Retirement represents a dramatic change in individual life that may also affect marriage stability, a fact which has been mostly ignored to date. Using observations on over 200 000 French men and over 166 000 French women aged 50 to 70, drawn from the French LaborForce Surveys over the last decade, and instrumenting retirement with legal retirement age in France, we find a significant and large increase in divorce rates upon retirement, which concerns especially individuals of either gender that grew up in a somewhat traditional type of household.