This Easter season, while Muslims are in the midst of Ramadan, the French public statistics agency INSEE has published a report on the state of religious practice in France. For the first time, Muslims appear to be more numerous than Catholics.
INSEE counts 5.8% of the French population as practising Muslims, compared to only 4.35% of practising Catholics—the definition of the term “practising” used here being the practice of weekly prayer. This difference is explained by the intense practice of the Muslim community. While less numerous, it nevertheless practises more than the Catholic community.
Although the Catholic religion remains the largest declared religion—29% for French people—this figure is constantly falling. The Muslim religion, which is the second largest, has been on the rise for a decade and now accounts for 10% of the total population.
The dynamism of the Muslim religion can also be observed through the intensity of the transmission of faith in families. 91% of people raised by Muslim parents consider themselves to be Muslims, while 67% of people raised by Catholic parents say they are Catholics.
More broadly, INSEE notes that immigrant populations arriving in France—regardless of their region of origin—are much more likely to declare a religious affiliation than metropolitan residents who have been living in France for several generations—as if the original French population had long since moved away from any religious practice. This phenomenon is consistent with a more general trend: a religious disaffection concerning the entire French population. Already in 2019-2020, INSEE reported that 51% of the population aged 18 to 59 in metropolitan France said they had no religion. This number is increasing among the youngest.
The report was sparsely commented on in the public arena. Éric Zemmour is one of the few political figures to have pointed out the civilisational tipping point revealed by this survey.
The Catholic Church in France has not commented on this statistical overview, which is clearly not in its favour. On Easter night, 5,643 adults will be baptised into the Catholic faith for the year 2023, 1,000 more than last year, or an increase of 28%. This is an undeniably positive trend, but insufficient to reverse the trend noted by INSEE, which raises the question of the internal dynamism of French Catholicism and its capacity to transmit.
