Until recently, the French assumed they had solved the issue of gays and marriage in a most civilized manner

Front Page The raw political debates and the spectacle of same-sex weddings in the United States were little more than a source of bemusement. After all, the French were the inventors of the Civil Solidarity Pact, a creative legal mechanism introduced in 1999 that gives all adult couples, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, many of the same fiscal and social rights as those who are formally wedded. But that was before Noël Mamere, the leader of France's small, leftist Green Party and a member of Parliament, announced last month that he would defy tradition, and some would say the law, by officiating at the country's first gay wedding ceremony. Like many French politicians, Mamere holds multiple offices. So he is using his perch as mayor of an obscure southwest town named Bègles to conduct his social experiment, joining two 30-something men, a supermarket clerk and a health care worker, in marriage on June 5. Mamere argues that nothing in the Napoleonic Code, the vast compilation of civil laws that has been in force since 1804, specifies that marriage has to be between a man and a woman. He has also threatened to take any challenge of his action to the European Court of Human Rights, a European Union court based in Strasbourg. His crusade has enraged the center-right French government, riven the Socialist Party and touched off a fierce intellectual battle in newspaper opinion columns and television talk shows over the rights of homosexuals in France.