When a Commune Is Called a 'Cult': Mayor Caroline Yaffée's CICNS Interview

In this interview with the CICNS, Caroline Yaffée describes what happened when a press article branded her commune a “cult”, and what that looks like from the desk of a rural mayor who makes no secret of her own interests.

CICNS interview. (English translation of the interview published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 5 November 2012. The French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation; passages the machine could not reliably hear are marked [inaudible].)

[Interviewer]: Caroline Yaffée is the mayor of a small commune in the Drôme. She also runs a place of welcome, a gîte and bed-and-breakfast. She speaks on the subject of the French context surrounding new forms of spirituality, as well as alternative health and education practices, which have been an integral part of her life for many years and which she fully assumes in her office as mayor. Her simple and direct view of the question is above all an invitation to respect, tolerance and fraternity.

[Yaffée]: In the 1980s I was in my twenties, so it was rather a personal search, to answer in some way my inner quest: why this world, where is my place, how can I also help our society to evolve, to move towards something better, something more just, more fraternal. And it is in that sense that both the new therapies and certain religious and spiritual writings helped me to forge my own opinion and my path. They helped me to make a path through life.

My son was born in ‘82, so straight away I asked myself questions about education, and there were questions there that helped me to make a path through life. There were several avenues that helped me to forge an educational method, or in any case that helped me in my child’s education.

So we have a place of welcome: a group gîte, bed-and-breakfast, campsite. We can accommodate about thirty people in rooms and about fifteen under canvas. So we come to welcome all sorts of very different publics: hikers, families who come simply to discover nature and life on a farm, because we are, after all, a working farm. And it is true that we also host personal-development courses, whose participants appreciate the setting of nature, the setting of silence, in which to do that work on oneself. Depending on the week, depending on the time of year, it is one group or the other. For us it is, on the contrary, a very pleasant and interesting marriage, and we appreciate this mix of publics. It gives us a diversity in our activity, in our welcome, which is interesting.

Personally, I have not been under pressure. It is true that the commune of Éourres had an article that was really quite harmful, treating it as a cult. So we were obliged to set things straight a little, but in the end it was also an opportunity to talk more with the prefecture, with the various administrations, and then, depending on the individuals, we were heard, or on the contrary they stuck to their position. It is true that it is hard to judge what that may have, how shall I put it, influenced in terms of attributes. There were allocations of grants, or projects that were accepted or refused, but we are still fighting a little for Éourres to be recognised for what it is, that is to say a commune coming back to life, which has projects, and which is not for all that a cult or a world apart.

As for certain difficulties (let us say, rather, in sharing who we are) it is due to a context in which, precisely, there is an energy that is still quite, I want to say, quite macho, quite masculine, where the values of listening, the values of tolerance, of sharing, are not necessarily well regarded. So that is what sometimes poses difficulties (that is perhaps too strong a word) but in any case it does not invite me to open up more and to exchange more with certain people.

From the purely therapeutic point of view, it is true that today many gentle therapies (what we call alternative medicine) are not recognised, and that is a pity, because when we speak of homeopathy no longer being reimbursed, I find that quite scandalous.

As regards education, it is true that there is not a great tolerance, a great openness towards alternative education. That is to say, if you are not part of the national education system, you are inevitably set somewhat apart, and private schools, with in particular a more open pedagogy (my own children went to Steiner schools, that is, Waldorf schools) it is true that you feel there is no desire at all to help, no support, so no financial support, so we have to manage by ourselves to provide this kind of education. So I find that a relatively intolerant attitude, whereas, for example, in Germany there is much more openness and much more possibility of truly choosing the school for your child, whereas in France I have the feeling that it is difficult and you have to be very combative to get there.

I think that what is important, then, in the running of the commune, in holding this responsibility of mayor, is to have a certain distance. It is a notion of service: if I accepted to be mayor of the commune, it was truly to serve all the inhabitants, to develop projects that seemed important to me, and so it is something that goes beyond me, beyond my person. And I think that the work I have been able to do on myself is precisely what makes it possible to have that distance, and not to see it at all in terms of power, but in terms of service, and at the same time to bring qualities of listening, of respect, of tolerance towards one another, and to be at my best in how to serve the other, how to serve the well-being of one and all. And it makes it possible, precisely, to take a little distance, having done a certain work on myself, to say: there it is, as long as there is no attachment, in any case, to a post or a power. I believe that is what is important.