INTERVIEW – In his latest book, French metamorphoses (Le Seuil), the director of the opinion and corporate strategies department at Ifop analyzes the reasons why the celebration of the dead is gradually competing with the Halloween party.
LE FIGARO. – There cremation has it become a widespread or even banal funeral practice?
Jérôme FOURQUET. – This is one of the most spectacular symptoms of what I call, in my latest book, French metamorphoseswith profound and rapid transformations of society. In 1980, the practice of funeral cremation was marginal. It concerned barely 1% of funerals and was carried out by audiences with a very particular profile: “free-thinking” activists, freemasons, atheists, etc. Today, more than 43% of funerals result in cremation. And in a few years, this practice will undoubtedly be the majority.
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The work of Claude Lévi Strauss has shown that funeral rites reveal the functioning of a society. But something that had remained unchanged for millennia has moved tectonically in just 40 years, it's spectacular. We are in a period of historical acceleration, of rupture…
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