Anti-Sect France: The State of Play — CICNS Documentary, Part 1

« La France antisectes : état des lieux » is a documentary produced by CICNS, the Centre d’Information et de Conseil des Nouvelles Spiritualités, a French association that documents the situation of spiritual minorities in France. This first part traces the genealogy of the French anti-cult apparatus — from the Jonestown tragedy and the American deprogramming era to the ADFI and UNADFI associations, the Vivien report, Waco, the Order of the Solar Temple affair and the 1996 Gest-Guyard parliamentary report with its list of 172 “sects”. The narration is CICNS’s own editorial voice — its counter-readings of Jonestown, Waco and the Solar Temple deaths are the association’s positions — and it is interleaved with interview excerpts from scholars and witnesses, including the historian Anne Morelli (Université libre de Bruxelles), the sociologists Massimo Introvigne, Régis Dericquebourg, Raphaël Liogier and Michel Maffesoli, and the former lawyer Christian Paturel, a Jehovah’s Witness.

CICNS documentary — part 1 of « La France antisectes : état des lieux ». (English translation of the first part of the documentary published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 4 April 2010. The French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation; passages the machine could not reliably hear are marked [inaudible].)

[inaudible]

[Morelli]: I am thinking of a schoolteacher in Belgium who was cast out of the teaching profession because he was a Jehovah’s Witness.

[Voice]: We had the case of a person whose children had been placed in a children’s home because the mother and the grandmother attended the Antoinists in Valenciennes.

[Voice]: An astounding and, in my view, unbelievable decision handed down in 1981: the Court of Cassation upholds the ruling of a court of appeal. It concerned a petition for divorce. And the court of appeal had said that, under the sway of her religious convictions, the wife, a member of a “sect”, imposed on her family circle, and on her son in particular, a strange diet, and was not raising him according to the principles of the religion. That is all.

[Interviewer]: What places individuals in the wrong category? What makes a spiritual association or a church a “sect” in the minds of our fellow citizens?

[Morelli]: Here at the University of Brussels we conducted a reflection on precisely that passage from one status to another. When is one called a religion? When is one called a sect? When is one a heresy? And the conclusion, in the course of this reflection which we carried out during a colloquium held right here, at the Centre for the Study of Religions and Laïcité, is that it is power that decides on the label.

[Interviewer]: Which power, in this instance? Which power thus transgresses the articles of a declaration of which France is a signatory, and even the principal instigator? These testimonies of discrimination suffered, and the sociological and legal observation of an amalgam, led us to conduct a genuine investigation.

An investigation into the involvement of a government in an astonishing fight.

[Voice]: There is a thirst, a spiritual thirst, a thirst for verticality, which has always existed in the human being, but to which today the institutional religions tend no longer to respond in a completely satisfactory way.

[Interviewer]: The West of the 1950s and 1960s sees this thirst for verticality suddenly finding expression in many people outside the traditional churches. It is difficult to convey the incredible diversity and multiplicity of the teachings and practices that appeared then, and the upheaval that millions of people may have lived through them. Some travel out to meet the East and its ancestral traditions, and bring back images, texts, and their own interpretation of those encounters, which inspires others in turn. Eastern teachers come to the West at the invitation of their new followers, or sometimes simply as bearers of a message they feel must be made known. Other seekers draw on Western teachings revisited or brought back into favour.

Within a dozen years, thousands of groups and formal associations come into being, of which the best known are only one facet. What links these groups is the aspiration to live sharing, peace and love, but also the notions of transcendence, revelation and awakening. Some sociologists see in this phenomenon a radically new approach to the relationship with the material and spiritual world, one that continues to this day.

[Maffesoli]: Manifestly, we are in the process of acceding to another relationship to the world and to others. At present we are passing into another type of civilization. We are in the process of leaving what has been called modernity, which had been built up like that, laboriously, over the three centuries that have just elapsed, and there is indeed something being put in place in our relationship to others. At bottom, that is what religion, religiosity, is. One of my colleagues even speaks of “reliance”, of re-linking: more and more, what is primordial is to link myself to the other, through the fact that I link myself to nature, that I link myself to the deity, in a broad or vague way. Once again, I have no fetishism about expressions. What can be said, and what is essential, is that there is a return of what we had believed to be surpassed.

[Interviewer]: This spiritual renewal does not leave people indifferent. In a society dominated by materialism, scientism and productivism, the sincerity and enthusiasm [inaudible ?] of these followers command attention. All the more so as this emergence was at the time taken very seriously by recognized figures and institutions. The new spiritualities occasionally enjoy episodic favour with the media, drawn by certain more spectacular, provocative or extravagant groups, or by the appearance in their ranks of the era’s inescapable stars. Journalists generally treat the subject rather superficially and often ironically. They invent a rather inoffensive image of these groups.

1978 is the year of a radical shift. Terrifying images invade the media. 914 people — men, women and children — met their death on 18 November at Jonestown, in Guyana, where a thousand members of the congregation of the Peoples Temple, the professor Jim Jones, had been living for two years. There is talk of poisoning, of massacre, and above all of collective suicide for religious motives. Journalists quickly draw a link between the tragedy and the new spiritual movements as a whole, then designated by the term “secte” — “cult” in English — which did not yet carry any pejorative charge. In the United States alone, 5,000 organizations under that designation suddenly become the object of a generalized mistrust.

But twenty years later, in 1997, following the request of a magazine invoking the freedom-of-information decree, the FBI is forced to make public 39,000 pages on this affair. In the United States these documents have the effect of a bombshell, so sharply do they contradict the picture conveyed by the media for twenty years. There was no intervention of elements from outside the community during the tragedy. Many corpses bore the traces of poison injections in parts of the body that one cannot reach oneself. Others had died by bullets and arrows. They show finally, and above all, that the American government is implicated in this affair and tried to keep certain facts secret. After the tragedy, anniversary preparations arrived at the Jonestown house. Is that the behaviour of people who had decided to end their lives?

Guyana is a blow to the spiritual and idealistic momentum of the 1960s and 70s. The media campaign that follows casts suspicion on all new expressions of spirituality throughout the world. It propels to the front of the stage an image until then very discreet, which sociologists call the anti-sect movement. Among the first to oppose the new religious movements, one finds a few parents shocked to see their children grow away from them, sometimes abandoning their studies or a professional life to join spiritual movements foreign to their culture. The case of the Children of God is fairly typical. It has the advantage of having been sufficiently covered by the media that archive footage is available.

[Participant] (father, archive footage): I think she joined against her will. When I spoke to her alone, she told me she was going to come home to me. When we were confronted by the ages of the Children of God, she began to cry, that she could not leave, that she would die if she went out of the door. And I believe she was very terrified.

[Participant] (journalist, archive footage): Your father has indicated that you stayed against your will.

[Participant] (young woman, archive footage): That is the only thing. When I met the Children of God, they showed me some scriptures in the Bible and I believed in it. And I knew that this was what I wanted to do. And I am here because I want to be here, and I want to stay and continue.

[Interviewer]: Parents’ associations would be born thereafter, such as CAN, the Cult Awareness Network, which would become the largest American anti-cult association. The judgements made by the parents bear only on subjective moral and religious values, in principle inadmissible before the courts. One concept providentially supplies a justification for their fight and an argument before the justice system: the theory of brainwashing.

This concept emerges at the beginning of the 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism. The CIA then finds itself required to supply, for propaganda purposes, an explanation for the conversion to communism of certain Chinese intellectuals and leaders. That explanation would be brainwashing. A book compiles all the data on this subject, written by Massimo Introvigne and Dick Anthony, respectively a sociologist of religions and a psychologist of worldwide renown.

[Introvigne]: Whenever society does not understand a movement that appears very strange, the quickest explanation is to say that one does not adhere to it voluntarily. It is bewitchment, it is hypnotism, it is mental manipulation.

[Interviewer]: The concept is taken up by the anti-cult movement at the beginning of the 1970s. It is above all Margaret Singer, a clinical psychologist, who would develop the theory of brainwashing by “sects”. Her many interventions as a prosecution witness against spiritual minorities, or in defence of the actions of the anti-cult associations, were carried out.

Once pruned of any scientific explanation, two simplistic ideas emerge from the discourse of the anti-cult activists. First, at the head of the new spiritual movements there are said to be exploiters, the gurus, decked out with every vice of humanity. Second, the members of the new spiritualities are said to be for the most part unwitting victims, and moreover, others [inaudible ?].

The first French anti-cult association comes into being in 1974 in Rennes. Doctor Claire Champollion, whose son had joined the Unification Church of the Reverend Moon, creates, with her husband and the psychiatrist André [inaudible ?], the Association for the Defence of the Family and the Individual, ADFI, and the fight against sects. The ADFI is not slow to follow the American associations in promoting a surprising practice: deprogramming — “déprogrammation” in its French version.

[Introvigne]: I would say that in the United States, the courts came to regard deprogramming as a criminal activity. For those who do not know these affairs, deprogramming consists of abducting, [inaudible ?] people in the street, putting them, typically, into a van and taking them to a place where they are spoken to very harshly, either about religion in general or about their religious experience, until they declare themselves convinced and converted.

[Interviewer]: Certain affairs enjoyed the favours of the press, such as that of Claire Château in 1982. This newspaper, in this instance, is a newspaper that was created by parents and by kidnappers, to whom it gives wide publicity.

[Introvigne]: The whole problem with deprogramming is that deprogramming was almost never conducted by psychologists or psychiatrists, but by former members of movements themselves, who had made it a very lucrative profession. There were deprogrammings at 40,000, 50,000 dollars, even 100,000 dollars, in the United States, and also by people who came from private police services and from sometimes rather shady circles. The best-known deprogrammer in the United States, Rick Ross, is someone who had begun his career as a jewel thief.

[Interviewer]: Kidnapping, unlawful confinement, unprofessional psychology or psychiatry: these words only partially describe the ordeals that adults may have undergone, some of whom filed complaints with the courts.

[Voice] (reading of a complaint): To the Senior Investigating Judge at the Tribunal de grande instance of Paris. I came out of this ordeal, which I describe as psychic rape, exhausted to the last degree. I denounce the role played by the ADFI, which pushed my family to attempt to deprogram me.

[Interviewer]: On the website of CESNUR, the centre for studies on new religions directed by Massimo Introvigne, one finds confirmations of the support given by the ADFIs to deprogramming attempts. Madame Lidwine Ovigneur, head of the ADFI of Lille, declared in 1976 to the newspaper L’Aurore, after the abduction of Brigitte Backeland, a young member of the Unification Church, that she was resting in the countryside, where she was going to be deprogrammed. According to Madame Ovigneur, this was not the first case: “Our deprogramming techniques are now well honed, thanks in particular to the American experiences.”

Here is a brief summary, and the epilogue, of the said American experiences. Hundreds of deprogrammings are orchestrated within a few years. Ted Patrick, the true father of deprogramming, regarded as a saviour by parents and as a torturer by many of his former patients, claimed 600 rescues, in his own words, before the judge who convicted him in 1974 for unlawful confinement. Following numerous trials and the conviction of a dozen deprogrammers for abduction, unlawful confinement, assault and battery, CAN closes in 1996.

The ADFIs would gradually distance themselves from the deprogrammers’ practices. The fact remains that they encouraged these barbaric and illegal acts, and that, unlike their American counterparts, this did not prevent them from prospering, nor from seeing their federation, UNADFI, obtain public-utility status the very year of CAN’s bankruptcy. As for Margaret Singer’s theory of brainwashing by “sects”, it would be genuinely discredited in American courts of justice, notably following the interventions of Dick Anthony. Few people know today that the theory of mental manipulation is only a progressive adaptation of the concept of brainwashing, originally created by the CIA to fight communism. It is therefore still — in France at any rate — taken seriously, and serves as justification for an enterprise of rescuing people who, for the most part, are not asking to be rescued.

Régis Dericquebourg, sociologist of religions, who has been studying the new religious movements for more than thirty years, received us at his home in Lille.

[Dericquebourg]: In the field, what do I encounter? I encounter people like you and me, leaders who do not seem especially dangerous, who in any case believe in what they do and believe in what they teach. I reject the idea according to which, at the head of these movements — for example at the head of Jehovism — there would be a college of a dozen people who would not believe in the Jehovist doctrine at all and who would be manipulating 6 million people. So I see people who are engaged in a process. They teach the doctrine, they lead, they have worship practices. I do not see — I have never seen — where the danger lay. Or else one must suppose that the mere fact of adopting a non-conformist doctrine is already a danger.

[Interviewer]: The concept thus collides with sociological realities, but also with plain common sense. What difference is there between convincing, persuading, winning someone over to one’s cause — which are socially accepted, non-punishable acts — and so-called mental manipulation? That it is possible to convince an individual to act against his objective interest is, however, not in dispute: Machiavelli and many others have written on this subject for centuries. But the anti-cult activists assert that the new spiritualities have made this deviance a speciality and a specificity.

[Voice]: Political parties engage in mental manipulation. Credit companies engage in mental manipulation. The salesman who calls you at 8 in the evening, four times in a row, to offer you a fitted kitchen with lots of advantages, engages in mental manipulation. The door-to-door canvassers who get elderly people to open their doors so as to fit them with alarms engage in mental manipulation. Monasteries engage in mental manipulation. Churches engage in mental manipulation. Everyone, at that point, engages in mental manipulation. So I do not see how one can engage in mental manipulation in a “sectarian” movement. It seems to me an offence that is hardly democratic, and one which we know was very much in use, in former times, in countries that did not shine for their democratic quality.

[Interviewer]: After the Guyana massacre, the fear of collective suicide, of indoctrination, of mental manipulation tarnished the image of spiritual minorities in everyone’s eyes. But what might have faded with time, as any trauma naturally fades, was to take on an unexpected scale.

Raphaël Liogier, director of the Observatoire du religieux in Aix-en-Provence.

[Liogier]: The notion of “sect”, in the 1970s, was essentially attached to an exotic imaginary — a somewhat childish thing one had to be careful about: those people are a bit strange, it’s childishness, and so on. In the 1980s, we evolved toward the image of the mafia-like, paedophile, secret network, etc. Manipulative. It completely evolved. We passed from one to the other. And as a result, what did that determine? It determined a different type of problem and a different public action. One could speak of operators of meaning who produce this: people who construct the imaginary — journalists, people who situate themselves with Christians, whatever you like.

[Interviewer]: This radical change in opinion could not have happened without the support of the State. The French government thus sets itself apart from that of the other European countries by supporting the anti-cult associations, then by relaying their messages. The first subsidies from a public body to an ADFI came from the Ministry of Health and date from 1977.

In 1982, it is Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy who commissions a report from Alain Vivien on the problems linked to the existence of the new movements, which he describes as religious and pseudo-religious sects. The report, completed in 1983, would be made public in 1985. This manner of release can only raise questions. The report’s argument, extremely alarmist, essentially repeats the discourse of the anti-cult militants without supporting it with any evidence. [inaudible ?] a real danger, why wait two years to disclose it? How to explain that the government circulated it in the press without taking any official measure to curb the supposed problem? The measures would come only ten years later. One can speak, in reality, of the deliberate propagation of a rumour.

[Morelli]: The religions that are not labelled — those are the object of mistrust on the part of power, and power organizes against them, more or less, a witch-hunt, a persecution, whatever you like, in one form or another, by highlighting the moments, shall I say, difficult or delicate, that can exist in any human group, and by presenting these moments as the norm of all marginal religious groups. And so, nobody thinks that all priests are paedophiles, but the rumour is spread, of course, that those who belong to so-called sects are, naturally, perverts of every kind.

[Interviewer]: As the propaganda bears its fruit and everyone ends up letting themselves be convinced of the existence of a social scourge called “sects”, the State’s actions become more radical and official. This is how military or police actions could take place, such as those suffered by the inhabitants of Terranova.

[Participant] (Terranova resident): At 6 in the morning — a quarter to 6 — they arrived. There were 60 gendarmes, including the financial brigade — the whole Aveyron was mobilized, because there aren’t many gendarmes — plus a special brigade of the army from Mont-de-Marsan. They came in screaming. I was in the kitchen; they trained a lamp on me, and, screaming, they told me: don’t move, put your hands on your head, or something like that. They approached me — my wife was beside me; in front of my wife they held me at gunpoint — she was paralysed with fear, and screamed, I believe.

[Interviewer]: A very similar event, proceeding as it did from the same repressive logic, occurred in 1993 in the United States: Waco, and the dramatic end of Pastor David Koresh’s community. The members of a Christian civil and spiritual minority, following a disproportionate and extremely violent raid by the forces of order, barricade themselves in the farm they had been occupying peacefully for decades. The ATF, then the FBI, backed by special army forces, lay siege to the building. They have helicopters and battle tanks at their disposal. The press is kept at a distance from the site for the 51 days of the siege. At dawn on 19 April, the assailants launch an assault, crushing men and children. They inject massive doses of highly flammable tear gas. 74 people, including 12 children, perish, burned alive, in the appalling inferno that breaks out at the end of the morning. This is what remains of the Davidians’ farm after the attack.

To speak of collective suicide in this affair is [inaudible ?], as the survivors’ testimonies confirm. To throw responsibility for the tragedy onto a supposed religious fanaticism is even genuinely indecent. Yet that is what the FBI, the ATF and even President Clinton would attempt to do. It is also this point of view that was widely spread by the media in France. How did the forces of order come to this? And at the scale of an entire society?

In France, in the affair of l’Essentiel, and just as at Waco, the forces of order had received special training in order to intervene.

[Participant] (Terranova resident): The gendarme who was questioning me had doubts. He could see clearly that there was a discrepancy with the film that had been made internally. Well, he explained to me that he had been trained specially for this case, to destroy a sect. He told me after a while: in any case, don’t worry, the goal is to destroy the sect and to raze Terranova. He showed me a film they had made on a computer, in which you could see it flying through the sky on a flying carpet, with the music of the rats. He told me it had served to brief all the others, to explain to them where they were going. It was: destroy a sect.

[Interviewer]: Who can say what their reaction would be to a surprise assault by armed forces? Between the epilogue of Waco and that of Terranova, there is perhaps only a cultural difference, or a factor of luck.

After Waco, the psychosis in France is firmly established. The affairs of the Order of the Solar Temple, in Canada, Switzerland and France, in 1994 and 1995, quite naturally come to take their place in the anti-cult argument. The French justice system, like the Swiss justice system, would follow an astonishing trail in this affair. It quickly becomes apparent that the judge and his investigators decided to privilege the strictly sectarian thesis of the transit toward Sirius. The whole investigation, and the public authorities’ argument, tend to demonstrate that this was a ritual suicide, a programmed and consented departure on the basis of a religious belief. It thereby forgets all rigour and prudence in the analysis of the exhibits, the facts, the autopsies and the testimonies that might have redirected the investigation. Despite the evidence of homicides with mafia-related and political implications, which would assert itself over the course of the years and the revelations, the French episode of the OTS was exploited to relaunch the anti-cult policy.

It is thus in the context of this media churn that the famous parliamentary report on sects is published in January 1996. Let us underline this strange coincidence: the Gest-Guyard report, wrapped up in haste, is filed with the presidency of the National Assembly on 22 December 1995, the day before the morbid discovery of the pseudo-suicides of the Vercors.

[Voice]: I do not at all mean to say — because I know nothing about it and do not wish to pronounce on this question — that there was, how shall I put it, that these deaths were the product of some kind of plot. I know nothing about that. But what I do know is that these deaths admirably served the parliamentary commission of inquiry which seized upon them and which, in a way, justified itself by that means. That seems to me extremely important.

[Interviewer]: Let us take the time to examine a few key elements of the report. First of all, a dismaying admission. Let us quote. [inaudible] End of quotation. A common sense built, as we have seen, by a previous slanted report and fifteen years of one-way media hype.

Another crucial point: like the Vivien report, this report produces no statistics on the supposed criminality of “sects”, but does not forget to recall 1978 and the Guyana massacre, Waco and other tragedies abusively linked to the new spiritualities. This total absence of evidence does not prevent the categorical and peremptory affirmation of the existence of a genuine scourge, as well as a denunciation by name in the form of a list of 172 dangerous sects. That is truly the most shocking act of the commission, as Maître [inaudible ?] underlines.

[Participant] (lawyer): Even if certain groups have indeed been convicted and have certain reprehensible behaviours, that does not justify, even against them, this device of a list. Even for them, in any case, they are victims of a procedure that is unacceptable. A procedure of media lynching, of proscription lists, which strongly resembles what happened under Vichy. One must be plain and clear about it.

[Voice]: You know that this business of lists is an old one. In 1937, in Germany, the commission of directives had already drawn up a list of the sects that could destroy the German people. There were the Jehovah’s Witnesses — the Bibelforscher, as they were then — and a few evangelical groups. When a list was made, things that had already existed were taken up again.

[Interviewer]: A final point on which we pause: the report’s sources. Twenty hearings behind closed doors. The deputies decided to keep them secret — and not the witnesses — while nevertheless transcribing a few chosen, anonymous passages, whose content makes it possible to affirm that pride of place was given to representatives of the anti-cult movement. The rapporteurs also declare that they relied essentially on a very fine and complete analysis by the Renseignements Généraux. Patrick Rougelet, a former director of the RG, would say of this analysis, in his book, that there is not much to it: “In a rush, a report had to be fabricated. A civil servant took on the job of compiling the work done by others, notably by the gendarmes.”

The report of the parliamentary commission of inquiry can claim neither a serious methodology nor any statistical study, and could put forward only the slapdash work of the Renseignements Généraux. It is therefore necessary that there be disclosure of that intelligence, as the law authorizes them.

Christian Paturel, former lawyer, Jehovah’s Witness.

[Paturel]: My church figures among the 172 sectarian movements. My church asked to be given access to the report of the Renseignements Généraux.

[Interviewer]: Despite an initial refusal by the Renseignements Généraux, they finally obtain that a court of justice examine this document for them.

[Paturel]: And in my view, the result would be identical for almost all of the movements that are listed. Which shows clearly that this work was done on the basis of denunciations by persons who have remained secret.

[Interviewer]: What, then, is left to this report in terms of legitimacy?

[Voice]: Can one speak of legitimacy when only 30 people took part in this commission of inquiry that we ended up with? Out of the 30, there are 7 or 8 who genuinely took part in the vote and adopted this report. I believe the question remains wide open. How can one speak of legitimacy when, for example — and this is public knowledge — no sociologist of religions, no researcher, was heard by the commission of inquiry?

[Voice]: I believe that the people who have drawn up parliamentary inquiry reports in France absolutely avoid citing “my work” — like that, indeed, of the other researchers. One must know that the parliamentary inquiry reports we have had are mendacious. And that the one on the money of sects, for example, like that of 1996, was made to support the thesis of the social scourge. The parliamentarians could let anything at all be written, since there was no possible recourse, and not even any possible right of reply, for the groups described, incriminated or defamed or sullied.

[Interviewer]: The deputies do indeed enjoy parliamentary immunity and, as for the document itself, they enjoy the protection of its indicative status.

[Voice]: It is obvious that the parliamentary reports are constantly applied. In theory — in theory they are not applicable, since they were not made, not constituted, under the conditions that could make them applicable — basic conditions, conditions of basic information, that could make them applicable. But they are applied permanently. They are applied in the refusal to grant visas, in the refusal to grant building permits. Because when you are — when you belong to this or that religious movement, and even when you are the representative of such a religious movement and you want to build a — I don’t know, a building, a small building in which to meet — even if you are a 1901 association, nothing at all, in short you are asking nothing of anyone, you just want to put up this small building, on a private basis, as an association — what does the mayor do? You apply for the building permit; the mayor looks at the list, he asks the prefect, he sees the list, it is marked. Finished. You do not get your building permit. And there, in that case, what is going to happen? You will say: look, I have suffered discrimination; it is because I belong to, or because I represent, this movement that I could not obtain a building permit, whereas the post tells me that… You will be told: you cannot go before the court. And why can I not go before the court? Well, you cannot, since the report is only indicative. Since it is only indicative, it is not enforceable, so you cannot say that it is because of the report that this was done to you. Yet, concretely, it is because of the report. Since the report is only indicative, it can say anything whatsoever; it will still only ever be indicative, while causing you harm without your being able to contradict it. Claiming that one cannot do what one is doing because one is in a situation of laïcité makes what possible? Doing it all the more, without having to explain oneself. That is the subtlety of the system, and that is its normal functioning. It is made for that.

[Interviewer]: This document is thus an unanswerable weapon of discrimination. It is still today a pillar of the policy known as the fight against sectarian drift.

This first part of our documentary reveals only a few aspects of the apparatus currently in place in France, which tends to perpetuate and exploit the fantasy of the “sect”. Our investigation therefore did not stop there.

[inaudible]

[Voice]: … of a movement recognized as sectarian, which is called the Evangelical Church.

[Baubérot]: For my part, as an academic, I will be very vigilant to see whether the new-style MIVILUDES remains within rationality.

[Duval]: Some interviewed me, came to film me, to record me. Some wrote pieces, and 27 were censored by their editorial offices. That is our democracy.

[Voice]: That means nothing.

[Voice]: And it is obvious that abroad, people do not have this sort of mania. I, who have travelled a great deal abroad — people think it is an absolute mockery.