, the Conseil d’État (Council of State, the government body that acts both as legal adviser to the executive branch and the supreme court for administrative justice) issued the 1980 Montcho judgment, which recognized the right to family reunification of a polygamous foreigner. The government commissioner, Mr. Rougevin-Baville, found that individuals living in polygamy had a right to remain in France if the marriage had been contracted in a country where polygamy is recognized (Hajjat 2021). The case concerned a citizen of Benin who had married two women in Dahomey in accordance with local law. In 1967, the husband obtained a 10-year residence permit in France, bringing his first wife and children. A few months later, he brought his second wife and her four children. A French prefect in the district where the family lived ordered the second wife to leave the territory. Reviewing this decision, the Conseil annulled the prefect’s demand for expulsion, finding that polygamy was not in itself contrary to the French public order and was justified by the right to lead a normal family life. In 1990, the judgment of the Court of Cassation allowed the second wife of an Algerian man to be her husband’s beneficiary of sickness and maternity insurance because the first wife had returned to Algeria and only the second remained in France.
These legal cases that recognized limited rights for polygamous marriages contracted in other countries were overturned in 1993, when the right-wing government headed by Balladur proclaimed a goal of “zero” immigration, with the intention of rolling back immigrant rights and limiting migrants’ ability to settle in France. Polygamy became a tool of the government to accomplish these objectives. The 1993 “Pasqua law” prohibited family reunification and barred noncitizens who were in polygamous marriages from obtaining and renewing residence permits. Following the recommendations of the Haut Conseil à l’intégration (High Council for Integration
Reviewing the law, the Conseil Constitutionnel (the Constitutional Council; the highest constitutional authority in France) confirmed the constitutionality of this restriction on the right to family life, noting it is constitutional to refuse residence permits for being in a “state of polygamy”:
[T]he conditions for normal family life are those generally accepted in France, the host country, which excludes polygamous marriages; therefore, the restrictions imposed by the law on the right to family reunification of polygamous persons and the penalties provided for its enforcement are constitutional. (Conseil Constitutionnel 1993)
As this quote demonstrates, the Conseil Constitutionnel defined “normal family” in the negative—as not participating in a polygamous marriage. This decision offered an important window into France’s fortification of the monogamous state. For naturalization, the normal family is solely defined in contrast to polygamy, with monogamy as the unspoken norm.
Along with defining the normal family, the 1993 decision also provided a fundamental distinction between potential (or legal) polygamy—being married monogamously but under a regime that would allow polygamy—and actual (or de facto) polygamy—currently having two or more wives. This distinction had been considered by the interior ministry’s naturalization subdirectorate before the implementation of the Pasqua law, recognizing polygamy as a particular problem for assimilation into French society (Hajjat 2021). Policymakers worried that some currently monogamously married immigrants might take another wife in their country of origin after becoming a citizen. In 1992, the Direction Population et Migrations (Population and Migration Directorate) commissioned a report, later published as an article by lawyer de Vareilles-Sommières (1993:150), that outlined how in sub-Saharan African countries where polygamy is legal, the polygamous regime is an “option”: “[T]he polygamous regime is never the only one available to future spouses, who have until their marriage, or even after, the choice between a union subject to a polygamous regime and a union subject to a monogamous regime.” Based on this report, the naturalization subdirectorate concluded that spouses had the ability to choose a monogamous or polygamous regime even in countries where a polygamous regime was automatically applied.
With this report as guidance, the administration applied a standard denial for naturalization or reinstatement when polygamy could be seen as an option. Applicants were not told why they were denied, but their internal files would state a failure to choose monogamous marital status, demonstrating nonadherence to the principle of French civil law and making them inadmissible due to lack of assimilation (Hajjat 2021). Applicants had to be married under a monogamous regime, and both legal and potential polygamy were grounds for exclusion. Based on these criteria, the naturalization subdirectorate refused to naturalize thousands of nationals of formerly colonized Muslim countries (Hajjat 2021). This practice was eventually challenged in a 1994 case in which the Conseil d’État ruled that being monogamous but from a country with a polygamous regime does not necessarily indicate a lack of assimilation. Ultimately, this case had a moderating effect on decisions made about naturalization; however, the suspicion of Muslims as potentially polygamous had already become a defining feature of assimilability and inclusion in the French polity.
Advocacy groups noted the state’s tendency to position polygamy as an abhorrent practice to define French normality. For example, GISTI (Groupe d'information et de soutien des immigrés), a nonprofit organization that provides information and support to immigrants and publishes Plein Droit, a quarterly journal that promotes the rights of immigrants in French society, critiqued the Pasqua law in a 1994 article for suggesting that all immigrants are polygamous:
Immigrants in the 60s and 70s were “all rapists.” Those in the 80s and 90s were “all polygamists.” The fact that only nationals of a minority of the countries from which foreigners living in France come are traditionally polygamous, and that among them only a minority practice polygamy, all this does not prevent the phenomenon from being highlighted as one of the characteristics of immigration. The Pasqua law gives it its status in France: “disturbance to public order.” It is difficult to see how public order would be disturbed by a man living with two women and their descendants. . . . What would be “disturbed” would in fact be the social security budget? But nothing prevents a French person from declaring as his beneficiaries’ children he had, successively or in the same period, by two different women. (GISTI 1994)
Such writings illuminated the hypocrisy of the French state in its approach to polygamy. In 2000, the Interior Ministry released a circular stating: “The prohibition of the principle of polygamy is based on the necessary respect for republican values, women’s rights and the integration of children,” specifically linking the normal family to French republican values and national belonging (Ministère de l’Intérieur [France] 2000). Again, the government reinforced the monogamous state through its abhorrence of polygamy.
Linking the prohibition of polygamy to republican values defined the boundary of who could be considered polygamous. White, French-born men could have multiple, simultaneous relationships with women, including fathering children with them. These relationships, however, were not captured legally or in broader discourse as polygamous because they were not formalized and were practiced by white men. François Mitterrand, who served as president of France from 1981 to 1995, offers an illuminating example. While married to his wife, Danielle, with whom he had three children, at the age of 47 he met Anne Pingeot, who was 20 at the time, and had a daughter with her—Mazarine, born in 1974. They were together for 30 years; she even lived in a wing of the Elysée for a time. Mitterrand also had an unacknowledged son, Hravn Forsne, who was born in 1988 with Swedish journalist Chris Forsne. Anti-immigration policies placed polygamy front and center for migrants’ legal status, yet the president’s familial situation conformed to polygynous family systems in many parts of Africa, which included a separate dwelling for each spouse. The construction of whiteness and citizenship against the polygynous Other—marked as racialized, Muslim, and immigrant—made such parallels invisible.
French laws that regulate the entry of migrants have consistently used polygamy to mark otherness and nonassimilation. Both the French Civil Code and the Code of Entry and Residence of Foreigners and Right of Asylum used this tactic, stating the government can “oppose the acquisition of French nationality by the foreign spouse” on the “grounds of indignity or lack of assimilation other than linguistic.” The next paragraph stated that proof of lack of assimilation consists of “the polygamous status of the foreign spouse or a sentence pronounced against him on account of the offense defined in Article 222-9 of the Penal Code” (France Civil Code 2013). Article 222-9 refers to acts of violence against a person under 15 years of age. Lawyer Christophe Daadouche, who works for GISTI, explained to me during an interview: “It’s in the same section of the law. There is not even a comma. There are 150 articles, one could have put [these two offenses] in different articles. It is in the same legislative provision!” Daadouche described the outrage of linking polygamy with the abuse of a minor, pointing out there is “no connection [between the two], but we feel obligated to make the child abuser and the polygamist coexist in the same sentence!”
These laws and policies demonstrate how polygamy has reinforced the monogamous state by vilifying immigrant populations as polygamous, enabling policies that deny entry, permanent residence, or citizenship based on either de facto or de jure polygamy. The state regulated citizenship through a racialized hierarchy that marked the polygynous Other in the metropole, relying on a rhetoric that made all Black and Arab Muslims—whether immigrant or not—suspect of polygamy. By the late twentieth century, the state turned to law and policy to condemn polygamy, abandoning other institutions, such as the Catholic Church, that were once important in defining the polygynous Other. The state exercised power over Muslim populations by constructing them as always potentially polygynous. The example of the highest court in France defining the normal family solely in terms of not being polygamous is strong evidence of the work of these institutions to allow the state to construct itself as fundamentally monogamous. Such rhetorical devices allowed the state to mark a bright line around polygamy—just as queer scholars note the boundary-work around homosexuality to mark it outside the charmed circle, along with, for example, incest and sex work (Rubin 1984). Monogamy remained an unchallenged norm of national identity even as many white French citizens participated in practices that could be characterized as polygamous.
Conclusions
To theorize the monogamous state, I demonstrated how the state relied on monogamy in contradictory and hypocritical ways to govern its subjects during three broad historical periods, from the ancien régime to modern statehood in France. Referring back to Rosanvallon’s (1990) definition of the state, I demonstrated how the state relied on administrative governance and interventionist methods in the metropole and its colonies to establish the symbolic representation of the polygynous Other. Nurturing a network of various relations and institutions—including the Church, marriage, the military, pronatalist state organisms, and immigration—France demarcated the moral superiority of monogamy through what were often contradictory and incoherent policies and practices. For example, France relied on economic regulation and symbolic boundary-work in Algeria to allow indigènes to practice polygamy according to personal status laws while it applied universal French law to property rights to divest indigènes of their land. Identifying the polygynous Other as a racialized “barbarian” allowed white French men to practice what ostensibly can be thought of as polygamy without being labeled as such.
Monogamy was key in shaping the state through state activities and logics that (1) coordinated with other institutions, such as the Catholic Church, to institutionalize monogamous marriage as the norm against a polygynous Other; (2) governed population size and fertility by deciding who was assimilable based on monogamy; (3) created laws and policies to define the state as fundamentally monogamous, moral, and civilized; (4) used rhetorics of monogamy to justify the expansion of the empire-state as a global, colonial force; and (5) regulated citizenship and structured racial hierarchies by situating whiteness, heteropatriarchy, and monogamy as the standard for inclusion in the French polity. Over the three periods, monogamy played a key role in shaping the state as governments sought to control inheritance and succession, promote pronatalism, expand France’s empire, and institute immigration and assimilation policies. The boundary-work that resulted from constructing a polygynous Other differed over time but always sought to uphold monogamy as the moral western standard.
The preoccupation with the polygynous Other, emerging in seventeenth-century France, provides early insight into how monogamy structured efforts to promote state power through reproduction and colonization. Monogamy under the monarchy shaped the state by aligning with the Catholic Church to promote monogamous marriage at home, with a focus on fertility, and in the colonizing of New France. Missionaries and government officials decried the “savage” sexuality of Native populations who were polygamous and entered and left sexual relationships with ease. Such relationships were contrasted with civilized French norms. The focus on savage sexuality first shaped the construction of the polygynous Other, but it was the Orientalist gaze and the concentration on “Muhammadan” sexual practices that solidified the concept of the Other as Muslim and attached it to Black and brown bodies (Le Cour Grandmaison 2019). Declaring polygamy to be the practice of savages and despotic rulers set the conditions for the permissible and impermissible and the need to make monogamy compulsory to shape the monogamous state. In this early period, monogamy shaped the state by relying on the Catholic Church to carry out the moral project of fostering monogamous marriage at home and in New France to encourage population growth and to expand state power.
During and after the Revolution in the second historical period, the Church became less important in governing the moral and social order. French Enlightenment thinkers had debated the benefits and evils of polygamy before the Revolution, but the prevailing wisdom of monogamy as the key to moral and social order defined the modern French state in post-Revolutionary France. The French Civil Code institutionalized monogamous marriage, seeking to end debates over the benefits and harms of polygamy. Monogamy was upheld as superior for its gender egalitarianism, yet the Civil Code demonstrated France’s hypocrisy by circumscribing the legal status of wives and enhancing husbands’ authority. The state increasingly defined itself against the polygynous Other as the second French colonial empire grew, offering justification for the empire-state’s expansion and raison d’être. Colonial subjects in the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa were permitted to practice polygamy to ensure their nonassimilability. Personal status laws enabled the French government to block Algerian Muslims from becoming citizens. Over time, the polygynous Other defined what it meant to be Muslim, feeding into a racial hierarchy constructed through France’s colonial efforts. The polygynous Other was a central tenet of the colonial enterprise that treated polygamy as an aspatial and atemporal monolith that defined entire populations (Patil 2018).
In the third historical period, the state built on efforts in the colonies to continue to shape a racial hierarchy in the metropole, questioning the citizenship and belonging of nonwhite populations based on suspicion of polygamy. Immigration became important to this racial hierarchy, and polygamy was used as a marker to determine which immigrants could be “French.” White immigrants were seen as assimilable; nonwhite immigrants—both Black and Arab—were equated with Islam and polygamy and thus unassimilable. The 1993 Pasqua law barred noncitizens from obtaining and renewing residence permits if they were in a polygamous marriage, and officials denied permits or citizenship to individuals who were in a de facto or de jure (for a limited time) polygamous regime. Monogamy shaped the state in the boundary-work that made it the norm even as powerful white French men, such as François Mitterrand, were never named as polygamists even when living with multiple women and fathering children in multiple simultaneous relationships. The end of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first witnessed a hardening of boundaries to define the monogamous state against a racialized, polygynous Other.
The history of the monogamous state continues into present-day France, and demarcating the polygynous Other endures as an important way for France to define itself. For example, the Macron government introduced Law No. 2021-1109 (August 24, 2021)—called the “separatism law” or “Republican principles law”—to counter what it perceived as “separatist” risks, pointing to the fear of Islamist radicalization in France. The law introduced polygamy-related provisions as a broader move to uphold “principles of the Republic” that translate into restrictive immigration-family measures (Slama 2022:154); these provisions were based on clauses already present in immigration laws passed between 1993 and 1997 (e.g., the Pasqua and Debré laws). As Slama (2022) argues, the law relied on outdated statistics without any evidence of the actual number of polygamous families in France. Polygamy was used as a symbolic marker of nonintegration, tied to a law whose stated goal was to combat Islamic extremism. The law again positioned republican values of monogamy and gender equality against those who participate in “separatist” practices like polygamy—constructing the polygynist Other as tied to Muslim “separatism.”
Once again, the monogamous state shaped itself around the superior republican value of monogamy by demonizing those (the imagined Muslim Other) who are unassimilable in the eyes of the state. This mononormativity is inscribed in state logics, which continually shape what it means to be Muslim in French society and how the state defines itself as morally superior (Schippers 2016). The construction of the polygynous Other creates “suspect citizens” out of Muslim populations living in France based on a racial hierarchy that marks Blacks as “uncivilized” and Arabs as “barbarians” who may or may not be citizens (Beaman 2023; Le Cour Grandmaison 2019).
Scholars have long noted the history of stereotypes that link Islam to sexual deviance and crime (Patil 2018), but sexuality scholars must more closely examine the relationship between sexuality, monogamy, and racial othering and how these shape various empire-states. My theorization of the monogamous state offers a path forward. Rubin (1984) recognized the importance of monogamy in the sex hierarchy that privileges what counts as “good” sex and structures heteronormative values. Sexuality scholarship that centers race and empire must carefully consider the importance of monogamy in the creation and maintenance of state logics. In their introduction to the American Sociological Association’s new journal Sex & Sexualities, Littlejohn and Stone (2025:3) recognize the ways that scientific racism and sexology have reinforced “monogamous, committed, heteronormative ‘settler sex’ as normative” based on racial-imperial power. Future research must further build on the work of historians who have considered “the importance of being monogamous” in settler colonialism, colonialism, racialization, and state-building (Carter 2008:1). States are often messy, fragmented, subjective, and contradictory forces that evolve over time, and western ideals of monogamy and heterosexuality help justify global dominance and expand state territories (Puri 2016). Future applications of this theorization of the monogamous state will enable broader analyses that consider the importance of connections between the global South and the global North to study sexuality, gender, and sex.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Tey Meadow and Julia Adams for their extensive comments as part of the Gender Power Theory workshop and helpful comments from Ann Orloff, Jane Pryma, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Paulina García-Del Moral, Minwoo Jung, Maro Youssef, and Tuğçe Ellialtı-Köse. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback and suggestions, which strengthened the analysis.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.