Posthumous marriage/ Necrogamy: Marrying a dead person
Posthumous Marriage
Posthumous marriage/ Necrogamy: Marrying a dead person
Is it possible to marry a dead person? The answer, surprising as it may seem, is yes. In fact, there is a fairly high number of certified posthumous marriages.
The difference between a living person and a dead person is evident, although legally they share some rights, including the right to marry. One case of post-mortem marriage occurred in France, more precisely in Dizy-le-Gros, a small town of around 1,000 inhabitants.
There, a young woman named Karen was able to realize the great dream of her life: to marry her boyfriend, Anthony. The wedding was celebrated with some unusual details, including that Anthony, the groom, had died two years earlier in a car accident.
French law is the only one in the West that allows a dead person and a living human, or two dead people, to marry legally. The law that grants it is the article 171 of the French Civil Code.
However, posthumous marriages are not easy to achieve. The only person in all of France capable of authorizing it is none other than the president. Here’s a part of the article 171 of the French Civil Code:
[“Posthumous marriage became legal in France by Article 171 of the civil code which states: “The President of the Republic may, for serious reasons, authorize the solemnization of marriage if one of the spouses died after completion of official formalities marking it unequivocal consent..”]
This law, which was believed to be obsolete, was applied again when President Nicolás Sarkozy authorized the wedding between Karen and Anthony, generating considerable commotion.
Origin
A few women were married by use of proxy to soldiers that had died weeks earlier. This practice came to be called posthumous marriage. Posthumous marriage for civilians originated in the 1950s, when a dam broke and killed 400 people in Fréjus, France, including a man named André Capra, who was engaged to Irène Jodart. Jodart pleaded with French President Charles de Gaulle to let her go along with her marriage plans even though her fiancé had died. She had support from the media and within months was allowed to marry her fiancé. It is likely that posthumous marriage (un mariage posthume) was made as an extension to France’s proxy marriage.
Anyone in France who wants to file for posthumous marriage sends a request to the President of France, who forwards it to the Justice Minister, who forwards it to the prosecutor for the surviving member’s district. If the couple had originally planned on getting married and the family of the deceased approves, the prosecutor sends the application back to the President. One out of every four applicants for posthumous marriage is rejected.
Posthumous marriage is not contemplated in any other Western legal body outside of France. This data could suggest that such legal oddity, even within France, must be somewhat unusual. However, the average number of posthumous weddings reaches the figure of 50 marriages per year.
There are several known cases of marriages between living and dead people. Its origin, at least in theory, is related to war; that is, with the death of soldiers in different conflicts throughout history and whose purpose was to provide a legal framework for their partners and children, who would otherwise be considered illegitimate.
If post-mortem marriage is a true legal rarity, but, what about posthumous divorce?
In Germany, for example, there was the figure of marriage with the fallen, the leichentrauung, which was nothing more than the possibility of marrying a soldier killed in combat.
In the cases in which the posthumous widow manifested some type of unworthy behavior, the Totenscheidung was sanctioned, that is, the post-mortem divorce, invoking the predictable desire of the deceased to divorce his unfaithful wife.
Marrying a dead person, as we see, is a delicate matter, since the living half of the couple must act with the same fidelity and dedication that is expected in a traditional marriage.
However, a less generic look at the issue of post-mortem marriage forces us to think about the disadvantages of any legal extension of a deceased person.
Historically speaking, this excess allowed the gestation of one of the most shameful episodes for the Catholic Church: the macabre Cadaveric Synod, where Pope Stephen VI ordered in 897 to exhume the remains of his predecessor, Pope Formosus, to submit him to trial. public and sentence him, among other penalties, to the amputation of three fingers, something that was notably difficult since the body of the ex-Pontiff showed all the symptoms of decomposition.
Naturally, that French law of which we spoke earlier has encouraged the most grotesque absurdities.
Perhaps the strangest of all is the one that involves the figure of the poet Isidore Lucien Ducasse (1846-1870), better known as Count de Lautréamont, author of the Songs of Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror).
The Count of Lautréamont mysteriously passed away at the age of 24. Much of his life remains a complete mystery. In its time, The Songs of Maldoror, a masterpiece of cursed poetry and practically the Bible of surrealism, reached a first edition of barely ten copies, hidden and, in many cases, secretly burned for fear of public ridicule.
In 2004, after long years of insisting in vain, a young American made public her request to marry the poet, let us remember, who died 134 years before. The request, formalized through a legal request in France, was dismissed for obvious reasons.
