The Politics of Value in French Funeral Arrangements

Abstract

This paper draws upon the history of the funeral market over two centuries to examine three major devices which have played a central role in the funeral economy, both in terms of defining the nature of the ‘goods’ and their attendant value but also in regulating the relations between the Pompes Funèbres and the other institutional actors involved. It highlights the ways in which these devices provide a ‘politics of value’ performing the articulation between the formatting of economic value and the pursuit of political concerns. First, observing the constitutional phase of the private industry, it examines the ‘system of the classes’ as a central device of managing dissonance between conflicting interests. Then, a historical jump leads us to half way through the twentieth century to the market infrastructure formed by the management of ‘care for the deceased’. As a third point, the exponential development of death insurance in recent years appears as an expression of rationalization of funeral arrangement. The analysis of the market devices will highlight an essential property, that is, the incorporation of a ‘calculation formula’ which set up both the profit sharing and the handling of moral and political issues.

KEYWORDS:

• calculation
• device
• funeral
• moral economy
• politics

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author is grateful to Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, Hans Kjellberg, Liz McFall, and Robert Howell Griffith for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. The author also thanks the JCE reviewers who offered many valuable insights that are reflected in the final version of this paper.

Notes

1. The historical approach has here a methodological goal rather than serving primarily to describe the trends of social change over two centuries.

2. Reconciling pragmatic market analyses with a full consideration of their political dimension is one of the avenues explored by Liz McFall through the historical study of the tremendous growth of life-insurance in England in the nineteenth century.

3. It is worth noting that this appellation is a literal translation of the French ‘entrepreneur.

4. p. 212–213.

5. According to A. Daumard (1996) in her study of the Parisian bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century, between 1821 and 1830, 83% of all burials (of the 261,360 deaths) were those of indigents. The percentage dropped to between 73% and 76.9% between 1839 and 1848 (Journal de la Société Statistique). Within major cities in the provinces, the percentage is closer to 30–40%, which nevertheless represents a significant expense and a regular subject of conflict between the fabriques and the town hall (Lassère 1997).

6. Source: Tract de la Maison Balard, around 1860; Paris Archives; Report of the committee Notre Histoire, Pompes Funèbres Générales; Kselman (1993).

7. This quest for new activities was inspired by the American model of a funeral home and a new offer of services for the deceased's family (accommodation, embalming, viewing rooms).

8. About 200 establishments of this nature were set up in France between 1962 and 1982, mainly through the initiative of the PFG. Source: Interministerial report IGA-IGF-IGAS (1989).

9. From the end of the 1970s, the imbalance in market distribution in favor of the large concessionnaires led to a large number of legal disputes and judicial appeals by the funeral agencies and the independant operators in the country areas against the managers of the funerarium (and against PFG in particular).

10. We are very far from the massive phenomenon of burial clubs and friendly societies which flourished in Great Britain in the nineteenth century and the huge industrial assurance companies like the Prudential Assurance Company which entered the market in the second half of the nineteenth century. See Sewell (1980), McFall (2009) and Trompette and Griffiths (2011)

11. See also customer surveys such as Credoc Study 2005 on the motivations of the French in taking out a funeral contract, Mémoire vive, n°4, 2005; Assurance obsèques: étude n A3424A (DAFSA études); Services funéraires et assurances obsèques à l'horizon 2011 (Précepta Etudes).

12. Funeral insurance hardly features in the analysis and forecasting perspectives of economic experts, consumer associations or public authorities (such as the French Competition Council or parliamentary committees).

13. This statement is drawn from the PhD research of L. Guffanti (http://www.cee.sciences-po.fr/fr/le-centre/doctorantes/246-lucas-guffanti.html).

14. The concept of moral economy, initially used by E. P.Thompson (1971) in connection with eighteenth-century English social conflicts refers to systems of rules and obligations incorporating exigencies of social justice. I here associate the idea of ‘moral calculation’ which refers to the formatting of economic value in the service of a form of solidarity, in civic, community, or family terms.