For centuries, in the West, and more specifically in France, people would pray, hold processions, and turn to God to be bestowed with rain or fair weather. Then, at the end of the 19th century, these practices, if they did not disappear, no longer seemed legitimate. To explain this meteorological religiosity, we usually consider that it is the expression of a belief or a superstition which the development of a scientific culture is likely to have dispelled. This text shows that all these rituals acts, because they are socially established gestures, do not require any belief, and that their disappearance is due to a historical metamorphosis in the collective relation to weather which turns it into matter of a personal, idiosyncratic taste.