The funeral of Petit Émile will take place this Saturday, February 8 in Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume. Parents were considering a live retransmission of the ceremony on CNews, but they were forced to retract.
On July 8, 2023, little Émile disappeared. The two and a half year old toddler was seen last time around 5 p.m., near the second home of his grandparents, located in the Hameau des Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. Until Sunday, March 31. On this date, the Aix-en-Provence prosecution announces that “bones” corresponding to the body of the boy were found the day before near the Vernet. Since this macabre discovery, the parents of the child have tried to rebuild themselves. And twenty months after Emile’s death, they chose to bury it, near the place where he was seen for the last time.
But the Vernet municipality refused to access their request, reports Paris Match. Parents one day wishing to rest alongside their son, they would break the rules of the town which requests that an individual plot be granted to the boy. “I have 300 secondary residences here, imagine if all their owners requested burial,” justified François Balique, the mayor of Vernet, with the magazine.
Faced with this refusal, Emile’s parents were forced to turn to Bouilladisse, a town in Bouches-du-Rhône, to bury their son. Also according to information from Paris Match, the couple chose to celebrate the child’s funeral in the heart of the Sainte-Marie-Madeleine basilica, in Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, one of the most important religious buildings from Provence.
A place of choice, ideal for a live retransmission of the ceremony on television on CNews, this Saturday, February 8. The idea had been envisaged upstream by the parents of little Émile, before dying in the egg, according to Paris Match. The proposal did not receive the approval of one of the main ones concerned by this commemoration: the bishop. In addition, as the weekly specifies, this openness to the media would have contrasted with their desire to have an intimate and conventional mass, celebrated according to the former rite and led by a priest of the priestly fraternity of Saint-Pierre, a very traditionalist community .