Family behaviours and religious practice in France

Based in our data, in France, 80 % of people aged 18–79 report being Catholic (currently or by birth), 5 % Muslim, 2 % Protestant, 2 % a different religion and 11 % say they have no religion. But this distribution varies considerably by age: the youngest cohorts less often report a religious affiliation, and when they do, they attend religious services less regularly than their elders. Regular attenders, now a small minority, remain more strongly attached to marriage and less often experience several successive unions. They also have more children: among women ever in union born in 1960, regular attenders have 0.6 children more than the others. Women practising a religion other than Catholicism, notably Muslim women, do not account for all of this difference, since regularly practising Catholics have 0.5 more children than the others