In a landmark ruling this week, France’s highest appeal court, the Cour de Cassation, threw out a lower court’s finding that parents have a right by customary law to use corporal punishment to discipline their children.
Corporal punishment against children has been banned in France since 2019, but in November 2024, an appeal court in the eastern town of Metz overturned the conviction of a police officer who had been handed an 18-month suspended prison sentence for his violent behaviour over a six-year period towards his two young sons. The court also stripped him of his parental rights.
During his initial trial, the defendant, Yves M. (last name withheld here), an officer with the French border police and based at Thionville in the Lorraine region, admitted using violence against his sons, claiming this was as a corrective punishment for misbehaviour.
Subsequently, after he appealed the sentence, the court in Metz, while recognising the use of violence, found in Yves M.’s favour, on the basis of a supposed customary law allowance that a parent had a “droit de correction parental” – the right to apply corporal punishment against their offspring, conditional to the violence being proportionate to the alleged misbehaviour of the youngsters and that it caused them no “harm”.
The public prosecutor’s office and the plaintiffs – Yves M’s former wife and two sons – appealed that conclusion before the Cour de Cassation which, in its definitive ruling published on Wednesday, overturned the Metz appeal court’s verdict, and ordered a retrial of M. The police officer had originally also been found guilty of violence towards his wife over the same period.
The domestic abuse was first revealed in October 2022 by the two sons (first names withheld), when they were aged 12 and nine. They described being slapped and having their hair pulled, which Yves M. admitted to as part of a “tough and strict” approach, and of being grabbed around the neck.
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The notion of a parent’s “droit de correction” comes from an ancestral form of customary law. In a ruling in 1819, the Cour de Cassation stated: “[If] nature and civil laws give to fathers, over their children, an authority to punish, they do not give them the right to exercise upon them violence or bad treatment that places their lives or health in peril.”
Two centuries have passed and moral values have changed since that conclusion, and the court today argues that “contemporary jurisprudence” leaves no doubt that a “droit de correction parental” exists neither under French or international law.
A slap cannot be an “educational” measure
The perpetrator of violence against a child of less than 15 years of age, and which entails an officially certified disablement of less than eight days, faces a maximum sentence of three years in prison and a fine of 45,000 euros. In its ruling this week, the Cour de Cassation underlined acts of violence in this context are punished “whatever their nature, including if they involve psychological violence”, and that parental violence is an “aggravating circumstance” and not a mitigating one, even when the pretext of educating the child is presented.
Speaking last May before parliament, then-French prime minister François Bayrou, mired in a scandal of violence and sexual abuse suffered by pupils at a Catholic school in his political fiefdom in south-west France, suggested that a slap could be an “educational” measure. Wednesday’s ruling means that that argument is clearly legally inadmissible, as well as being morally absurd.
Patrice Spinosi, lawyer for the children and former wife of Yves M., welcomed the ruling. “It is the end of the idea, however much it persists among some judges, that there was, alongside the law, a customary right of ‘correction’ for parents. The Cour de Cassation has put the church back in the middle of the village!”
Céline Astolfe, lawyer for the child protection association Fondation pour l’enfance, which joined the case as a plaintiff, told Mediapart that the ruling “solemnly states that there exists no legal excuse for [a violent] disciplinary power of a parent over children”, adding: “Let’s make the wish that this ruling prevents any temptation by a judge to resurface a medieval ‘droit de correction’.”
In the case of Yves M., the Metz appeal court had last year highlighted that no lesions were apparent on the bodies of his two sons. But on Wednesday the office of France’s “defender of public rights” – Défenseure des droits, who acts as an independent authority as enshrined by the constitution – released a statement warning that violence against children “can cause important damage, not necessarily immediately detectable, but likely to cause long-term effects”, adding: “The psychological impact is particularly serious, because of their vulnerability, their dependence and their physiological and psychological immaturity.”
Speaking during the appeal hearing in Metz last year, the eldest of Yves M.’s two sons declared: “A good father is not someone who strangles you when you’ve not done your [school] exercise well enough, or who hits you. I don’t call that education.”
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse