End of the morality check in the civil service

On 13 July 1983, the French parliament passed Law No. 83-634 on the rights and obligations of civil servants, better known as the Loi Le Pors, named after the Communist Minister for the Civil Service, Anicet Le Pors. The law replaced the ordinance in force since 1959 and in doing so removed the terms "good morality" (bonne moralité) and "good morals" (bonnes moeurs) as conditions of entry to the civil service.

Until then, the so-called enquête de moralité, an official morality check by the police or the prefecture, could be used specifically to deny homosexual applicants access to civil service posts, from teacher to police officer. Only two years earlier, in 1981, the decades-old registration of homosexual people by the Paris police prefecture had finally been discontinued. The 1983 reform was thus part of a rapid series of liberalisations in the first years of President François Mitterrand's term: in 1981 France officially rejected the WHO's classification of homosexuality as a mental illness, and in 1982 the Loi Forni abolished the discriminatory higher age of consent for same-sex relationships that had existed since the Vichy regime.

Contemporary commentators later described the core of the Loi Le Pors succinctly: it replaced the "civil servant as subject" with the "civil servant as citizen". Revised several times, it remains to this day the basic law of the French career civil service for the state, local authorities and hospitals. Explicit protection against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation only followed in 1985, but the abolition of the morality check in 1983 marked the decisive first step away from institutional blanket suspicion of homosexual civil servants.