Denying burial to unbaptized children

Discover the fourteenth session of the seminar “Regards croisés sur la petite enfance” 2024-2025: "Denying burial to unbaptized children: a political and religious issue in imperial France (1800-1815)”)."

The seminar looks at early childhood as a social, historical and cultural construct. Theories and knowledge relating to the conception, birth and development of children are analyzed in terms of their interactions with their environment and gender norms. Against this backdrop, the seminar will explore the boundaries of this age category and address the question of its temporality according to medical, international, anthropological or historical standards.

In the spring of 1806, the birth at Pompierre in the Vosges of a stillborn child, baptized under certain conditions, but denied burial in consecrated ground by the church warden, sparked a veritable “affair” reaching all the way to the bishopric of Nancy and the Ministry of Religious Affairs. While prohibiting unbaptized children from being buried in consecrated ground was nothing new at the dawn of the 19th century, its vehement questioning, in a France that had barely emerged from the religious tensions of the previous decade, showed that excluding stillborn babies from the consecrated part of the cemetery was now a political issue that concerned all levels of the imperial administration, against a backdrop of redefined funeral legislation. Drawing on archives held by the Archives nationales and the Archives départementales, this paper aims to shed light on the meaning and issues surrounding the refusal of burial for stillborn babies in the early 19th century.

• Vincent Gourdon, historian and demographer at CNRS (UMR 8596 Centre Roland Mousnier
• Nathalie Sage Pranchère, historian at CNRS (UMR 7219 SPHERE).