For several days, residents of the town of Fréjus, in the Var, have been grimacing while wringing out their wet socks. It is December 2, 1959 and it has been three weeks since the city in the south-east of France was washed out by torrential rains. The gardens are soggy, the gutters are overflowing, the sidewalks form a shiny mirror weighed down by the gray of the sky. In human memory, we cannot remember having experienced such an execrable end to the year.
At the same time, about ten kilometers to the north, the Malpasset dam begins to show signs of weakness. Built five years earlier on Reyran, it is shaken with muffled vibrations. Its guardian, André Ferro, saw the water rise more than four meters in twenty-four hours. He even observes suspicious discharges… What to do? Open the floodgates? A highway construction site is located below and the opening of the dam could interrupt the work. Around 6 p.m. on December 2, 1959, André Ferro finally received the order to release the 50 million cubic meters of water weighing down the structure.
Too late. At 9:13 p.m., the dam gave way, releasing a wave estimated at 40 meters high. Concrete blocks weighing several tons are thrown into the valley below. It takes twenty-one minutes for the deadly wave to threaten the town of Fréjus and its 15,000 residents, most of whom are seated in front of the flagship television program on Wednesday evening, “La Piste aux étoiles”. When the water finally reaches them, Achille Zavatta’s number is cut short. “The residents (…) fled without knowing where the danger came fromreports La Provence at the time. Killed on the spot and dragged by the murderous river, their shroud was an immense expanse of mud.”
The human and material toll is appalling. In the aftermath of the disaster, there were 423 deaths, a third of which were children, and more than 7,000 people affected. A thousand hectares of agricultural land were ravaged, buildings overturned, cellars submerged. A half-meter layer of mud covers the most affected districts of Fréjus. On site, emergency services are being organized: the girls’ school has been converted into an emergency shelter. Telephone, roads, railways, electricity, nothing works: the Var town is cut off from the rest of the world.
Until death mends us
Amid the tragic testimonies relayed by the newspapers, one news item, in particular, stirred public opinion. Among the victims was a young fiancé in the middle of preparations for his wedding. Will the ceremony, which was scheduled for a few days later, take place? His grieving partner, also pregnant, hopes so. “I only wish for one thingconfided Irène Jodar to Le Parisien Libération, January 9, 1960. It’s to be able to marry posthumously so that the child I carry legally becomes his father’s son.”
Will his request be heard? During the two world wars, we had already seen marriages celebrated despite the premature death of the spouse. In addition to offering a form of consolation, post-mortem weddings made it possible to distribute a pension to war widows and remove the moral taboo of pregnancies contracted outside of marriage. At the town hall of Fréjus, the posthumous marriage of Irène Jodar and André Capra finally took place in August 1960. And this, thanks to article 171 of the Civil Code which was created especially to allow it and was ratified on January 8, 1960.
According to this passage of the law, still in force today (and which was reformulated in May 2011), “the President of the Republic may, for serious reasons, authorize the celebration of the marriage in the event of the death of one of the future spouses, as long as a sufficient gathering of facts unequivocally establishes his consent.. What “serious reasons” can be considered? If the victim died during military operations or as a result of terrorism, for example. Painful personal circumstances are also taken into consideration: the longevity of cohabitation or a presumption of paternity can justify the celebration of posthumous weddings.
In addition to requiring the approval of the Élysée, such a request is subject to a unique procedure. It is necessary to prove the consent of the deceased partner, but also to justify that a marriage was indeed being organized (material proof, such as a quote from a caterer or a dated invitation card, may be requested). Furthermore, for obvious reasons, posthumous marriage does not create inheritance claims for the surviving spouse.
It is estimated that around fifty posthumous unions are celebrated each year in France. Irène Jodar, “the little fiancée of Fréjus and France” who was the first to benefit from this legislative arrangement, was 19 years old at the time of the events. Although she ended up remarrying a living partner, she never forgot the terrible wave that hit Fréjus on December 2, 1959. “She had a horror of water, never went to the beach or the swimming pool”confided her great-granddaughter to Var-Matin, at the time of her death in 2019, sixty years after the disaster.
