Interview with Bernard Renaud on the Theme of "Cults"

As a publisher, Bernard Renaud brought out French-language academic studies of new religious movements, including a collective volume edited by the sociologist Massimo Introvigne and Régis Dericquebourg’s study “Croire et guérir”. In this CICNS interview he recounts the collapse of the esoteric and spirituality market after the Solar Temple affair, the boycott of scholarly books on “cults”, and the exclusion of academics from the media debate.

CICNS interview. (English translation of the interview published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 10 November 2006. The French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation; passages the machine could not reliably hear are marked [inaudible].)

[Interviewer]: Bernard Renaud, a bookseller and then a publisher specialising in the fields of esotericism, spirituality and natural health, has, from this privileged observation post, followed with a curious and open (but no less critical) eye the revival of their expressions in the West. Over the course of this interview, he retraces their history and comments on the coercive and repressive character of the reception given in France to those who, in the 1970s, were called the new religious movements.

[Renaud]: The revival of esotericism in France began at the end of the 1950s, with “Le Matin des magiciens” (“The Morning of the Magicians”) by Pauwels and Bergier, and then the magazine Planète.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the beginning of the nineteenth, the esoteric movement was exceedingly important in France, and we were even the leader in Europe. There was a whole host of esoteric movements, associations, societies, which had their headquarters in France or in England, in the United States, with ramifications the world over. In those movements there were famous writers, politicians. And there was no impossibility, no incompatibility. And that seemed normal. For the rest, esotericism, the esoteric movements influenced part of the literature of the late nineteenth century. And that was something known and well established.

Then there was a gap, right in the 1950s, and so this movement around esotericism developed again at the beginning of the 1960s. And little by little it gathered momentum.

At that point we saw bookshop sales collapse. Booksellers were beginning to ask themselves whether they should still define themselves as esoteric booksellers, because people were starting to point the finger at them, starting to point the finger at publishers who produced books on esotericism and spirituality, saying they were proselytising. They were proselytising for the cults.

And it was from that moment (yes, ‘92, ‘93) that we really felt it. And it was very, very strong in Canada: the Canadian market collapsed completely at that point because of the Solar Temple affair, because at the outset there was a first part that had happened in Canada, and there was the boomerang effect, and it reached us. And it was really at that moment. And we felt it (the magazines, my colleagues who also work in these specialities) we all felt that drop at that moment. And it was entirely due to the whole campaign that was waged around the Solar Temple, but also around all the cult phenomena.

It was the field of esotericism and spirituality that was hit, because all these movements, all these cultish groups refer in one way or another either to esoteric currents or to spiritual currents. So the amalgam is made.

When there were all those broadcasts, all those articles on the cults, a few books came out, not to defend the cults, but to present what these cults, these new religious movements, were. And none of the authors of articles or books along those lines were invited onto the television sets, and none was able to contribute to a feature in any weekly whatsoever. They seemed like pariahs.

Massimo Introvigne, [inaudible ?] and Olivier-Louis Séguy had asked to take part in the commission that had been set up, and they had been promised they would take part. They were never called. And yet (academics, lawyers, sociologists) these are people who can be trusted, who study the fact, and without taking a position: they study the fact as a fact.

For my part, I think the media (via a certain number of politicians, moreover) bear a large share of responsibility for the disinformation.

I published two important books in this field. One called “Pour en finir avec les sectes” (“To Be Done with the Cults”), which is a collection of texts edited by Massimo Introvigne. It is a book in which the contributions were made by academics and which took stock of these movements, and which showed that these were first and foremost sociological studies, and which showed that these were movements that were not dangerous, movements one needed to learn about, but movements against which there was nothing to reproach, nothing to say.

The second book is the book by Mr Dericquebourg, a sociologist at the University of Lille, called “Croire et guérir” (“Believing and Healing”), and here is a book that takes stock of four movements. This book was completely boycotted, both by the press and by the booksellers, because they were absolutely convinced that the publisher and the author were proselytising for these movements, which, once again, was absolutely not the case. And in the sales notes we distribute to booksellers when a book comes out, the book’s content was clearly set out, and we explained who Dericquebourg was, what he did, how he had studied these movements, why he had done so. The fact remains that it is a book we are going to pulp this year, because we must have sold 250 copies.

That shows the power the media and the vox populi can have. That is to say, from the moment a book does not fit the politically correct temper of the times, no one talks about it, and people will even spread disinformation about it.

If a book actually contains things forbidden by law, things contrary to the law (we have a penal code in France) every publisher is required to deposit four copies with the Bibliothèque Nationale, one copy with the Ministry of the Interior and one copy with the public prosecutor’s office to which he answers. The books are read. So if it were contrary to the law, the book would immediately be withdrawn from sale on the instruction of the courts, obviously. But, I mean, today, no book published in these fields has been withdrawn.

One need only look, to take the example of Scientology, at Dianetics, the book by Ron Hubbard [?], which was criticised, and so on. A few years ago, Dianetics — you would see the book painted on the walls of Paris: you drove along the périphérique and you saw, writ large, the cover, the nature of the book. Any book may be published. And those movements have the right to publish their books. Now it is up to us to make of them the use we think we should. That is all.

[Renaud]: I think it is much more a matter of wanting everything to be politically correct, so no head must stick out above the rest. And these movements are disturbing. There it is. Because these movements lead people to think differently.

An author like Régis Debray, who has just published a very interesting book on the religious fact and the meaning of words like religion, like sacred, and so on, is in the process of changing French thought, of moving the philosophers forward in these fields too, by looking at it all with a different eye.

We are, on the one hand, desacralising what we call religion, with a capital R, and on the other hand we are trying to make all the new religions uniform. We are going to fall back into a period of… yes, of the unsaid: we are simply not going to talk about it any more.

Everything is arranged so that today, on the one hand, we are told about the religious fact (yes, because that is what it is called) and then, on the other hand, all these movements, all these new religions, well, that will interest the sociologists. There you are, that is all. It will interest… a minority of people. And besides, you need only look at all the books that come out on these movements: the sales are minimal. We sell 300, 400, 500 copies. It is pitiful. It interests no one. Everything is arranged so that it interests no one. Unfortunately.

Each and every one of us must keep a critical mind with regard to all these phenomena and all these movements. Now, if some find themselves at home there, so much the better for them.

These movements that arrived in France have a reason for being. There were such movements in the twelfth century, in the fourteenth century, in the sixteenth century, in the seventeenth century. Our whole history is shot through with… We did not call them that, but at the time they were called [inaudible ?], which endured, which corresponded to a given moment in our history for given reasons. These movements contributed a certain number of things, good and bad. They made us react well or badly, but they made society move. And I believe we cannot erase all those contributions with a stroke of the pen by saying “it is bad”. I think these movements have a reason for being and that they have taken part in the evolution of our society.

In ten years, in five years, in twenty years, there will be other movements that arise, which will also correspond to something at a given moment. Because emergences… it is like an island appearing in the ocean. Why? There was an earthquake, there was something that made it happen… Well, for us, there was ‘68, which allowed the emergence of a whole host of currents of ideas. It allowed the emergence of all these movements.

And it is a necessity. We cannot forbid all that on the pretext that it disturbs us, that it is not politically correct, that philosophically it does not correspond to what we would like… No, we must let these movements live, because they have a necessity, they have a reason for being.