After the Diocese constructed the building in 1873, it was in 1905, following the separation of Churches and State, that the SMPF, the Municipal Funeral Service, was created as an expression of the progression of Republican ideals. What it means was, every person now had the right to a ceremony, regardless of religion, status (divorced women were previously required to be buried by night) or circumstances of death (suicides were also banned). The city had a monopoly on coffins, hearses, bearers and cemeteries. An important part of the work was the funeral “ceremony”, and it was therefore compulsory (right up until the 1980s) to place curtains at the entrances to buildings in which dead bodies were laid. The city’s monopoly on funeral services ended with the Sueur Law of 8 January 1993, and the activity at the Rue d’Aubervilliers site declined progressively until the last employee left in 1997.
During the heyday of CENT QUATRE, 27,000 hearses left the building every year and 1,400 people worked there, including some forty women. The SMPF employed woodworkers, cabinetmakers, coachbuilders, mechanics, seamstresses, painters and masons. The job definitions were very specific: cortege organisation office, regulator, bearer etc. The site therefore contained offices, stables, a registry office, workshops, a canteen, a hairdresser’s, a polisher, accommodation for staff on call, warehouses for poles and curtains, and so on. Those who worked at CENT QUATRE have fond memories of the team spirit that reigned there, the atmosphere, the football team, and the orchestra. Those “lovely times”, together with the pride that accompanied the involvement in such an important and dignified event, allowed the difficulties that went with the job to be readily forgotten. In May 1968, the site was run as a co-operative for fifteen days without any incidents, giving blue-collar and white-collar workers the opportunity to emerge from their respective isolation.
Contrary to widely held beliefs, it was not the vocation of the Funeral Service to receive bodies, although it had to deal with some very unusual situations. After the Second World War and the wars in Algeria and Indochina, for example, the victims’ spoils were presented to the families on the site.
History compiled from works by Christine Blancot, Christèle Falzon and Gérard Simonet.