2023-10-31 23:01:02
With quiet steps, the police enter the corridor of the funeral home towards the coffin, a poplar wood chest on which an officer is preparing to place a seal with wax, always obligatory before a cremation. On the lid, a simple copper-effect plaque: “1944-2023”. The ceremony will take place in a few minutes at the Notre-Dame-et-Saint-Laurent collegiate church in Eu (Seine-Maritime). Two bearers from Hannedouche funeral directors retrieve the mortuary stretcher to roll it silently to the hearse. It was precisely the noise that gave René Hannedouche the idea to launch his funeral business.
At the end of the 1980s, René’s ambulance company prospered nicely in Abbeville (Somme). He works with his two sons, who don’t get along at all. One day, he attends “catastrophic funeral” : when the coffin is moved into the church, he hears a terrible squeak. “I told myself I could do better”, recalls the 89-year-old grandfather, retired for around fifteen years. Already, René has in mind leaving the ambulances to his eldest and taking the youngest, François, into the funeral home.
In 1991, he bought the house adjoining his ambulance garage to build a small funeral store. At a time when the dead were cared for at home or in hospital mortuary rooms, René and François decided to have two funeral homes. “In the region, we were the first to have it and to offer this service”says René proudly.
“Social know-how”
Initially, thanks to his two companies, René tinkered with the organization and “juggles ambulance staff”. The funeral home business eventually took hold; it now employs around twenty employees, spread across six agencies in the Somme and Seine-Maritime, who carry out body lifting, care, ceremonies and burials. Rémy and Hugo, François’ two sons, joined the company, after testing the profession by working, the summer they were 16, alongside marble workers in cemeteries.
In more than thirty years and three generations of undertakers, the Hannedouche have seen their activity structured. In 1993, a loi put an end to the municipal monopoly of the funeral service, gradually forcing them to professionalize their management of human resources. “Now, training is essential for administration”, explains François, the profession being regulated by strict conditions. But, he believes, “you can have your diploma and not succeed in the field”. Learning to live with death on a daily basis is not given to everyone. “You have to try and see if you can do it”continues François. Beyond diplomas, the Hannedouche expect from their employees “a skill”underlines Rémy.
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