Registered: Feb 2004
Location: Cambridge U.K.
Posts: 1

Nice, France.(Wed 11th Feb)

A 35 year old French woman has married her boyfriend 18 months after he was killed in an accident
Cristel Demichel who wore black was married on Tuesday under a little-used law in the presence of her friends at the city hall in the southern city of Nice local officials said. It would have been her husband Eric's 30th birthday
"Eric and I promised when he was alive that we would marry" she told French television, "Even though I respect the values I shared especially his death was not his fault"

Eric Demichel, a policeman, was killed in a hit and run accident in September 2002. Cristel who was pregnant at the time also lost her baby in the same accident.

"I lived a beautiful love story and this wedding testifies to it" Cristel said.

Posthumous marriage is allowed in France under a law introduced by former French President Charles De Caulle.

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Fascinating story. Any thoughts?

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Registered: Apr 2004
Location: Hawaii
Posts: 2

Stories like this tend to affirm my problems with highly secularized societies in general and the French in specific.

There is a fundamental reason why marriage exists in any culture; permitting posthumous marriage defies logic and cheapens the value of marriage (and marriage is an institution that can bear little further cheapening than it has already endured).

Love and Loss are insepearable and the painful loss of a love is possibly the most powerful emotional trauma out there. It can be formative or destructive, ultimately, and in this case it appears that the government of France has conspired with Death to create a mockery of marriage.

Unfortunate.

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