The decline has been dramatic over the long term. In the early 2010s, there were still around 270,000 baptisms a year of children under the age of seven in France. Around ten years later, that figure had fallen to around 180,000. The French Bishops’ Conference itself acknowledges that the baptism of young children has been declining for many years.
The first explanation is almost inevitable: there are fewer Catholics who identify as such. The ‘Trajectoires et Origines’ survey by INSEE and INED indicated that in 2019–2020, amongst 18–59-year-olds living in mainland France, 51 per cent stated they had no religion and 29 per cent identified as Catholic. Above all, the passing on of the faith is no longer automatic: amongst those brought up by Catholic parents, 67 per cent still identify as Catholic in adulthood, whilst 31 per cent say they have no religion.
In other words, each generation passes on Catholicism to the next to a slightly lesser extent. Yet the baptism of an infant is based precisely on this transmission: it is obviously not the babies who ask to be baptised, but their parents who decide to enrol them in a faith, a community and a history. When the parents themselves have an increasingly distant relationship with this religion, the act loses its obvious significance.
There is also a demographic factor. The number of births in France has been falling for over a decade. As early as 2022, INSEE recorded around 726,000 births, nearly 13 per cent fewer than in 2010, and the decline has continued since then. Fewer children necessarily means, all other things being equal, fewer candidates for baptism. But demographics clearly do not suffice to explain the scale of the decline: the proportion of families choosing baptism is also falling.
Above all, we must look at what has happened to ‘cultural Catholicism’. The famous saying ‘we’ll have him baptised anyway’ is becoming less and less relevant. In the past, grandparents, the extended family and the social environment could exert a strong influence on the decision. Baptism was sometimes more of a family ceremony than a conscious religious affirmation. In a far more secularised society, young parents feel less obliged to uphold this tradition. Even the Catholic Church has long recognised that seeking a sacrament simply because ‘that’s what the family does’ is increasingly at odds with contemporary French society.
Another development runs even deeper: our societies place greater importance on individual choice. Some parents, including those from Christian families, prefer not to decide their child’s religion and to leave it up to the child to choose later. This approach is in direct conflict with the Catholic tradition of infant baptism, in which parents and godparents profess the faith on the child’s behalf and undertake to raise them in that faith.
And this is where the situation becomes far more interesting than a simple narrative of the ‘decline of the Church’. For whilst baptisms of young children are falling, requests for the baptism of teenagers and adults have seen a spectacular rise in recent years. In 2024, 7,135 adults were baptised at Easter in France, nearly 31 per cent more than in 2023. The increase was particularly marked among 18–25-year-olds.
This paradox perhaps gets to the heart of the matter. We are not merely witnessing the disappearance of a religious practice: we are witnessing the transition from a Catholicism of heritage to a Catholicism of choice. Fewer babies are being baptised because their parents no longer necessarily regard Catholicism as an identity that is automatically passed on at birth. But some of these children, once they reach adolescence or adulthood, may then decide for themselves to seek baptism.
For the Catholic Church, the phenomenon is obviously ambivalent. In numerical terms, a few thousand adult baptisms do not in any way compensate for the disappearance of tens of thousands of child baptisms. But symbolically, the change is considerable. The baptised person of tomorrow may be less often the one whose parents took them to church at three months old because ‘the whole family has always done so’, and more often the one who knocked on the door themselves twenty years later.
The decline in infant baptisms therefore speaks to something far broader than the waning of a sacrament. It signals the gradual end of a France where one could be Catholic by birth, almost as if one were inheriting a surname. Faith is becoming a minority belief, less automatic, sometimes embraced later in life — but when it does emerge, it is also more of a conscious choice. And this transformation could well profoundly alter the face of French Catholicism in the decades to come.
