France is a country of contradictions, many of them rooted in its own history. It gave the world the French Revolution, which executed the king and, in the name of universal rights, overturned the old order. Yet even after that rupture, political authority in France has often drawn on an almost monarchical conception of power.
Modern and traditional, republican and quasi-monarchical, universalist yet steeped in national exceptionalism, these tensions are not mutually exclusive but exist in constant friction.
That internal conflict shapes public debate and social legislation perhaps more strongly than anywhere else in Europe. Unlike in many countries, both sides carry real intellectual weight, and French society has a distinctive ability to translate abstract ideological disputes into concrete political and legal battles.
For that reason, cultural and ethical conflicts in France tend to be deeper, more intense and often more historically significant than elsewhere.
The paradox of the progressive elite
The events of 2013 offered a striking illustration of this divide. When hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million, marched in Paris under the banner of La Manif pour Tous against gay marriage, the state moved quickly to play down the scale of the mobilisation.
Police estimates were conservative, the government dismissed the protests as a reactionary fringe, and much of the media portrayed them as a doomed backlash. At the time, progressive opinion dominated not only political institutions but also the cultural and media sphere, which saw itself as the voice of modernity.
Yet the roles were reversed. This was not a familiar clash between a rebellious street and a cautious elite. The progressive establishment stood with the law, the media and institutional authority, while a large, disciplined conservative movement took to the streets. It was not a marginal Catholic protest but evidence of a substantial social force that could not simply be written off.
François Hollande acknowledged as much years later in Un président ne devrait pas dire ça…, admitting: ‘I underestimated the reaction and mobilisation of those who opposed it.’
This was more than a misreading of numbers. It revealed a deeper political blind spot, an inability among elites to recognise that they were confronting not a fringe, but a genuine part of the country. Although La Manif pour Tous has faced internal struggles, it has continued campaigning against gay marriage, gender ideology and surrogacy.
The next fault line
That is why the debate over gestation pour autrui, or surrogacy, remains so sensitive. It is not merely another bioethical question, but part of a wider dispute over whether the state should continue to redefine the boundaries of family, parenthood and the use of the human body.
Surrogacy is currently banned in France. The present argument is therefore not about introducing a prohibition, but about whether the existing one will endure. Pressure for change is returning through discussions of so-called ‘ethical surrogacy’ and through the legal status of children born abroad.
This debate is the latest stage in a longer trajectory. Surrogacy has long been seen by critics as the logical endpoint of progressive reform, even as its proponents have repeatedly denied that further steps would follow.
The pattern is familiar. Each concession is presented as final. When the civil solidarity pact, PACS, was introduced in 1999, it was said not to lead to marriage. Fourteen years later, ‘marriage for all’ was enacted. That, in turn, was supposed to settle the matter with adoption rights. Yet in 2021, Emmanuel Macron extended access to assisted reproduction to female couples and single women.
Macron himself has described surrogacy as a red line. But this has been as much a political calculation as a principle. The scale of previous protests over family and bioethics has made the issue highly combustible, and reopening it risks fuelling broader anti-government sentiment.
Even so, the groundwork is being laid. When figures such as Gabriel Attal and Clément Beaune raise the prospect of ‘ethical surrogacy’, they are following a familiar script, testing arguments and preparing public opinion.
Unlikely alliances
What makes the current moment different is the emergence of an unexpected coalition. Conservatives are finding common ground with strands of both classical and radical feminism, which view surrogacy not as progress but as a stark form of exploitation.
Defenders of the traditional family and secular advocates of women’s rights thus find themselves aligned. One side resists the dissolution of biological and familial ties, the other rejects the reduction of the female body to a commercial function. What unites them is opposition to the logic of the market extending into the most intimate aspects of human life.
For the progressive camp, this is a far more difficult challenge to dismiss. Opposition can no longer be caricatured as purely religious or reactionary. It now carries a broader, explicitly humanist argument.
France may therefore be better placed than many Western countries to resist this shift. The enduring unpopularity of Macron, widely seen as the embodiment of a detached progressive elite, could reinforce that resistance.
If this final line holds, France may once again stand apart. More than that, it could offer a model for other secular societies, showing that opposition to surrogacy need not rest on religious belief, but can arise from a conviction that the human body and the creation of life should not be treated as commodities.
