The Malpasset Dam, which broke on Dec. 2, 1959, nearly wiped out the French town of Fréjus and drowned more than 400 people. Among the dead was a young man named André Capra.
Among the living was his enceinte fian cee, Irène Jodart. "I shall marry him anyway!" proclaimed Irène.
Within a month, she was legally able to do just that. She had interested President de Gaulle in her plight, the press had rallied to her cause, and the Nation al Assembly had passed a unique law al lowing the President of the Republic to "authorize the celebration" of postmortem marriages.
The law is, perhaps, an inevitable ex tension of the long-established French practice of proxy marriage. Napoleon used the Archduke Charles in Vienna as his stand-in at the altar with Marie Lou ise of Austria, while the Emperor stayed comfortably in Paris. And proxy marriages between soldiers and their girls back home became common in World War I. But during the Indo-China war a decade ago, when it sometimes took weeks for news of a soldier's death in the jungles to reach Paris, brides often discovered that they had been married by proxy to men already killed. Was such a woman legally a bereaved widow or sorrow-stricken mistress? The Malpasset Dam disaster stirred public demand for a legal solution.
That solution may not be quite as outlandish as one French lawyer claimed: "Juridical nonsense! The French Assembly can now raise the dead." The aim of the law is simply to legitimize any children the woman may have and get her any possible pension; the ceremony gives her no new inheritance rights. But bizarre results are piling up:
— Five women married lovers lost in World War I; several of these have children now over 50.
— One woman married a man who had been killed when his motorcycle collided with a horse. A French higher court of appeals ruled last month that the woman can now collect damages from the farmer who owns the horse.
— One woman was married to a living husband when a ceremony was performed that made her the legal widow of a long-dead soldier.
One out of every four applicants for a posthumous marriage is turned down, for the law requires that the man must have proved his consent "unequivocally," by posting of the banns at the local town hall, say, or written permission from a soldier's commanding officer. Simple pregnancy is not enough. "Trouble is," says one high Justice Ministry official, "many a woman comes to us brandishing just a letter from her dead fiancé, promising to marry her. That won't do it, legally. Think of all the Frenchmen who write such promises to three or four mistresses."