NEWS STORY: French See Halloween As Another American Corruption

c. 2000 Religion News Service PARIS _ Halloween’s recent sweep into France stops at the doors of Sainte Colette des Buttes Chaumont. No grinning pumpkins or waxed autumn leaves brighten the sparse, ultra-modern Paris parish. Paper cutout witches and ghosts that dance across French store windows, school classrooms and bus stops are not welcome among […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

PARIS _ Halloween’s recent sweep into France stops at the doors of Sainte Colette des Buttes Chaumont.

No grinning pumpkins or waxed autumn leaves brighten the sparse, ultra-modern Paris parish. Paper cutout witches and ghosts that dance across French store windows, school classrooms and bus stops are not welcome among the some 100 Roman Catholics bent soberly in Sunday morning prayer.


The single nod to autumn _ a jar of yellow-and-white chrysanthemums at the altar _ is instead a gentle reminder of All Saints’ Day, a Nov. 1 institution created to remember the dead and to crush All Hallows Eve merriment for good.

But these days, Father Benoit Bourgoin admits, Halloween festivities are gaining ground. “It’s not worth fighting against Halloween,” said St. Colette’s rotund priest, clad in a thick blue sweater as he prepared for the next Mass. “The church has Christianized pagan feasts, but these feasts are always there.”

French critics have fingered the usual suspect _ the United States _ for their latest pagan predicament, which they claim has brought a trite and ghoulish interpretation of death. Not content with corrupting the French language and cuisine, they argue, American imports are now corrupting the country’s roughly 44 million Catholics as well.

Last week, an outraged minority struck back. Decrying Halloween as “devoted to Satan, ugliness and absolute evil,” several hundred Roman Catholic schoolchildren and priests gathered in southern France to protest the festival.

“We should have something else to offer children besides a macabre festival,” a protesting priest told Reuters news service.

But other clergy openly scorn such religious hand-wringing.

“It’s an old holiday, let people celebrate,” said Father Dominique Philip, a priest at Sainte Rita church in Paris. “Once again, the Catholic Church is putting itself in a ridiculous position and meddling in an affair that doesn’t concern it.”

The religious debate has bypassed most ordinary French, who have embraced Le Halloween with gusto. At outdoor produce stands, ruddy farmers sell vegetable and fruit in witch hats. Newspapers offer page-long holiday listings for children and adults. Local brasseries and French variety shows host Halloween specials as tacky as any in America.


And French parents like Anne Barthelemy shrug their shoulders and cave in to popular demand.

“I think it’s a little bit ridiculous that French priests protested this holiday,” said the 27-year-old mother, whose three children will trick-or-treat for the first time this year. “But I do think it is really too bad that in Europe, where many old and interesting traditions have been wiped out, we are accepting this American holiday that has nothing to do with us.”

But in fact, the origins of Halloween are European, not American.

Ancient Celts in France and Britain observed the edge-of-winter festivities, when the souls of the dead were said to revisit their homes. Only in the ninth century did Pope Boniface IV create All Saints’ Day, in an apparent bid to Christianize the pagan festival.

He gambled correctly. Over the centuries, the saints’ day rubbed out most traces of All Hallows Eve in France. And gradually, a holiday commemorating martyred saints morphed into an occasion where French like Francoise Aubry remember dead loved ones instead.

At the Belleville cemetery, near the Sainte Colette church, Aubry carefully swept aside dead leaves and dirt, and placed two pots of chrysanthemums on her mother-in-law’s grave.

“For me, Halloween is commerce, but All Saints is sacred,” said the 68-year-old grandmother, who makes a yearly half-hour train ride from her home to tend the grave. “We think about our family and all those who have died.”


But such contemplation is becoming a rarity in France, some clergy say. Like Americans, they fret, the French are growing uncomfortable about addressing the subject of death. And all this talk of goblins isn’t helping.

“Halloween’s commercial success touches profound questions,” said Father Stanislav Lalanne, spokesman for the conference of French bishops. “Death is considered as a fearful subject, and Halloween is a way to respond to it in a way I find extremely dangerous.”

Until now, the anti-American crusade has tackled more worldly problems of bad vocabulary and bad food. Sunday columnists still decry the dangerous import of American expressions into the French language. French sheep farmer Jose Bove remains a local hero since this summer’s battle against what he and others call “McDomination.”

As she kept a watchful eye on her children, Anne Barthelemy expressed hope for another French uprising against bad taste.

“There are very few people like Jose Bove left,” she said wistfully. “I regret we have so little resistance in Europe to American cultural domination.”

DEA END BRYANT

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!