French weddings are curious affairs. They can literally take place over 3 days. The first day is for the civil wedding, which takes place at the Town Hall and is conducted by the Mayor (if you’re lucky or important) but most usually an acolyte who reads from a book and doesn’t really get involved much in the preparation of the whole thing.
Town Halls can have several weddings in one day. It’s real purpose is to record the act of marri
age into the French administration, whereby a book is created that all married couples must keep for fear of guillotine if they lose called a “livret de famille”.
Every time you have a child, the Town Hall where the baby is born faithfully records the new arrival in this book and you use it to prove your civil status when an ordinary passport or ID card won’t do.
Most often, a civil wedding takes place the same day as the religious wedding, one after the other. Sometimes the civil wedding takes days, weeks or months before the religious one. It
really depends on the couple and there are no official rules for these types of French weddings.
French civil weddings only (ie no religious weddings afterwards) are for atheists, mixed-religious couples, gays and lesbians since 2013, and those couples that just don’t want the expense or stress of preparing a huge, traditional religious one.
After a wedding ceremony, some members of the party drive to the reception venue to beep their horns repeatedly for the length of the drive.
In 2012 one wedding party took this to a whole other length by stopping their cars on the autoroute to celebrate, causing an enormous traffic jam and generally annoying everyone.
If you si
t by a town hall anywhere in France on a Saturday afternoon and you’re liable to see a procession of newlyweds, fresh from their mandatory civil ceremony with the mayor.
As they pull away in their wedding car together, flushed with pride and eager to get on with their new life together, they are serenaded by the almighty racket of a hundred honking car horns.
The wedding party usually gets it going but the whole town soon gets in
volved. It’s thought the tradition is rooted in charivari, a musical form of social coercion by which unwed couples were humiliated into marriage.
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