A funeral home employee displays an urn
© AFP/File Mychele DaniauPARIS (AFP) - That makes France the most cremation-oriented country of Catholic southern Europe -- against 12 percent in Spain, six percent in Italy and two percent in Portugal.
But social and economic change seem as much responsible as the lifting of religious taboos.
In 1963, the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, or Vatican II, removed a time-old ban on incinerating remains under the proviso this did not undermine a believer's faith in the resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul.
The church too demanded a funeral mass before cremation and stated it did not approve scattering the ashes -- there should be a place left to honour the dead, it said.
Of the half a million people who die each year in France -- population 60 million -- most are buried in coffins, but cremations have rocketed from one percent in 1975 to 15 percent in 1998, 26 percent today and are expected to overshoot 50 percent in 2030, according to the CREDOC research centre on living conditions.
The country, which 30 years ago had only seven crematoriums, now boasts 120, but that is far less than the 1,665 in the world's top cremation country Japan, where 99.7 percent of corpses are incinerated at death.
Cremations are most popular in Paris, where one out of three bodies are incinerated, but affect less than eight percent of deaths in backwater rural parts of France.
Disposing of bodies by incineration is also wide in Protestant regions such as eastern Alsace as the Protestant church -- except the Adventists and Presbyterians -- okeyed cremations back in 1898, when the practice was restricted to free-masons and free-thinkers.
But in a country where only 51 percent of people dub themselves Catholics, against 80 percent up until the 1990s, and only 10 percent are regular church-goers, according to recent surveys, religion is far from the only factor in the growing popularity of cremations.
In tough economic times cremations are cheaper than burials, city cemeteries are over-crowded, and the tradition of being laid to rest in a family crypt or plot in a country village is disappearing fast as France's five-decade-long rural exodus marches on.
As for the country's estimated four million Moslems, 600,000 Jews and 700,000 Orthodox Christians, cremations remain taboo.
So what do people do with the ashes of their loved ones? According to official statistics, 71 percent of funeral urns are taken home, 21 percent placed in cemetery "funeral walls" and eight percent scattered in the new grassy plots, or memorial gardens, built for that purpose inside cemetery grounds.
The French, known for their red-tape taste for administrative rules and regulations, are currently drafting legislation on the fate of funeral urns. Still not finalised legislation states they can be kept at home on the mantle-piece, but only if the local town-hall authorities are informed.
©AFP