Freedom of Religion or Belief · Spiritual Minorities · Global Advocacy
253 stories
Articles and interviews preserved from the Centre d'information et de conseil des nouvelles spiritualités (CICNS).
CICNS, the Centre d’information et de conseil des nouvelles spiritualités, described itself as an independent centre, open to the new spiritualities and to anyone wanting to inform themselves seriously about them. Among its stated objectives was ending the association between criminality and spiritual minorities, which it saw as a media-driven stigmatisation. It recognised that abuses of power, trust and weakness can exist within spiritual minorities as within any other group, and held that proven abuses must be dealt with by the justice system on the same footing as abuses of the same nature committed in other groups.
The pieces on this shelf — articles, case files and interviews — are republished in English translation, each citing its source at the foot of the post; the dated ones appeared between 2004 and 2014. They are preserved here so that English-language readers can consult what CICNS and its interviewees actually said. They are commentary of their moment — France’s cult controversy of the 2000s — and should be read as period documents, not as reporting on the present.
For a guide to this collection, grouped by voice, see the CICNS Interviews Guide.
Nineteen questions and answers in which the CICNS sets out, in its own English, what it does and does not claim: that abuses exist but are rare and are matters for the courts, that the word applied to spiritual minorities is the instrument of their stigmatisation, that brainwashing is a demagogic concept, and who exactly is behind the association.
Grenoble lawyer Jean-Pierre Joseph on how the word cult functions in French courtrooms: an accusation that needs no proof, that no judge goes to verify, and that turns ordinary choices into offences.
Guy Delaunay's long essay arguing that anti-cultism does not fight the cults but constructs the cult object, from Coupat's account of antiterrorism to the 2006 commission's 80,000-children figure that its own civil servants refuted on camera.
Éric Bouzou dissects the 19 September 2007 France 2 programme on cults and gurus as three manipulations in one show: the pretence of treating a social issue, the simulacrum of balance, and a set turned popular tribunal. A 2010 postscript notes the presenter's own fall.
CICNS's own anthology of its interview archive: Morelli on who awards the label, Duval on the French axis of evil, Baubérot on asking the manipulation question of everyone, lawyers Biro, Florand, Canonici, Pérollier and Joseph on the legal machinery, and a dozen more voices, in their spoken language.
Olivier Golinvaux's Québécois Libre essay on the French cult panic: from sequi and secare to Weber and Troeltsch, how the word was secularised into 'dangerousness', why the ten Gest criteria self-destruct, and what the State's hold on the market in beliefs really protects.
CICNS annotates the full text of Prime Minister Raffarin's 27 May 2005 circular, reading its abandonment of cult lists as a change of form that leaves the policy's intentions and intensity untouched.
CICNS's December 2009 letters to the Interior and Health ministers over Maître Picotin's Aquitaine exit counseling cell, tying it to the banned deprogramming lineage and asking what legal framework covers it. Unanswered as of April 2011.
Twenty letters sent in May and June 2009 to La Croix, Libération, AFP, France 2 and the rest of the media landscape that relayed the 2008 MIVILUDES report: the same request each time, that journalists carry the opinions they leave out, and a right of reply asked of France 2.
The full exchange: CICNS's requests for dialogue, the discriminations file, the copyright misattribution in the 2006 report, Roulet's replies, the withdrawn interview after Nathalie Luca's departure, and the account of the one meeting held.
Claude-Gérard Sarrazin's polemical epistemology lesson: acts of faith beneath scientific knowledge, measuring instruments that cannot measure what they deny, the placebo as unexplained process, and the argument from authority that rules the paranormal inadmissible.
CICNS contrasts the Amour et Miséricorde community, dissolved under media pressure after a Fenech visit, with France 24's respectful coverage of a Buddhist three-year retreat that would tick the same criteria.
Émile D'Albret dissects MIVILUDES council anthropologist Nathalie Luca's colloquium paper: a definition of the cult that studies the state's vulnerabilities, a Jonestown retold with five dead, and prevention as politics.
Sociologist Françoise Champion, co-editor of the reference volume Sectes et démocratie, interviewed in Les trois mondes: politicians who privately admit the phenomenon is marginal and publicly forget it, media that no longer know what religion is, and the case-by-case method that would depassion the debate.
Daniel Fradette, president of Montreal's CINR, interviewed in Les 3 mondes on the French exception seen from Quebec: a witch-hunt conducted in the name of rationality, a repressed religion-State dispute resurfacing, and the mediation experience Quebec could lend.
Claude-Gérard Sarrazin sets his own Quebec experiences, from the Mensa school project to the charismatic group that made him a 'sorcerer', against a history of the refusal of difference: Inquisition, Terror, Vichy, Hitler, Stalin, and today's secular fundamentalism.
The press interview in which the head of Eckankar Mauritius answers the accusations after the St Paul tragedy: one former member among the ten dead, medallions that prove nothing, a fifty-member group with a few chairs and books, and teachings that condemn suicide without reserve.
The complete archive of the CICNS's editorials from the founding letter of January 2005 to January 2008: a running, month-by-month primary record of the anti-cult scene as the association watched it, from the Hidalgo cult map and the Outreau shock to the third parliamentary commission, the FECRIS question and the Sarkozy laïcité debate.
A contributed essay from La Page Libérale, republished by the CICNS with an explicit disagreement note: Hervé Duray takes the parliamentary commission's seven cult indicators - mental destabilisation, exorbitant financial demands, indoctrination of children and the rest - and applies each one, point by point, to the French State itself, before dissecting the About-Picard extension of the abuse-of-weakness offence.
The CICNS's reading report on the 2004 Willaime and Amiotte-Suchet study of the Mulhouse Pentecostal assembly Mission du Plein Évangile - La Porte Ouverte Chrétienne: how a theological quarrel and some disappointed members were transformed, by the CCMM, the AVIPOC and a national anti-cult climate the sociologists call paranoid, into a full stigmatisation process, with long extracts on the semantic career of the word 'secte'.
CICNS reproduces the ministry's family-security advice sheet, which steers citizens to ADFI and CCMM and explains how to place a relative under guardianship, and annotates it as a state instruction manual for persecution.
Valérie Dole sets the masonic obediences' own descriptions of themselves - an initiatory order with rites, grades, secrecy, proselytism and a monthly slot on France Culture - beside the ten criteria of dangerousness applied to the spiritual minorities, and asks not that Freemasonry lose its treatment but that everyone be granted it.
The MIVILUDES secretary general tells trainee magistrates the word 'cult' is stigmatising, that membership of a minority of conviction is no dérive sectaire, and that most of Europe handles the matter with ordinary law.
The outgoing UNADFI president tells Technikart in 2001 that people now see cults everywhere, that the Steiner schools her grandchildren attend are wrongly catalogued, and that she is leaving as more dogmatic voices arrive.
CICNS reads the 2009 book in which a TF1 news executive writes in the first person as a deceased woman, against the 80-page record of the appeal trial that acquitted the doctor the book targets, and against the journalists' charter its author signed.
The CICNS presents and criticises the Info-Secte book by Mike Kropveld and Marie-Andrée Pelland - the most balanced French-language treatment it has found, and still, it argues, marked by cult-phobia - then reprints long extracts on why people join groups, on Quebec's law of religious freedom, and on the difference between a good guru and an infantilising, abusing or swindling one.
Valérie Dole's sourced inquiry into forced psychiatric commitment in France: 52,000 forced hospitalisations in 2000, the I3P infirmary operating outside the law, and the ministry advice that ties guardianship to the cult accusation.
From the Indian Removal Act and the demonic Indian carved into the Capitol, through McCarthyism and Peter Watkins's Punishment Park, to a Father Christmas whose red hat is swapped for a turban: the CICNS traces one mechanism of manufactured hatred and asks what it is doing today to the spiritual minorities.
Éric Bouzou surveys the storm around Sarkozy's Latran and Riyadh speeches and the Mignon 'non-problem' episode, from Baubérot and Debray to the Protestant federation, and asks why France cannot debate laïcité calmly.
CICNS's running commentary on the parliamentary channel's October 2011 report marking ten years of the About-Picard law: Waco and Solar Temple images out of context, a poll figure misattributed to Ipsos, an ongoing trial prejudged, and 'mental manipulation' presented as technical science.
A review from the Revue canadienne de criminologie et de justice pénale of the 2001 Montreal volume: Jean-François Mayer on the researcher caught between public security and science, Alain Bouchard on how the media metaphorise the Raëlians, Jean Duhaime on religious diversity in the Canadian armed forces, and a legal chapter finding French law more nuanced case by case than its public policy suggests.
The anthropologist who resigned from the MIVILUDES steering council argues that a group's dangerousness is read from a state's symbolic frontiers rather than from the group itself: the same movements, a different threat in each country. Long extracts on Germany's refusal to publish a list, Britain's case-by-case approach and the Accoyer witness law, with the CICNS's own commentary of March 2009.
A condensed reading of Un ethnologue au Mandarom: the only French ethnologist to have lived inside the group recounts the CNRS letter warning that his relativism might banalise it, a journal's demand that he not say the rumour was unfounded and that he audit the group's finances, a university refusing his colloquium, and what he actually found on the accusations of confined children, drugs and rape.
Éric Bouzou's enquiry into the France 2 hidden-camera programme Les infiltrés: why CICNS declined the panel, the three-to-one ratio of anti-cult voices, and what Chomsky, Bourdieu and the profession's own critics say about a journalism that cries wolf.
Jean-Luc Delfin's essay from the magazine Les trois mondes: why nothing is more opposed to the tempo of the media than a spiritual path, how cult coverage recycles anti-cult files without verification, and what Zola knew about buried truth.
André Tarassi takes the ADFI's own bulletin editorial of late 2003 line by line: the follower who says he is free proves he is not, the brainwashing that is selective enough to leave him absolutely normal before a judge, the cult compared to a drug dealer and a pimp so that no mediation need ever be attempted - and the Camus quotation on true dialogue with which the editorial closes.
CICNS reviews Lionel Mariani's IEP thesis on French political responses to the cult question, saluting its balance while contesting its acceptance of the intrinsic-dangerousness frame and its refusal of the word 'hardening'.
Éric Bouzou reads the MIVILUDES guide for local authorities as a paranoid manual that treats the 'cult movement' as an omnipresent enemy and legal protections as pitfalls, quoting the guide against itself.
Laurent Ladouce's history of thirty years of his movement in France, introduced by CICNS: how Ouest-France coined 'la secte Moon' in 1975, how Boyer's 'Empire Moon' replaced it under Mitterrand, and how brainwashing, deprogramming and State harassment mirrored the thing they denounced.
Anne Morelli, historian of religions at the ULB, recounts from the inside how a France 2 'debate' on cults was built: names banned, invited witnesses barred at the MIVILUDES's request, a guest walked off the set, and her own microphone switched off.
The historian of Christianity who served as an expert to the parliamentary commission sets religions and cults side by side term for term - priest and guru, catechesis and indoctrination - and finds no objective criterion separating them: on work, money, sexuality, conversion, the courts, politics and harmfulness measured in deaths.
CICNS documents the October 2009 MIVILUDES visit to an ecumenical monastery in Ille-et-Vilaine, reproducing the residents' letter to their prefect describing an intrusion conducted with journalists in tow.
CICNS's reading digest of Eric Forgues's essay: page by page, how Quebec's French-language press covered the new age from outside, as catch-all, plague and infiltration, and what that says about an elite estranged from a quarter of its readership.
Valérie Dole documents the 1998 law that made home education 'exceptional' in France: the parliamentary session verbatim, the annual inspections and mayoral inquiries it created, and the cult panic that carried it unanimously.
CICNS reads the report's custody case-law study against its missing context: judges writing 'cult' into their reasoning, divorce accusations as windfall, and the 80,000-children figure quietly absent from the mission's own pages.
When France's most-watched soap ran a ten-week cult storyline in 2008, CICNS traced the plot beat by beat: every anti-cult archetype rendered as realism, down to a judge doing something no French judge can legally do.
CICNS's 2009 assessment turns Roulet's own exit balance sheet against the mission: no credible victim inquiry ever done, discriminations institutionalised, the secular pact breached by doctrine evaluation, and a groundswell misread.
Baubérot and Milot's ASSR 2002 discussion of Hervieu-Léger's book: the cult fight as public-hygiene campaign, the allergy to pluralism behind French regulation, and the Canadian counter-model where ordinary law suffices.
CICNS scores the 2007 second-round candidates on spiritual liberty: Sarkozy's book against his muscular formulas, Royal's 1999 anti-cult school plan and her ADFI-lawyer spokesman. Neither answered the questionnaire.
A chapter reprinted from the lawyer Jean-Pierre Joseph's book, arguing that the anti-cult campaign exists to neutralise anyone - farmer, craftsman, homeopath, agrarian community - who escapes a centralised economy: with a detailed account of how television reports are edited to manufacture menace, and a six-point indictment of the 1995 parliamentary commission that classified 172 movements in fifty minutes.
Claude-Gérard Sarrazin's chapter on the ontological frontier between those who admit only matter and those who admit more: how the free-thinkers were right against religious hegemony, and how their heirs, he argues, are now taking up the torch of the fundamentalists they defeated - by refusing publication, by dismissing intelligence tests, and finally by curtailing the right to live according to one's conscience.
Alain Bouchard, sociologist of religion at Université Laval, on the 'religiously correct': the implicit norm that religion be private, rational and undemonstrative, and how the mediatised church and the mediatised cult are its two mirror images in Quebec.
Raphaël Verrier's lmsi.net essay dismantles the ten Renseignements Généraux criteria behind the Guyard list one by one, asks why Opus Dei escaped it, and reads the About-Picard bill as a menace to the associative world itself.
Part one of the CICNS dossier on France's political police: the 1995 order article by article with plain-language glosses, the three files, the wiretap cards marked Secret Source, and how informers are recruited and paid.
Part two of the CICNS dossier on France's political police: the daily minister's dossier, the unheaded white notes, the Salamandre election simulator, the covert OCSS polling office, and the cult database that became a reference.
Extracts from former RG officer Patrick Rougelet's book: the unprovable white notes, 53,000 occult journalist files, the rushed 1995 cult report copied from the gendarmes, and why he concludes the service cannot be reformed.
Jean-Luc Delfin reads rumour as a survival of the sacrificial ritual: an archaic mechanism whose three phases - derealisation, fascination, sacrifice - map onto Edgar Morin's incubation, propagation and metastasis, and whose modern form is the media lynching. With Girard, Lempert, Voyé and Rosnow, and a note on what it does to those who cannot recover from it.
CICNS's page-cited extracts from the sitting minister's 2004 book: no wave of dérives sectaires, a witch-hunt gone too far at times, ordinary criminal law as the test, and a positive laïcité as the liberty to hope.
CICNS assembles the record in the actors' own words: Fenech affirming and denying the fight against cults in the same fortnight, ministers promising a pitiless hunt, and journalists dropping the official euphemism entirely.
Extracts from a fiercely polemical account of the About-Picard law and the climate that produced it: a text at once very precise and very vague, the two execrable faces of French laïcité, the checklist of habits that will mark a relative as being under a cult's hold, and the parliamentary debate in which one deputy's own warnings dissolve into reassurance.
A neighbour who would kill Jehovah's Witnesses in the street, bombs outside a church, an ADFI representative saying on Europe 1 that she understands people who plant them: the CICNS takes the measure of twenty years of conditioning, then answers, one by one, the objections its own readers send in - the cults exist all the same, there are dangerous groups, I have a right to protect my children.
An interview with the Lille psycho-sociologist on the church-sect distinction, on why there is no legal definition of a sect and why a pluralist State should not supply one, on the five sociological conditions that lead someone into a minority religious group, and on the turnover that sees followers stay four or five years.
Extracts from La suite dans les idées of 7 July 2009: how the point of support for naming a cult shifted from the Bible to mental manipulation, and with it who does the naming; the ethnologist of witchcraft on a phenomenon constituted entirely by its accusers; the jurist on a State that protects citizens from their own choices; and the finding that the article introduced to fight the cults is applied almost everywhere except to them.
Historian Paul Airiau's paper from the MIVILUDES 'Sectes et laïcité' seminar: a BnF catalogue chronology of the cult question, the associations and laws that built it, and laïcité arriving late, partly as an answer to America.
Christian Decoeur turns the argument from French specificity back on itself: from the Chevalier de La Barre beheaded for keeping his hat on to two schoolgirls expelled for keeping their scarves on, and through a catalogue of what that specificity has actually produced - record psychotropic consumption, a justice system under the executive, a medicine that hurls anathemas, and a list of therapies that all end at the same guillotine word.
Régis Dericquebourg's 1998 interview with the socialist mayor of Lens: an atheist's case for lending the municipal stadium to a minority the ADFI wanted banned, resting on Guy Mollet and the plain rule of law.
The CICNS's reading report on Erner's study of victimism, with long extracts: the victim as a social category rather than a biological fact, suffering as a secularised sacredness, moral harassment and the psychologisation of pain, and the argument that compassion, precious in private life, is at best an imposture as a principle of government - read against a French anti-cult policy built entirely on the victim's account.
Landmark Education's reply to the May 2004 Pièces à Conviction broadcast, as compiled by CICNS: the unnotified listing it could never be struck off, the promises France 3 made and broke, the experts the channel declined to consult, and a viewer's comment from the channel's own forum.
Ten deaths in Mauritius in August 2004, two EK medallions, and within days a whole religious minority under suspicion: Emile d'Albret traces how the French anti-cult template travelled to the Indian Ocean press, and defends nothing but the presumption of innocence.
CICNS's running dossier on four years of French cult television: C dans l'air, the Landmark exposé, Karl Zéro, Teva, Jonestown and Waco documentaries, and the full email exchange in which a Ça se discute journalist promised an open debate that never was.
Two education professionals write to CICNS about the MIVILUDES minors guide: a support-network teacher who finds the targeted families the least worrying third, and a principal who in 33 years found nothing.
Régis Dericquebourg's CESNUR 2003 Vilnius paper: the 1905 framework, the Vivien and Guyard reports, the About-Picard law, the new mission's contested composition, and what fifteen minority groups expected of the right.
An anonymous dossier republished by the CICNS setting out five cases attributed to France's ADFI/UNADFI anti-cult network, from a 1982 suicide to the 2000 death of Doctor Yves Jullien.
A dossier on France's ADFI/UNADFI anti-cult network republished by the CICNS, gathering an ex-member's testimony, book extracts by Paturel, Barrucand and Anne Morelli, and two 1999 newspaper reports.
CICNS's 28,000-word annotated dossier on the 2006 French parliamentary commission on cults and minors, covering eleven hearings from MIVILUDES president Jean-Michel Roulet to the Machelon report.
CICNS's twelve-part commentary on Serge Blisko's November 2012 Senate hearing: the MIVILUDES's rhetoric, the About-Picard Act's record of convictions, and the child-victim figures its president could not substantiate.
CICNS profile of the CCMM, the anti-cult association founded in 1981 by Roger Ikor, with quotations from Ikor's own articles and speeches of the 1980s.
Rudolf Vis's memorandum to the Parliamentary Assembly arguing against consultative status for FECRIS, republished with a CICNS introduction, and taking each of the federation's six stated objectives in turn.
CICNS fact-check of Georges Fenech's 30 October 2012 Senate hearing: 13 million claimed victims against the Justice Ministry's own count of 192 reports over three years.
The head of France's central bureau of religious affairs tells the 2006 parliamentary commission on cults and childhood that he has no evidence of public-order disturbance, and warns that stigmatisation may itself become one.
CICNS on the French parliamentary cult reports from Vivien (1983) onwards: official texts deny them normative value, yet courts, administrations and the media use them constantly.
Éric Bouzou's section-by-section commentary on the MIVILUDES president's 2008 report to the Prime Minister, from its opening word "teratology" to its unfounded child-victim figures.
CICNS on the 2013 Senate commission on cults and health: four months in, not one targeted practitioner had been heard, while officials asserted victim numbers they admitted they could not support.
CICNS's point-by-point rebuttal of the 19 December 2006 presentation of the French parliamentary report on cults and children, including the Tabitha's Place visit and the 40,000-80,000 figure.
CICNS's timecoded analysis of Jean-Pierre Jougla's 6 November 2012 Senate testimony, counting his disqualifying terms and answering each passage of his argument.
CICNS commentary on the 2013 French Senate hearings of naturopaths, kinesiologists and energy healers, arguing that practitioners who adopt anti-cult language against each other feed the repression.
The full text of Philippe Vuilque's 2006 resolution creating the parliamentary commission on cults and minors, annotated line by line by the CICNS, with the Assembly debate that adopted it unanimously.
CICNS walks through the 2004 MIVILUDES guide for civil servants: criteria of dangerousness with no legal basis, and 192 of 54,000 child-welfare files.
CICNS takes apart the 2010 MIVILUDES guide on minors: the unfounded 50,000 child victims, "mental hold" as pseudo-science, and criteria that fit any family.
Emile D'Albret reads the 2001 MILS guide for mayors as a manual for using planning, tax and schooling law against spiritual minorities.
CICNS reads the 2010 MIVILUDES guide on protecting minors and finds a doctrine that asks officials to detect a dérive sectaire before it exists: risk in place of established harm.
CICNS on the MIVILUDES 2010 annual report: the "2012" apocalypse threat, resettlement in the countryside as a new cult indicator, and alternative medicine as danger.
CICNS presents extracts from the MIVILUDES university seminar: Danièle Hervieu-Léger on three lines of dérive, and Jean Baubérot on the rhetoric of the Republic under threat.
Patrick Le Berre turns the nine "cult mechanisms" back on MIVILUDES itself, counting the 2005 report's conflations, defamations and abuses of dominant position.
André Tarassi on the MIVILUDES 2005 report, which abandoned the pledge not to name groups and became an inventory of spiritual minorities and their "dangers".
André Tarassi on the MIVILUDES 2004 report: professional secrecy urged towards denunciation, the About-Picard law's nil record, and doctrine equated with danger.
Two CICNS commentaries on the MIVILUDES 2006 annual report: André Tarassi on the mission's academic screen, Éric Bouzou on its psychology of "mental hold".
Michel de Courtelle's long reading of the MIVILUDES 2006 report, with the Leschi and Dupuis hearings that put 8 cult-linked cases against 19,000 child reports.
André Tarassi's line-by-line CICNS commentary on the first MIVILUDES annual report, from the "consensus" not to be broken to the criteria of dangerousness.
Denis Mathieu's chapter-by-chapter digest of the 234-page MIVILUDES 2007 report: 41 referrals since 2005, the OSCE chapter, and a tour of central Europe.
Éric Bouzou on the MIVILUDES 2007 report: the mission cast as martyr, preterition as method, mental hold as an argument, and the missing figures.
CICNS commentary on the MIVILUDES 2009 annual report: Fenech's claim of "effectiveness", a long study of shamanism, and the mission's attack on judges.
Michel de Courtelle measures the MIVILUDES 2007 report against its predecessors and takes apart at length its chapter on "induced false memories".
CICNS on the MIVILUDES 2008 report: figures Fenech gave the press that the report never printed, and the Interior Ministry's circular against lists.
CICNS case file on the 2005 suit before the Paris tribunal de grande instance seeking the dissolution of the anti-cult association UNADFI, with press coverage of the hearings and the judgment.
CICNS case file on the 2005 Brussels appeal ruling that condemned the Belgian State for damaging the image of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in its 1997 parliamentary cult report.
CICNS dossier of violent police and gendarmerie raids on spiritual minorities in France from 1989 to 2011 (Longo Maï, The Family, Beljanski, Tabitha's Place, the Mandarom and others), with CICNS's advice to victims.
Martine Lagattier's account in Alternative santé - l'impatient of the February 2000 defamation trial of deputy Jacques Guyard, sued by the Federation of Steiner Schools, the Mercure fédéral and the NEF over the 1999 parliamentary cult report.
CICNS legal analysis of the Guyard and Brard rulings, in which French courts found defamation of movements labelled cults proven yet excused it under the good-faith doctrine.
CICNS case file on Dr Yves Jullien, who took his own life in March 2000 after a cult rumor and administrative harassment closed his Epinoïa centre at l'Isle-sur-Serein.
CICNS's 2012 follow-up on the Robert Lé Dinh appeal trial: UNADFI as civil party, the About-Picard law, psychological subjection, and the media's treatment of the case.
CICNS commentary on the 2010 assize trial of Robert Lé Dinh, reproducing the defence pleadings of Maîtres Lebonjour and Martial on how the cult postulate shapes French courtrooms.
CICNS case file on the 20 November 2000 raid by sixty armed gendarmes on the small Terranova spiritual community in the Aveyron, and the five years of surveillance, custody and trial that framed it.
The full text of the 2010 criminal complaint filed by the Moulin des Vallées community against MIVILUDES president Georges Fenech over an unannounced 2009 raid conducted with undisclosed journalists.
A 2005 CICNS member's analysis of the Arnaud Mussy / Néo-Phare appeal verdict, the first application of the About-Picard law, and the role of expert witness Jean-Marie Abgrall.
A 2005 CICNS investigation into French banks jointly refusing accounts to a spiritual association, the legal right to an account, and the role of FATF blacklists, TRACFIN and the DGCCRF.
CAP-LC's 2003 review of Strasbourg lawyer Laurent Hincker's book on rumour-driven prosecutions of spiritual movements, from the Guyard anthroposophy defamation case to a Hindu movement destroyed by press inventions.
CICNS's dossier on the Gettliffe/Grant custody affair (2001-2009): the annotated Thémis-Phonetag blog debate over Nathalie Gettliffe's removal of her children from Canada, the court rulings on both sides of the Atlantic, and the October 2010 addendum.
CICNS's case file on Dr Gérard Guéniot: the 2006 Lille conviction, the full 2009 Douai appeal acquittal, and how the media, ADFI/UNADFI and the MIVILUDES treated the 'Grail' cult affair.
CICNS's press dossier on the Order of the Solar Temple trial: Michel Tabachnik's 2001 acquittal and 2006 appeal acquittal, the victims' families' fight to reopen the investigation, and the unanswered questions around the 74 deaths.
Press coverage, the ECHR Registrar's communiqué and Christian Paturel's own testimony on Paturel v France (22 December 2005), in which Strasbourg unanimously found that his French defamation conviction over an anti-cult book violated Article 10.
CICNS dossier on deputy Jean-Pierre Brard's legal entanglements: his defamation conviction over the Jehovah's Witnesses upheld in cassation, the Chouraqui and Jasmeen rulings, and his clashes with the Protestant federations.
Three 2007 French rulings compiled by CICNS: Catherine Picard's defamation conviction over the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Cour de cassation finding Fournier and Picard's book defamatory towards AMORC, and the dismissal of Anne Hidalgo's suit against Christian Cotten.
CICNS's compiled case file on the Jehovah's Witnesses in France: the Picard and Brard defamation convictions, the 45-million-euro tax battle, the court-ordered disclosure of the intelligence files behind the 1996 cult list, and local hostility to their places of worship.
CICNS's chronology of the Beatitudes community affair: the complaints and judicial proceedings, MIVILUDES's cautious handling, and the media's role in building the group's negative image.
Starting from the 2007 Lisieux 'Parc d'accueil' affair, CICNS asks whether French justice can remain independent of rumor, media pressure and political influence, with extracts from Charles Debbasch and Jean-Louis Nadal.
Patrice Rolland's scholarly anatomy of the About-Picard law's legislative debate: a law explicitly directed against cults that never names or defines them, and what that paradox reveals about French fear of the cult phenomenon.
Engineer and CICNS member Éric Bouzou surveys how French courts handle 'cult' cases, drawing on Vincente Fortier's case-law study and testimony from Raphaël Liogier and Laurent Hincker.
Marseille lawyer Philippe Perollier's clause-by-clause commentary on France's 2001 About-Picard law: how the abandoned offence of mental manipulation returned as abuse of weakness, and the power the law's vagueness hands to the judges.
A mother's first-person account of losing custody of her two daughters after her ex-husband, backed by an anti-cult association, branded her community, the Gens de Bernard, a cult.
CICNS opens the thousand-page archive of Maître Christian Paturel, the lawyer who prevailed over UNADFI at the European Court of Human Rights, starting with the 1993 mass removal of 33 children from 'La Famille'.
From Maître Paturel's archives, CICNS re-examines the 1996 Gest-Guyard parliamentary report on cults: its factual blunders, its unsourced claim of 'numerous illegalities', and the fifteen court cases cited in its support.
Drawing on file 45 of Maître Paturel's archives and historian Pierre Barrucand's 1996 study, CICNS traces the parallel between pre-war anti-Jewish caricatures and 1990s anti-cult imagery, and dissects the reflex answer 'I am not a cult'.
In this interview extract from his archives, Maître Christian Paturel recounts the gendarmerie operation at the Horus agrarian community and how he came to defend more than three thousand conscientious objectors, most of them Jehovah's Witnesses.
CICNS's legal guide to police raids, searches and garde à vue custody as experienced by spiritual minorities in France, with statutory rules, time limits and first-hand raid testimony.
Guy Delaunay's 2007 defense dossier on psychoanalyst Claude David, jailed amid cult-manipulation accusations, tracing the Fondation PI's history, the rumor campaigns against it, and the machinery of the French anti-cult fight.
CICNS analysis of McCarthyism's surveillance machinery and civil liberties abuses, drawn as a historical parallel to France's anti-cult campaign.
The CICNS's own statement of what it is, why it was formed, and what its members pledge. Republished as provenance for the CICNS material archived on this site.
English translation of the full CICNS interview with writer Christiane Singer (Paris, May 2006): society as socially programmed hypnosis, the French anti-cult witch-hunt, and spiritual experience as an inalienable freedom.
19 November 2014
Part 2 of the CICNS documentary: the 2006 'Enfance volée' report tested against its own hearings, and testimony from people accused of being in cults.
16 August 2014
Éric Bouzou argues the state's own dérive sectaire category is incoherent: applied evenhandedly it would indict the family, the workplace and the school first.
1 August 2013
Asked what spirituality means, the French answer moral values, love, the inner life and the beauty of nature; ninety per cent say they still feel wonder. André Tarassi sets those survey findings beside a public conversation in which the places where enchantment is sought are described as dangerous, and beside the record mistrust the same public reports towards those doing the describing.
1 July 2013
Part 1 of the 2013 CICNS interview with sociologist Raphaël Liogier, in English: the struggle inside the French State between the field ministries and the laïcité ideologues at Matignon, and the proposal of an independent observatory of spiritual minorities.
1 July 2013
Part 2 of the 2013 CICNS interview with sociologist Raphaël Liogier, in English: how asking why people believe gets read on French television as siding with evil, and the political cost Emmanuelle Mignon paid for questioning the anti-cult consensus.
1 July 2013
Part 3 of the 2013 CICNS interview with sociologist Raphaël Liogier, in English: why the cults debate is impossible on television. Anti-cult positioning is a cost-free political resource, and the thirty-second format forbids nuance.
1 July 2013
Part 4 of the 2013 CICNS interview with sociologist Raphaël Liogier, in English: his individuo-globalism thesis — every age rests on a mythic ground, secularization does not mean less religion, and new religious movements draw on the emerging individual-global mythic soil.
1 July 2013
English translation of the 2012 CICNS health interview with journalist Sylvie Simon on the "cult" label, non-conventional medicine, and the media in France.
22 January 2013
English translation of the CICNS interview with French journalist Ivan Rioufol on France's anti-cult campaign, MIVILUDES figures and media conformism.
21 January 2013
English translation of the CICNS interview with Robert Ménard, co-founder of Reporters sans frontières, on French newsrooms, press freedom and the treatment of "cults".
19 December 2012
English translation of the CICNS interview with Caroline Yaffée, a Drôme mayor, on the 'cult' label, alternative medicine and Steiner schooling in France.
5 November 2012
English translation of the CICNS interview with writer Gilles Farcet: media-fed fear of "cults", the ambiguity of mental manipulation, and spiritual freedom.
5 November 2012
English translation of the CICNS interview with Patrick Le Berre, a former CEA research scientist, on the "cult" rumour and harassment he says he endured.
5 November 2012
Denis Mathieu dissects the 2011 MIVILUDES/IPSOS poll and Georges Fenech's use of it, arguing that thirty years of state and media anti-cult propaganda have installed a suspicion no study, statistic or court record supports.
1 October 2012
CICNS reviews Fenech's 2012 apocalypse book and walks through his Figaro interview question by question, noting the unquantified victim count and the journalist's silence at each unproven claim.
1 September 2012
CICNS sets Fenech's cordial account of his 2011 meeting with Bishop Konstantin Bendas against the bishop's own published verdict: armed guards, gold watches, undefined menaces, and a translator's parting line.
1 July 2012
The CICNS reads the victimologist's 2012 book on abuse of weakness and finds a chapter on the hold of the cults that reproduces the MIVILUDES's own checklist. It tests each criterion against the army, the monastery, the Buddhist retreat and the CAC 40 company, and proposes self-knowledge in place of the victim-manipulator model.
1 June 2012
CICNS reads the January 2012 bulletin of France's medical council: a yoga-class cover captioned as danger, the Solar Temple invoked for a health dossier, and 258,000 copies met with silence.
1 April 2012
André Tarassi's Reflets article: an exclusive laïcité, a mission run like a militant grouplet, figures that swing from 8 children a year to 80,000 in danger, and the case for a neutral observatory instead.
1 April 2012
The CICNS's March 2012 reading report on Jean Baubérot's account of the new laïcité - a tele-visual construction, a magic word rebaptising a debate on Islam - accompanied by long extracts, and by two criticisms: the spiritual minorities are never mentioned, and without that omission the book's left-right thesis would not hold.
1 March 2012
CICNS prices a day of 'new spirituality' training against approved providers and the MIVILUDES's own 150 € course, finding the accused groups charge a fraction of what State-approved training bodies do.
1 February 2012
CICNS reconstructs the arithmetic behind Fenech's claim that 1,200 to 1,500 training bodies are cult-linked, and sets it against the DGEFP's own controls: almost 800 checks, one body assimilable to a cult.
1 February 2012
Éric Bouzou's history of the terminology shifts from MILS to MIVILUDES, the new subjection-based definition of dérive sectaire, the online denunciation form, and why a few hundred activists outweigh half a million citizens.
1 February 2012
CICNS's year-by-year chronicle of the anti-cult struggle in France: laws, parliamentary reports, court cases and media campaigns from 1893 to the 2010s.
21 December 2011
English translation of Jean Baubérot's address at the CICNS colloquium: laïcité's Gallican roots, the 1905 law, medicine and school as sites of conflict with minorities of conviction, and the risk of charismatic domination everywhere.
24 November 2011
CICNS reads the Interior Minister's 2011 compendium of laïcité law: ten pages on dérives sectaires, an undefined 'cult movement' at their centre, and questions Guéant is never asked about the About-Picard law and the MIVILUDES list.
1 November 2011
English translation of a CICNS-published talk on laïcité as "neutralizing neutrality", the 1905 law, and the French state's treatment of "cults".
29 October 2011
English translation of Raphaël Liogier's round-table extract at the CICNS colloquium: the arbitrary versus the authoritarian, unenforceable-yet-enforced parliamentary reports, and his first-hand account of testifying as an expert in a Soka Gakkai discrimination case.
29 October 2011
English translation of historian Anne Morelli's CICNS round-table remarks on the double standard between "cults" and recognised religions.
28 October 2011
In 1960 the Mirguet amendment classed homosexuality among the social scourges, and an official repression followed that lasted until 1981. The CICNS sets that forgotten episode beside the 1995 Gest-Guyard report's use of the same word, and the 2004 description of cult membership as a pathology to be treated with or without consent.
1 September 2011
CICNS's annotated digest of the Luca colloquium volume: Willaime, Rolland and the MIVILUDES on the French model, the Belgian CIAOSN and Swiss CIC compared, Barker on Britain, and the exchanges where CICNS pressed from the floor.
1 August 2011
A French doula's first-person account of a two-hour judicial-police questioning in Montpellier over suspected 'dérive sectaire' — CICNS testimony in English.
4 July 2011
A June 2011 synthesis of what laïcité is: the four principles of Baubérot and Milot, Milot's five types, whom it binds, how it differs from secularisation, the 1905 and 2004 laws, the Mexican precedent - then the test applied to the treatment of the spiritual minorities, principle by principle.
1 June 2011
CICNS's June 2011 survey of the coverage of the 2010 MIVILUDES report, outlet by outlet: France Inter's chill down the spine, the one interviewer who pushed back (the full Fenech/Ménard exchange transcribed), an LCP panel with no other side, and the report's own annex admitting Europe sees no problem.
1 June 2011
CICNS's December 2010 letter to the French broadcasting regulator over a France 2 programme on people 'snatched by a cult': the unnamed-but-recognisable subterfuge, the 500,000-follower figure, and the association's May 2011 commentary on the reply it received.
1 May 2011
English translation of the short version of the 2011 CICNS documentary on France's anti-cult apparatus, the 2006 parliamentary inquiry and its unheard victims.
29 April 2011
First half of Raphaël Liogier's talk at the CICNS colloquium, in English: how Western Buddhism became a good religion while Soka Gakkai did not, three definitions of the word cult, and laïcité as a contested neutrality caught in a struggle of classifications.
19 April 2011
Second half of Raphaël Liogier's talk at the CICNS colloquium, in English: liberty defined from above (Rousseau vs Locke), education and medicine as the privileged conflict domains, the Longo Maï case, and the declamatory function of the anti-cult law.
19 April 2011
English translation of Laurent Hincker's address at the CICNS colloquium: defamation trials over the word 'cult', the 1995 criteria, the About-Picard law.
4 April 2011
André Tarassi's March 2011 stocktaking of the association's first seven years, and the strategic turn it announces: dialogue with the authorities having gone unanswered, 'stop complaining, file complaints' becomes the new direction.
1 March 2011
The CICNS reads the proceedings of a GEMPPI colloquium on refusals of care for ideological causes and finds the professionals answering the associations' question in the negative: a prison psychiatrist explains that the obligation to undergo care cannot apply and that religious refusal is not a psychiatric pathology, and the National Consultative Ethics Committee's opinion 87 holds that one has the right to be mad so long as that madness harms no one else.
1 March 2011
CICNS reads a January 2011 LCP broadcast against itself: Georges Fenech places dependence at the heart of the dérive sectaire, Serge Hefez places it at the heart of healing, and the state diploma stands in for ethics. With a partial transcript of the exchange.
1 February 2011
A CICNS chronology of the DISA affair: three child-welfare educators accused of cult behaviour in 2004, one imprisoned for three months, cleared by a discharge in 2010 after two SRPJ officers admitted inventing their confessions.
1 October 2010
Éric Bouzou traces the notion from the CIA's failed behaviourist experiments and Schein and Lifton's refutation, through Margaret Singer's defeat in an American court, to its French rebirth as mental manipulation and then as the psychological subjection written into the About-Picard law, and sets out the three questions the MIVILUDES has never answered.
1 September 2010
André Tarassi reads Sarah Chiche's novel L'emprise as a safe bet on the anti-cult literary wave, then turns to the phrase that leapt out at him, a victim 'emptied of her me', and asks what the modern self being protected from the cults actually is.
1 August 2010
Denis Mathieu on the unnamed scientism in French education - Comte, Renan, the popular-science magazines - and how it lends tacit authority to anti-cult journalism: a close reading of one investigation that lists facts under the heading "the facts" and demonstrates nothing, and of a Sciences et Avenir dossier that treats scholarly caution as mere academic reserve.
1 August 2010
Raphaël Liogier's phrase for how intellectuals concede the anti-cult case without evidence. The CICNS answers it with a reasoning by the absurd - dissolve the two or three groups everyone names, and the fight is still unjustified - and then applies the MIVILUDES's own criteria of dérives sectaires, point by point, to France Télécom and its forty-five suicides.
1 June 2010
English translation of part 1 of the CICNS documentary tracing the French anti-cult movement's origins, from Jonestown to the 1996 parliamentary report.
4 April 2010
English translation of part 3 of the CICNS documentary « La France antisectes »: TV talk shows, staged testimony and the 2008 Mignon controversy.
1 April 2010
CICNS re-tallies the 57-country chapter of the 2009 report question by question: 274 No against 11 Yes, three countries resembling France, four convictions worldwide, and a bold conclusion the body of the text contradicts.
1 April 2010
CICNS surveys the French media's coverage of the 2009 MIVILUDES report, channel by channel and headline by headline: platforms without debate, figures without questions, and a press that copies the report's own summaries as news.
1 April 2010
Brahma Kumaris members in France describe fiscal audits, lost jobs, surveillance and an arson attempt after the 1996 parliamentary 'cult' list — CICNS video.
24 January 2010
Éric Bouzou reads the 2009 full-veil mission as the anti-cult playbook applied to an established religion: fear vocabulary, absent data, one veiled witness heard, and Guy Carcassonne's demolition of every ground but public order.
1 January 2010
CICNS documents the January 2010 police search of the Terre du Ciel centre in Saône-et-Loire, its letter campaign to the authorities, Janine Tavernier's statement of support, and the abandonment of the cult line of inquiry.
1 January 2010
Residents of the Moulin des Vallées monastery recount a 2009 MIVILUDES raid led by its president and the media coverage that followed. Translated CICNS report.
23 December 2009
CICNS counter-investigation of France 2's "Prise directe" (17 Nov 2009): the Guéniot affair, a physician acquitted on appeal, and trial by television.
6 December 2009
Éric Bouzou's 2009 essay on the Fenech offensive: the propaganda mechanics, the veil mission and France Télécom as the cases the MIVILUDES was kept away from, the science of brainwashing revisited, and the About-Picard law's avowed hypocrisy.
1 December 2009
André Tarassi dismantles the anti-cult movement's proudest claim, 'we judge acts, not beliefs': beliefs determine acts, rituals are unreadable without the inner experience that founded them, and the belief/act division is a discrediting device.
1 December 2009
English translation of the CICNS report contrasting TV and book coverage of the Guéniot "cult" affair with the Douai appeal court's full acquittal.
14 November 2009
Full transcript of the CICNS interview with journalist Jean-Luc Martin-Lagardette on France's anti-cult policy, the MIVILUDES, and the role of the media.
1 October 2009
André Tarassi turns the hypercritical gaze around: on the atrocity tales of Bromley and Shupe, Melton's divorce analogy, Galanter's finding that a third of one group's leavers had sought psychiatric help before joining, Kliever on the bitter leaver who magnifies flaws into threats, and the absence of any French study of the militants themselves.
1 October 2009
The CICNS reads the masonic obediences' own websites, communiqués and press against the history of the accusations once made against them by Leo XIII and the anti-masonic literature of the nineteenth century, then applies the MIVILUDES's own criteria of dérives sectaires to the lodges and finds at least three of them fit.
1 September 2009
English translation of the CICNS interview with American sociologist Stuart Wright on leaving new religious movements, apostates, and the 1993 Waco standoff.
3 July 2009
English translation of the CICNS interview with Susan Palmer, Canadian sociologist, on her fieldwork among France's listed "cults" and the About-Picard law.
3 July 2009
The CICNS's June 2009 reading report on Esquerre's Fayard study, with long extracts: how the totalitarian, mentally manipulating cult was a French collective invention of the 1970s and 80s, how the About-Picard law created a state of psychological subjection that has never dissolved anyone, and what the Interior Ministry's own head of the bureau of religions says he cannot find to control.
1 June 2009
Éric Bouzou sets the parliamentary litany on 'the cults and money' against the 2009 financial system itself: the derivatives casino, debt money, the G20's mystification, and a thought experiment in which the MIVILUDES's own criteria are applied to finance.
1 May 2009
English translation of a 2009 CICNS clip arguing that France's 2008 witness-immunity law reinforces the impunity of parliamentary anti-cult commissions.
9 January 2009
English translation of the CICNS interview with naturopath Philippe Dargère on administrative pressure, the anti-cult climate and alternative health in France.
9 January 2009
CICNS catalogues how the word 'cult' escaped its cage in France: politicians, prosecutors, sports captains, archbishops, brand strategists and bloggers all reaching for the same pejorative, sector by sector, quote by quote.
1 December 2008
On Fenech's 2008 appointment, CICNS assembles what Baubérot, Liogier, Morelli, Duval and Maffesoli told it drives the French fight against cults: Gallican surveillance, a classification struggle, a shared cake, and manufactured fear.
1 October 2008
CICNS's 2008 dossier on the scarecrow role assigned to Scientology: how the fear terminology was built, what the accusations amount to, the full list of French convictions on the record, and what a dissolution would risk.
1 September 2008
CICNS tests Orange's 2008 parental-control filter and finds a hidden proscription list: 'cults' the only named category, entries that contradict the operator's own stated precautions, and no source anyone can check. The remedy proposed is an independent observatory.
1 August 2008
CICNS's full UPR dossier: the 2001 law of exception, police assaults on calumnious accusations, the fivefold-varying child figures against the ministries' own counts, the lists, the divorce spectre, and the observatory it asks for instead.
1 May 2008
CICNS's account of the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidians at Mount Carmel: the ATF raid, the 51-day standoff, the final assault, and the media narrative.
1 January 2008
Guy Delaunay of the Gens de Bernard community answers the January 2007 raid and the imprisonment of Claude David with a meditation on influence, reference points, guilt and freedom.
27 November 2007
Three divorced mothers and three lawyers describe how "cult" accusations were used in French divorce and custody proceedings, in a 2007 CICNS documentary.
10 June 2007
English translation of the CICNS interview with Laurent Ladouce of the Unification Church on the "Moon cult" media campaigns, deprogramming and the MIVILUDES.
12 February 2007
André Tarassi traces French anti-cultism to 1981 and the Vivien mission, names its most committed actors on the left, surveys the 'without-religion' half of France, and reads the 1999 party-funding proposals as anti-democratic.
1 February 2007
The full January 2007 exchange between Michel Thys, Belgian free thinker and Grand Orient mason, and André Tarassi of the CICNS: twenty questions on belief and choice, the suicide and child-protection figures, the iceberg argument, and two spiritualities talking across the divide.
1 January 2007
The CICNS's full creation project, first drafted in 2007 and updated in March 2013: a map of every actor in the French cult question - executive, parliament, anti-cult associations, apostates, courts, media, researchers, neighbouring countries - the five reasons the current policy is not constructive, and a concrete structure modelled on Britain's INFORM, with its board, its mission and its financing.
1 January 2007
English translation of the short CICNS interview (2006) with writer Christiane Singer: the French anti-cult witch-hunt as a passing fever of morbid rationalism.
12 November 2006
English translation of the CICNS interview with Bernard Montaud, founder of psychanalyse corporelle, on France's post-Solar-Temple climate around "cults".
11 November 2006
English translation of the CICNS interview with French lawyer Bernard Biro on 'cult' accusations in the courts, the About-Picard law and defamation remedies.
11 November 2006
English translation of the CICNS interview with Québec journalist Eugénie Francoeur on new spiritualities in Canada, Britain and France.
11 November 2006
English translation of the CICNS interview with Grenoble lawyer Jean-Pierre Joseph on the 1995 French parliamentary report on "cults" and the events around it.
11 November 2006
Kinesiology school head Jean-Claude Guyard on the Brittany trial, UNADFI and the anti-cult climate in France, in his 2006 CICNS interview.
11 November 2006
Christian Tal Schaller's CICNS interview: the 1997 gendarmerie raid on his health institute, the trials that followed, and the "cult deviance" label.
11 November 2006
English translation of the CICNS interview with Bernard Renaud, esoteric bookseller and publisher, on how France's 1990s anti-cult campaign hit publishing.
10 November 2006
English translation of the CICNS video interview with Christian Paturel, the jurist vindicated by the European Court of Human Rights in Paturel v. France (2005).
10 November 2006
Unnamed members of the publishing venture in France's L'Essentiel affair recount the raid, custody, house arrest and years of proceedings in this translated CICNS report.
10 November 2006
English translation of the CICNS video interview with sociologist Michel Maffesoli on postmodern religiosity, the wild sacred, and France's anti-cult scapegoating.
10 November 2006
English translation of the CICNS interview with Marseille lawyer Philippe Pérollier on French anti-cult case law, the 1996 list and the About-Picard law.
10 November 2006
English translation of the CICNS interview with sociologist Régis Dericquebourg on fieldwork among healing churches and France's anti-cult climate.
10 November 2006
English translation of the CICNS interview with pastor and jurist Dominique Kounkou on the "cult" label, African-expression churches and the About-Picard law.
9 November 2006
English translation of the CICNS interview with Jean Baubérot on the 1905 law, the MILS, the MIVILUDES, and religious minorities in France.
9 November 2006
English translation of the CICNS interview with lawyer Jean-Marc Florand on the legal void around "cults", the About-Picard law and France's anti-cult bodies.
9 November 2006
English translation of the CICNS interview with Pierre Barrucand, CNRS researcher, on the history of French anti-cult campaigns.
4 November 2006
English translation of the 2006 CICNS video interview with French journalist Sylvie Simon on the branding of alternative health practices as 'cults' in France.
4 November 2006
Full transcript of the CICNS interview with sociologist Massimo Introvigne on the history of brainwashing theory, MK-ULTRA, deprogramming, and anti-cult laws.
1 November 2006
CICNS reproduces and annotates the social-action circular that wires every welfare directorate into the anti-cult watch: reinforced vigilance on accreditations, monthly correspondent meetings, and a dedicated reporting mailbox.
1 June 2006
Janine Tavernier, president of the UNADFI from 1993 to 2001, prefaces the Rose-Cross Grand Master's book: she recalls the criterion she insisted on - harmfulness, never doctrine - reports hearing an anti-cult figure say the idea of God must be eradicated, and calls for the official rehabilitation of A.M.O.R.C.
1 May 2006
Full transcript of the CICNS interview with sociologist Raphaël Liogier on French laïcité, state neutrality as intervention, and how 'good' and 'bad' religions are classified.
1 May 2006
The companion essay to Tarassi's abuse dossier: why French media consign politicians' escapades to oblivion while blowing up the gurus', and what a taboo domain offers a society in search of scapegoats.
1 January 2006
André Tarassi's 2006 dossier on the great sexual-abuse affairs involving spiritual leaders, from Chopra's ten-minute acquittal to the Mandarom defamation rulings: what survived the courts, what remained rumour, and the invisible abuse of score-settling behind the stigmatisation campaign.
1 January 2006
Full transcript of the CICNS interview with historian Anne Morelli (ULB) on who decides the label 'cult', media treatment of religious minorities, and freedom of conscience.
1 November 2005
Éric Bouzou's May 2005 article on the Moëlan-sur-Mer trial: five people in the dock, but Kinesiology itself pointed at, and behind the amalgam a question of fear and power. With the AFP dispatch on the verdict reproduced and annotated.
1 May 2005
Alain Chevillat of Terre du Ciel recounts the press barrage that greeted one invited speaker at his Aix-les-Bains forum, dismantles the parliamentary report the censors brandished, and claims for the individual the right to think differently, including the right to be wrong.
1 March 2005
Full transcript of the CICNS interview with ethnologist Maurice Duval, in English: his four-year field study of the Mandarom, the censorship that followed, why the word 'cult' has no sociological meaning, and the manufacture of collective fear.
1 March 2005
Maurice Duval's 2005 article for L'Homme et la Société: a Montpellier by-law banning all proselytism on the public highway used against a Trotskyist paper seller, alternative groups listed as cults in the 1996 report, the Weberian typology tested on the Mandarom, and fear tracked as it moves from the nuclear industry to the foreigner to the cults - the bedrock, he argues, of a security ideology that makes neoliberal policy acceptable.
1 January 2005
The CICNS's founding definitional essay of January 2005: where the new spiritual currents came from, why gathering around a shared view of human destiny is an ordinary social act, and why the hostility they meet is aimed not at criminality but at a whole dimension of life.
1 January 2005
Valérie Dole assembles what the serious research actually says about suicide in France, from the WHO figures to the prisons to Durkheim, and finds spiritual membership nowhere among the causes; the parallel drawn by anti-cultism runs the other way.
1 January 2005
A CICNS essay of pointed questions about conflation: why acts found across all of society are treated as defining crimes when they occur in spiritual minorities.
1 January 2004
The December 2003 Le Monde text-petition by Marcela Iacub and Patrice Maniglier against the Accoyer amendment: patients asking the health authorities to stop protecting them from their own freely chosen therapists.
2 December 2003
A CNRS research director's August 2000 essay: the cults amplify the society that denounces them, embracing its faith in education, media, networks and management, and the three great reactions to cultural crisis - accept, criticise, flee. Written as the French parliament voted mental manipulation into law, it argues that both the French repression and the American pressure reduce free will, and that the planetary market may be the largest cult of all.
1 August 2000