The 19th century is far from having accepted the materialist verdict of a number of 1793 « représentants en mission » (Parliamentary members sent to the provinces as political envoys) according to whom death was a « sommeil éternel » an eternal sleep, and the period for the self-interested exploitation of human credulity, over. On the contrary, the century is characterised by a surge of spirituality one of whose main manifestations consisted in a fervent religion of the dead. The latter expressed itself in various ways : intense family cult of tombs, a revival of the cult of Purgatory, and the birth of spiritualism. Thus it is the spiritualism of the century which constituted, in nineteenth century France, the real face of the « religion de la sortie de la religion » the religion of the end of religion (Marcel Gauchet) ; and the need to communicate with the after-life was all the more intense as its traditional representations had become problematical and as this uncertainty needed to be compensated for as family interaction became more emotional.