What is Toussaint? All Saints’ Day in France

What is Toussaint?

Toussaint is short for la fête de tous les saints, the feast of all the saints. It is a Catholic holy day for every saint, the famous ones with their own day in the calendar and all the others. The Church has kept it on 1 November since the ninth century.

In France it is also a public holiday, one of the four religious feasts kept as holidays under Napoleon’s Concordat with the Church, with Christmas, the Ascension and the Assumption. Schools, banks and most offices are closed. Bakeries and many shops open, as on a Sunday.

Toussaint or the day of the dead?

Strictly, the dead have their own day: 2 November, le jour des morts, All Souls’ Day. Toussaint is for the saints. But 2 November is a working day, and the 1st is not, so the family visit to the cemetery happens on the 1st. Most French people use the word Toussaint for both.

For an American, this is the part that takes getting used to. Our late October is costumes and candy. The French version of the same week is quiet, practical and spent at the family grave.

Why chrysanthemums?

Because of 1919. For the first anniversary of the Armistice, on 11 November 1919, President Raymond Poincaré asked that every war memorial in France be decorated with flowers. The chrysanthemum was chosen: it flowers in autumn, it is cheap, and it survives the cold. From the memorials it moved to family graves, and from 11 November to Toussaint.

The flower itself came from China. A French naval captain, Pierre Blancard, brought the first cuttings to France in 1789.

The result is a rule worth knowing before you are invited to dinner in France: never bring chrysanthemums. However beautiful the pot, it says cemetery. Bring chocolates, or flowers of any other kind.

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What do the French do on Toussaint?

Many go to the cemetery, often the one in the town the family comes from, to clean the grave, put down a pot of chrysanthemums and see the cousins who came for the same reason. Then there is lunch. For families who are away for the school holidays, the visit happens on the way there or on the way back.

Fewer people go than before. In surveys by the French funeral federation and the research centre Crédoc, the share of French people who went to the cemetery on 1 November as a habit fell from 45 percent in 2007 to 39 percent in 2014. Cremation, now more than a third of funerals, and families living far apart are the usual explanations. The flowers are still bought: in 2023, nearly four million French households bought plants for Toussaint, and 60 percent of them were chrysanthemums, according to a study for the horticulture federation Val’hor.

The Toussaint school holidays

French schools close for two weeks around Toussaint, and the break carries its name. In 2026 it runs from Saturday 17 October to Monday 2 November, the same dates in all three school zones of mainland France. Why two weeks in October, when American children have none: the French school calendar, explained.

Since 1 November 2026 is a Sunday, French workers get no extra day off this year. A French public holiday that falls on a weekend is simply lost. Classes start again on the Monday morning.

Toussaint and Halloween

They are the same story told from two sides. Halloween is All Hallows’ Eve, the evening before All Saints’ Day. The Americans kept the evening; the French kept the day.

Halloween did arrive in France, in the late 1990s, and it is still smaller there than here: some costumes, a few children at the door, very few decorated porches. The whole comparison is in is Halloween a thing in France.

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