Contracting a marriage

French law has said the same thing since 1804, in eleven words: there is no marriage where there is no consent. The 1962 United Nations convention on the subject puts it the other way round and requires the full and free consent of both parties, expressed in person before the authority that registers it. Everything around the act has been automated, the appointment, the file, the checks against the register, the certificate. The act itself has not moved, because it is a promise made by someone who can be held to it, in front of witnesses who can say they heard it. A machine can draft the vows and read them aloud. It cannot be the one who is married afterwards, and there is nothing in it that a divorce could undo.