A new fight with old battle lines
In April 2013, the French government passed a law giving gay couples the right to marry and adopt children, despite months of public protests against those rights. But why did this measure — enacted well after similar laws in other European countries had already passed — stir so much controversy in a country often regarded as a bastion of personal liberty? Why have some factions of French society been so reluctant to, well, vive la difference? To MIT Professor Bruno Perreau, this iteration of the global LGBTQ rights debate highlights an important way of grasping an essential tension in French society: France’s ideology of universalism has helped it drive toward equality in some respects, but the country has had trouble accommodating social differences in other regards. “France defines its identity through the logic of unity,” says Perreau, the Cynthia L. Reed Professor of French Studies and Language in MIT’s Global Studies and...