From Homosexuality to the Cults: Scourges, State Repression and History on a Loop

From Homosexuality to the Cults: Scourges, State Repression, Short Memory and History on a Loop

CICNS (September 2011)

On 18 July 1960, the Mirguet amendment, classing homosexuality among the “social scourges” on the same footing as alcoholism, tuberculosis, drug addiction, procuring and prostitution, was adopted by the National Assembly.

On 30 July, law no. 60-773 authorised the government to take, “in application of article 38 of the Constitution”, the measures necessary to fight against “certain social scourges”.

There followed an official repression of homosexuality which would not end until 1981, when the police groups for the surveillance of homosexuals and the files concerning them were abolished, and the Ministry of Health removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses.

It is a safe bet that few people today know of this recent episode of official discriminatory repression by the French State.

This “social forgetting” can be measured by the incredulity we meet when we speak of the repression at work today under cover of the “fight against dérives sectaires” and using the same mechanisms: the idea of a “social scourge”[1], but also of a “pathology”, to take up the term employed in 2004 by Nicole Guedj, then Secretary of State for victims’ rights attached to the Minister of Justice, in her opening speech at the colloquium “The lawyer faced with dérives sectaires”.

A pathology said to be contracted by mental manipulation (by “gurus”) on people in a state of weakness (“followers”), whom it is envisaged to treat with or without their consent, since this notable exception to the law of persons is provided for as soon as there is “mental illness”.

History reminds us in particular (on condition that it be taught with the intention of revealing the strengths as much as the weaknesses) that every society, faced with its fears, is quick to create new scapegoats, to conceive exceptions to its own great humanist declarations, to reintroduce the arbitrary into its codes and to want to “cure” the “deviants”… only to end up expressing official apologies, decades later, or even a façade of shame for having made such choices.

[1] The Gest-Guyard parliamentary report of 1995 assimilates (textually) the cults to a “scourge” and would be immediately followed by the creation of the first interministerial institution dedicated to the study of and the fight against the “cults”.