This statistic shows the feeling of belonging to a specific religion among people in France in a survey from 2022. It displays that half of respondents stated that they felt linked to Christianism, when around 40 percent of them declared they felt bound to no religion.

This graphic shows the forecasted number of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, religiously unaffiliated people, believers in folk religions and in other religions in France in 2022. With almost ** million people identifying themselves as Christians, Christianity was the most represented religion in France. Furthermore, about **** million people considered themselves religiously unaffiliated.

According to a survey conducted in April 2023 in France, more than 60 percent of responding non-Practicing Catholics stated that they did believe in God, whereas 80 percent of respondents of a religion other than Catholicism declared that did believe in God's existence. Finally, 94 percent of Practicing Catholics respondents were believers.

This statistic illustrates the religious affiliation of the French population in France in February and March 2018. That year, around 41 percent of the interviewed population declared themselves to be Catholic. The majority of the sample considered themselves to be without religion.

According to a survey conducted in France in April 2023, 44 percent of the respondents affirmed they believed in God, and there were 56 percent of the surveyed who defined themselves as non- believers. Since 1947, French people's faith in God kept slightly decreasing, indeed in that year there were 66 percent of respondents affirming they believed in God, and there were only 55 percent in 2004.

Prepared by ICPSR under a project to automate major portions of the Statistique Generale de la France, this is a collection of demographic, social, education, economic, population, and vital statistics data for France, 1833-1925. This conversion project is a continuation of one conducted in 1972, for which a similar data collection was created, SOCIAL, DEMOGRAPHIC, AND EDUCATIONAL DATA FOR FRANCE, 1801-1897 (ICPSR 0048). The project to collect and prepare these data was sponsored by two French and two American groups: ICPSR and the Center for Western European Studies at the University of Michigan, and the Fourth and Sixth Sections of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and Conseil National de la Recherches Scientifique in France. Both collections include data recorded at the departement, arrondissement, chef-lieu, and ville level. In this collection, materials from the vital statistics series were prepared for selected years rather than for each year in the period from 1900-1925. The years that were chosen clustered around the quinquennial censuses and also included (because of the violent demographic dislocations produced by World War I) each year in the 1914-1919 period. In addition, some vital statistics for the nineteenth century (1836-1850, 1880, and 1892) obtained from fugitive published volumes that could not be located during the course of the 1972 project were prepared. The 136 datasets in this collection contain: (1) French population, economic, and social data obtained from the quenquennial censuses of 1901, 1906, 1911, and 1921, that detail the composition of the population by categories of age, sex, nativity, marital status, religion, place of residence, and occupation, (2) industrial census data for the years 1861-1896, (3) data on primary education in France for 1833, 1901, and 1906, as well as data on secondary and higher education in France for the years 1836-1850, 1880, and 1892, and (4) data from a separate series of annual vital statistics (Mouvement de la Population) that cover the years 1836-1850, 1892, and 1900-1925, citing births, deaths, and marriages in the nation.

The graph shows the distribution of young people aged from 18 to 30 years old according to their religious affiliation in France in 2023. The survey displays that ** percent of the respondents declared no religion. Moreover, ** percent of them declared themselves as Christians. The second religion among French young adults was Islam with ** percent of the respondents who stated Islam as their religion.

France: Non religious people as percent of the population: The latest value from is percent, unavailable from percent in . In comparison, the world average is 0.0 percent, based on data from countries. Historically, the average for France from to is percent. The minimum value, percent, was reached in while the maximum of percent was recorded in .

According to a survey conducted in March 2022 in France, 87 percent of regular practicing Catholics had a Bible in their homes. They were followed by Protestants with 79 percent of them having a Bible at home. People who declared themselves without religion were also those most likely not to own the religious book, with only 13 percent of them owning a copy of the Bible.

This statistic illustrates the religious affiliation of young people aged 18 to 30 years in France in March 2018, by gender. According to the survey, almost half of women of this age reported having no religious affiliation, compared to 40 percent of men. The second most represented category was the catholic religion, fairly equally distributed amon men and women with each 41 and 43 percent, respectively.

France: Christians as percent of the total population: Pour cet indicateur, The Cline Center for Democracy fournit des données pour la France de 1960 à 2013. La valeur moyenne pour France pendant cette période était de 83.3 pour cent avec un minimum de 77.7 pour cent en 2013 et un maximum de 88.2 pour cent en 1960.

According to a survey conducted in 2019-2020, ** percent of France's inhabitants who were also immigrants declared themselves to be Muslims. On the other hand, a large majority of French inhabitants with no migrant background declared themselves to be Catholics, indeed there were ** percent of them who felt close to the Christian religion.

France: Muslims as percent of the total population: Pour cet indicateur, The Cline Center for Democracy fournit des données pour la France de 1960 à 2013. La valeur moyenne pour France pendant cette période était de 3.9 pour cent avec un minimum de 1 pour cent en 1960 et un maximum de 8 pour cent en 2012.

In 2021, more than *****of the anti-religious acts identified by the Ministry of the Interior concerned the Christian community. According to the source, these were mainly attacks on religious property. The second most affected community was the Jewish community in France (*****percent of anti-religious acts).

Results of official censuses of the single countries.

This statistic shows the estimate of the French on the proportion of Muslims living in France in 2018. It reveals that French people thought that there were 28 percent of the French population that was Muslim, while the real proportion of the Muslim population in France amounted to nine percent.

France: Sunni Muslims as percent of the total population: Pour cet indicateur, The Cline Center for Democracy fournit des données pour la France de à . La valeur moyenne pour France pendant cette période était de pour cent avec un minimum de pour cent en et un maximum de pour cent en .

Abstract

The World Values Survey (www.worldvaluessurvey.org) is a global network of social scientists studying changing values and their impact on social and political life, led by an international team of scholars, with the WVS association and secretariat headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. The survey, which started in 1981, seeks to use the most rigorous, high-quality research designs in each country. The WVS consists of nationally representative surveys conducted in almost 100 countries which contain almost 90 percent of the world’s population, using a common questionnaire. The WVS is the largest non-commercial, cross-national, time series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed, currently including interviews with almost 400,000 respondents. Moreover the WVS is the only academic study covering the full range of global variations, from very poor to very rich countries, in all of the world’s major cultural zones. The WVS seeks to help scientists and policy makers understand changes in the beliefs, values and motivations of people throughout the world. Thousands of political scientists, sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists and economists have used these data to analyze such topics as economic development, democratization, religion, gender equality, social capital, and subjective well-being. These data have also been widely used by government officials, journalists and students, and groups at the World Bank have analyzed the linkages between cultural factors and economic development.

Geographic coverage

The survey covers France.

Analysis unit

• Household
• Individual

Universe

The WVS for France covers national population aged 18 years and over, for both sexes.

Kind of data

Sample survey data [ssd]

Sampling procedure

Quota sample according to the following criteria: gender, age, profession of respondent, region, size of town. As in most of the countries involved, quota sampling had been used to select the respondents, a brief description of the methodology at the beginning of the methodological report seems to be useful. The respondent was selected using quota selection. Respondents were only selected if they matched the quotas given to the interviewers. Concerning substitution, any respondent fitting an appropriate quota profile could be interviewed instead of somebody with the same quotas, but who did not want to participate in the survey. Concerning stratification factors, region and size of town were used to design the sample and select appropriate sampling points.

The sample size for France is N=1001.

Mode of data collection

Face-to-face [f2f]

Research instrument

Quota relevant questions and questions necessary for statistical reasons had been asked at the beginning of the interview. Here the actual order: Statistical questions: Interview number, date of contact, type of contact, comments, number of quota sheet Quota relevant questions: Region ZEAT, commune, size of town, v235, v236, v237, v241, v241_1 (if people are currently not working, they had been asked, if they had a job in the past), v242, Then the order of the WVS questions strictly followed the master questionnaire. No additional questions had been inserted in the programmed questionnaire. The wording of v34 to v42 and v198 to v208 had been amended, because the original version was likely to offend minorities due to the special situation in France (protests in suburban areas etc.). After question v256 some additional statistical questions, such as duration of the interview, name and address of respondent were inserted.

Sampling error estimates

+/- 3,2%

According to a survey conducted in 2025, a large majority of the French respondents believed France was a country of Catholic culture and tradition. Indeed, there were ***percent of those surveyed thought that way.

This dataset captures the responses of over 1500 participants in France to an original online survey.

This online survey was designed by a group of experts in populism from Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED, Madrid), King's College London, Univerity of York, Universidad Diego Portales, Chile, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) and University of Liverpool.

The survey contains over a hundred items:

Socio-demographic items: education, age, religion, gender, employment

Populism items: including Akkerman et al.'s 2014 scale of populist attitudes, and a new items corresponding to a new multi-dimensional scale of populist attitudes (Olivas Osuna 2021; Olivas Osuna 2024; Olivas Osuna et al. forthcoming) (32 items)

Items related to trust on institutions and media (9 items)

Items related to satisfaction with the functioning of democracy, services and institutions (7 items)

Authoritarian values (Feldman and Stenner 1997)

Liberal democratic values (Zanotti and Rama 2021)

Authoritarian personality indexes (Hibbing 2020)

Conspiracy theories (3 items)

Nationalism (5 items)

Nativism (Young et al. 2019)

Affective polarisation

Support for political party (past vote and vote intention)

Left-right ideological self-placement

Other socio-political questions.

Fieldwork was conducted by YouGov Spain in February 2023. The surveys was part of the projects: Populism and Borders: a Supply- and Demand-Side Comparative Analysis of Discourses and Attitudes (PBSDCA) and Principal Investigator Interdisciplinary Comparative Project on Populism and Secessionism (ICPPS).

The uploaded files contain:

Detail of survey results (.sav)

Questionnaire (.doc)

Summary of results (.xls)

Fieldwork summary file (.pdf)(this file is in Spanish)