Early Secular Burials in 19th-Century Flemish Provincial Towns

Abstract

In 19th-century Belgium, cemeteries and burials gave rise to a major conflict between the Catholic Church and different kinds of secular people in Belgium. While these confrontations are quite well known in large urban environments, far less research has been produced about their counterparts in small-town settings. This article studies the options secular people had in those ‘backwater’ contexts in the province of Antwerp from the first secular burials in the 1860s up to the turn of the century. Following Albert Hirschman’s ‘voice / exit / loyalty’-scheme, we focus upon the choices that could be made and who could make them within the framework of local power relations. We will show how the particularities of social integration (or the lack thereof) generated the profiles of the individuals best equipped to break with Church-dominated community rituals and help to enforce local funerary policy transformations.