Between emotional values and functional values, what future for French parish churches? The Lyon-Saint-Étienne urban region questioned by Quebec’s “Plan Churches”

Résumé En

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the future of religious heritage has provoked serious consideration in the fields of law, history, architecture and heritage. The origin of this problem is explained both by the decline in traditional worship practices, essentially Catholic in France, from the 1960s onwards, and by the Church's lack of human and financial resources, which has resulted in the appearance of a veritable "religious desert". This process, related to society's secularisation, is expected to increase because of the likelihood of these two factors intensifying. If convents, monasteries, seminaries and other Catholic religious buildings have already been affected by this phenomenon, parish churches are now in turn losing their original use. Quebec has also experienced this same situation, but its historical and legal contexts have accelerated the transformation of churches, which in turn resulted in the establishment of a "Churches Plan" that tries to preserve church buildings by converting them.In this thesis, that pioneering programme is used in the Lyons - Saint-Etienne urban area, as a lens through which to read the French situation and as a tool for generating methods adapted to its specific context.The first part summarises the specific heritage and legal knowledge bases from Quebec and France concerning their parish churches, which is necessary for understanding the two contexts. First, Quebec's historical, legal and social context is detailed, in order to understand the source and applications of its "Churches Plan". Then we question the place of churches in the evolutionary notion of heritage, between local heritage and institutional heritage. Finally, we detail the specificities of the French legal regime, which governs the management of churches, in order to envisage their conversion.The second part is an observational study, which defines the territory and creates an inventory of the corpus of research. We first provide an inventory of 429 parish churches within the territory studied here. From an analysis of their transformations, we propose three major typologies ("historical", "19th century" and "20th century" churches). Using the cases of church conversions in our corpus, we analyse the degree of compatibility between their previous worship use and their new uses, and then formulate hypotheses relating architectural interventions for adaptative reuse to restoration theories. The third part is an action-research interventional study. Three representative case studies have been selected, one from each church typology: église de l’Assomption-de-la-Vierge de Montarcher ("historical church", rural area, Loire), église Saint-Nicolas de Givors ("19th-century church", urban area, Rhône) and église Notre-Dame-de-l'Espérance de Villeurbanne ("twentieth-century church", urban area, Rhône). For each case, a participatory approach has been set up with the municipality, inhabitants and associations, in order to propose conversion scenarios adapted to local needs.This work shows that the demolition of parish churches, widely perceived as a common good, threatens the transmission of local identities. It therefore seems essential to start a global reflection on the evolution of this heritage, one which takes into account territorial issues, citizens' demands and the architectural diversity of these buildings. We show that the architect, through both his sensitivity to the place and his technical, can play a central role in implementing of these reflection.