‘Funerary Culture Wars’ in Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Europe and the Case of the Brussels’ Freethought Movement

Abstract

This article explores how the control of religious authority over funerary culture became a contentious issue on a pan-European level during the course of the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century. A comparative analysis of the conflicts around burial and cremation in various European nation-states highlights the two-dimensional character of these ‘funerary culture wars’. Freethinkers were radical players in these institutional and cultural conflicts as they challenged the tight grip of churches on the ‘death systems’ in their respective cities and countries. We will show how the institutional and cultural secularisation of funerary culture was not a universal and inevitable developmental trend but rather a historically variable and contingent outcome of social and political struggles around concrete change. We zoom in on the city of Brussels where freethinkers made new secular funerary practices very visible from the middle of the 19th century onwards.

The non-religious and the European city in the nineteenth century: the development of crematories in Milan and Gotha

“…28 Many Protestant churches initially reacted with similar restraint, but then gradually accepted cremation by the end of the nineteenth century. 29 While cremation retained its secularist character, especially as it became part of the developing socialist culture of the early twentieth century, 30 this acceptance by Protestant churches also made it compatible with Christian ideas. 31 Not every urn placed in modern cemeteries, therefore, testified to a secularist attitude on the part of those who opted for this practice in the nineteenth century.…”