Concerned about the sterility of his couple and eager to have an heir to succeed him, Napoleon planned to adopt Eugène de Beauharnais, the fruit of Joséphine's first marriage. To do this, he includes adoption in the code that bears his name. Far from the adoption of children as we know it, it is an agreement between consenting adults, since a man must be 30 years old to be able to be adopted and 25 years old for a woman. Adoption is then only a question of transmission of inheritance.
It was only in the 20th century that adoption took care of children, it officially becoming possible for minors in 1923. The two world wars having caused more deaths among civilians than among soldiers, it seems logical to bring together those who have lost their parents and those who have lost their children. However, it was not until 1966, and the will of an adoptive father who became Prime Minister (Georges Pompidou), that adopted children could benefit from the same rights as biological children. The French particularity, which has fueled futile debates for a long time, is that to this status which gives fullness (full adoption) of rights and duties to adoptive families, another status is added, that of simple adoption, heir to the law Napoleonic. Since then, it has been conclusively explained that full adoption irrevocably cuts all ties between the child and his biological family, whereas these would be maintained in simple adoption. Some then imagine this rupture as total, brutal and harmful. They demonstrate an aversion to full adoption, accusing it of cutting the child off from his origins, of denying him the right to his previous existence. Among the most virulent, we hear that full adoption is a forgery or a fiction, therefore a lie for the child.
The recent debate over marriage and adoption by homosexual couples has awakened these old demons. The term fiction was even used to describe plenary adoption during the Senate Law Committee during these debates. Of course, we know that the idea of fiction is not necessarily pejorative. It indicates the capacity that the right has to establish a link by declaring adopted children born to their adoptive parents in the civil status. But legal fiction does not encompass the whole of the adoptive experience. The law, no more than biology, does not focus on the link of filiation, adoptive or not. Adoption may trouble some legal scholars who, as the name of their discipline suggests, want to stay square. But isn't it adoption itself, in its entirety, which is a fiction? To give a family, which is not related to him, to a child, that is surprising. Accepting that a child who doesn't look like them can call adults to whom he is attached “daddy” and “mommy” doesn't seem very normal. However, for thirty years in France, tens of thousands of adoptive families have been built and flourished in a society that is more curious than caring.