After quickly putting the role of the legal duty to maintain in relation to family solidarity into perspective, the objective of this article is to give the reader a succinct presentation of legal rules and jurisprudences that institute and organize these maintenance obligations in the fields of both Civil Law and Social Welfare Law. Firstly, these rules are presented in two successive series of texts, sometimes accompanied by a few explanations. The first series goes over the essentials of articles concerning maintenance obligations from the Civil Code, the second presents articles pertaining to the Social Welfare System (Social and Family Action Code, Public Health Code, Social Security Code), linking maintenance obligations with providing benefits. There is then a table indicating which maintenance obligations each of the social benefits program concerned are responsible for. Secondly, this presentation gives a few precisions on the regime of the aforementioned obligations and on the scope of judicial litigations that they provoke. The difficulties relative to the links between civil rules and rules pertaining to Social Welfare Law are more specifically referred to. The aim is not to furnish an overall study on the subject, but only to point out the most noteworthy difficulties.