When the crematorium at Père-Lachaise opened at the end of the nineteenth century, cremation ran up against a ban. Which one?
The answer
The Catholic Church condemned cremation, seeing in it a denial of the resurrection of the body; the ban would not be lifted until 1963. The crematorium at Père-Lachaise, the first in France, therefore opened amid a climate of scandal, championed by freethinkers.
This question belongs to the “The Strange and the Paranormal” series of the Père-Lachaise quiz: ten questions, a story behind every right answer.