Des adultes en mode mineur. Enquête sur les procédures d’émancipation judiciaire

In France, access to majority occurs for almost all young people on their eighteenth birthday. But families can resort to a judicial emancipation procedure, through which a minor aged 16 or over can be granted civil legal capacity before the legal age of majority. Between 2016 and 2021, 8,716 litigants requested the emancipation of their child, or nearly 1,450 families per year. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was a procedure intended for the propertied classes, and closely linked to the consequences of the death of one of the parents. After 1945, the public was more varied, notably due to a gap between the civil majority at 21 and a de facto majority from 18. The study shows that we can today distinguish three classes of trajectories of early aspiration to civil capacities of adults. What we call “average-certifying” emancipations, from middle-class parents, aim at the acquisition of licences and the certification of professional exams. “Bourgeois-academic” emancipations are linked to international school strategies or from overseas departments to the mainland. And “family-popular” emancipations appear as an instrument for regulating family trajectories and disputes. We then highlight the existence of a “court effect” on emancipation judgments, the variations of which are not limited to differences in the reasons for the requests. In a situation of incompleteness of the law – linked to the absence of case law – supervisory judges transfer secondary legal standards and professional provisions associated with their previous trajectory within the legal field, which contribute to the differentiation of their practices. The attention paid to the uses of the bodies of minors, the recourse to extra-legal notions of “risk” and “maturity” , fill in this incompleteness. We conclude by highlighting the main logic of emancipation procedures which, whatever their outcome, are less of an arbitration between autonomy and protection of minors than a mechanism of reproduction or transfer of (legal) guardianship of parents towards (practical) guardianship and (social) control of other institutions (such as juvenile justice or the nuclear family). Finally, we propose some avenues for the development of minors’ rights: Proposal 1: Replace the notion of “just grounds” with that of “interests of the minor” in article 413-2 of the Civil Code defining the framework of emancipation Proposal 2: Authorize minors to request their emancipation Proposition 3: Authorize minors aged 16 to go to court Proposal 4: Strengthen the autonomy of the minor guardianship judge Proposal 5: Remove the need for emancipation to obtain the BNSSA before the age of eighteen

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