Does the map really show all French churches that have been set on fire, vandalized or attacked in recent years?

Claim:

A map shows all the churches in France that have been “set on fire, vandalized or attacked in recent years.”

Evaluation:

A map purporting to show French churches that have been “destroyed,” “vandalized,” or “attacked” has been circulating on social media for years.

We’ve noticed that the map is often shared following major fires in French churches that make headlines around the world. For example, we first observed the map spreading on social media platforms after Notre Dame Cathedral caught fire in April 2019.

When a fire broke out on the spire of a French cathedral on July 11, 2024, which was later contained, the map spread again via social media posts.

When we investigated this claim in 2019, we came across posts blaming Muslims for the Notre Dame fire and linking the incident (which authorities reported at the time was likely an accident) to churches that had been vandalized in France shortly before.

Social media posts containing the claim continued to baselessly blame Muslims for the incidents documented on the map in 2024. One X-account commented on a post containing the map: “This is only going to get worse. These Islamists will burn down churches and then murder Christians and Jews.”

However, these claims were not true. In 2019, we discovered that this map came from christianophobie.fr, a website dedicated to tracking “christianophobial” acts in France and the rest of the world.

Although this image is often shared as if it showed all the churches “destroyed” in France, the map actually documents a wide range of nefarious activities – such as vandalism, theft and arson – that occurred in both churches and cemeteries over an apparent two-year period, namely 2017 and 2018.

It’s also worth noting that while this map documents some relatively serious crimes, such as arson or toppling church statues, many of these pins were related to graffiti-related incidents. We also found one pin that referred to a person simply disrupting a church service.

We have already verified other claims about French churches, such as whether photographs actually showed the real skull of Mary Magdalene in a golden reliquary.

Sources