History of the Anti-Cult Struggle in France

1893

Gabriel Tarde, a sociologist who tried his hand at criminology, publishes a series of articles which would later appear under the title L’opinion et la foule (Opinion and the Crowd), the first of which is the following article: Foules et sectes du point de vue criminel (Crowds and Sects from the Criminal Point of View) (in La Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 November, pp. 349-387). In this essay, which explores the notions of crowds, corporations, the public and what differentiates them from one another, the notion of sect is defined as follows:

“A crowd tends to reproduce itself at the first opportunity, to reproduce itself at less and less irregular intervals and, purifying itself each time, to organise itself corporatively into a kind of sect or party; a club begins by being open and public, then, little by little, it closes in and tightens up; moreover, the leaders of a crowd are most often not isolated individuals, but sectarians. Sects are the ferments of crowds. (…) Nothing more beneficent than the Hanse in the Middle Ages; nothing more harmful, in our day, than the anarchic sect. In both cases, the same force of expansion, salutary or terrible.”

Cited as sects: the Jacobins, the Sicilian mafia, the Neapolitan camorra, Russian nihilism…

General remarks on the evolution of the terms sects and sectarian

According to a study carried out in 2004 by Mr Paul Airieau, historian, for the MIVILUDES in the framework of the seminar Sectes et laïcité (Sects and Secularism):

“(Through the) catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the books were identified whose titles contained the words ‘sectes’, ‘secte’, ‘sectaire’, ‘sectaires’, ‘sectarisme’ from 1900 to 2002, and ‘laïcité’ from 1945 to 2002. (…) This yields 376 titles, whose chronological distribution is not without interest. (…) The first part of the century draws attention: a relatively regular output, but never more than three titles. Before 1977, output is never higher than five, and some years include no title at all. After 1977, there is an explosion, (annual) output never falling below five, except in 1989 and 2002. 1990-2002, with a very strong surge and a peak in 1996 and 1997, and an impressive drop in 2000. The proportions are just as eloquent. Between 1977 and 2002, 69.95% of the books selected are published, with the period 1986-2002 concentrating as much as 51.33% of them (193 titles). As for the period before 1945, it accounts for 13.56% of the titles (51), that is, less than the period 1945-1977 (16.48%, 62 titles). The theme therefore becomes socially important from the end of the 1970s onwards, and highly fashionable in the decade of the 1990s.”

“The words ‘sectaire’ and ‘sectaires’ are not used over the whole period. They are present almost solely before 1914 and after 1998, ‘sectaires’ even being used mostly before 1914 (54.54% of occurrences). As for ‘sectarisme’, it is used mostly between 1971 and 1972, disappears (with the exception of 1980) and reappears from 2000 onwards. ‘Sectes’ and ‘secte’ also display particularities. ‘Sectes’ has 56.25% of its occurrences after 1986, whereas ‘secte’ has only 44.23%. Before 1945 occur 8.33% of the uses of ‘sectes’, but 16.34% of those of ‘secte’. A change seems to have taken place: the ‘sects’ have replaced the ‘sect’, and the shift became more pronounced from the 1950s onwards, and even more so after 1977. These elements therefore suggest shifts in the meaning of the words which will need to be clarified.”

“Before 1945, the question of the ‘sects’ is virtually non-existent. (…) In the 1950s, in addition to the sociological and descriptive use, we see the appearance of the Catholic polemic against the non-Catholic religious groups expanding in France: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists, Baptists, Mormons, essentially.”

Chronology

1946

Jean Herbert, author of numerous works devoted to Hinduism, founds the Spiritualités vivantes (Living Spiritualities) collection at Albin Michel.

In an article published in 2005 on Primo Info, entitled Psychologie politique et paix sociale ou l’art subtil de la manipulation des foules (Political Psychology and Social Peace, or the Subtle Art of Crowd Manipulation), Pascal Hubrecht writes: “For a true discipline of mass persuasion to come into being, one would have to wait for the true manipulators of political symbolism, who appeared in the United States in the mid-1950s. These masters of a discipline of a new kind synthesised the work of Sechenov and Pavlov (Soviet psychology) and their conditioned reflexes, of Freud and his father images, of Rienman and his idea of conceiving American voters as spectator-consumers of politics.”

1950

“The revival of esotericism in France begins at the end of the 1950s with Le matin des magiciens (The Morning of the Magicians), by Louis Pauwels, then the review Planète.”

“Around the 1950s-60s, the West sees a thirst for verticality suddenly expressing itself in many people outside the traditional Churches. It is difficult to convey the incredible diversity and multiplicity of the teachings and practices that appeared at that time, and the upheaval that millions of people may have experienced through them. Some travel to encounter the Orient and its ancestral traditions; they bring back images, texts, and their own interpretation of these encounters, which in turn inspire others.”

“The expression brainwashing appears for the first time on 24 September 1950 in an article in the Miami Daily News dealing with methods used by the Chinese communists to ‘turn’ prisoners of war or political detainees. It was signed by Edward Hunter, a journalist who was also an agent of the OSS and then of the CIA. Dick Anthony and Massimo Introvigne distinguish three periods in the history of the notion of ‘brainwashing’: the anti-communist period from 1950 to the end of the 1960s, the period of the ‘first anti-cult war’ in the 1970s-1980s, and the period of the ‘second anti-cult war’ in the 1990s.”

“McCarthyism is an episode of American history also known by the name of the ‘Red Scare’, which stretched approximately from 1950 to 1956. It designates not only the inquisitorial procedure conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s commission, consisting in hunting down possible communist agents, activists or sympathisers in the United States, but also a political atmosphere consisting in curtailing the expression of political or social opinions judged unfavourable, by limiting civil rights on the grounds of defending national security.” It is regarded by some observers as a precedent for the anti-cult campaign in France, itself sometimes judged to be a convenient screen for the introduction of legislation aimed at curtailing individual liberties for purposes rather remote from the original motives.

1951

Publication of the three doctrinal books of the Christ of Montfavet. “First at Christmas 1947, then on the same date in 1950, he reveals himself to his family as a new incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Christ returned to earth, a revelation which would be communicated to the general public from February 1954 onwards. However, from the end of December 1950, numerous leaflets are distributed throughout France and even beyond our borders, leaflets bearing the title Hier Jésus de Nazareth, aujourd’hui Georges [Roux] de Montfavet ! (Yesterday Jesus of Nazareth, today Georges [Roux] of Montfavet!). Immediately a mission, the Agence Chrétienne d’Information (Christian Information Agency), is established in Paris.”

“The number of studies carried out in the sociology of religion in France and Belgium in recent years is very impressive. Not only are there a large number of reports on the percentage of those interested in religion in relation to the overall population, with comparisons by region, community, sex, age, class and occupation, but also a significant number of exhaustive surveys by parishes and dioceses; attempts have been made to measure the effects of education, social class membership and housing on religious beliefs, to confirm the results of social change or territorial mobility on religious belief and, in France, to establish a link between religion and political choice. (…) Modern studies in France and Belgium are mostly conducted by Catholics who have received no prior sociological training.”

1953

Publication of M. Colinon’s book, Faux prophètes et sectes d’aujourd’hui (False Prophets and Sects of Today), Plon, 1953, coll. Présences.

1954

“The Reverend Sun Myung Moon officially founds, in Seoul, the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity (commonly called the ‘Unification Church’, or Moon. From 1957 onwards, thirty Korean towns and communes see new churches erected. In 1958, he sends his first missionaries to neighbouring Japan and, in 1959, his first mission arrives in America.”

“Scientology, or the Church of Scientology, an organisation founded in the United States by L. Ron Hubbard, promotes a method called ‘dianetics’ by its founder and more broadly offers a set of beliefs and practices relating to the nature of man and his place in the universe.” In 1954, foundation of the first Church of Scientology.

1959

“In 1959, Indian spirituality is still known in France only in restricted circles. Arnaud Desjardins, a film-maker and a Christian who practises yoga, sets off for India by car. He intends to deepen his knowledge of yoga, but also to discover, and make others discover through television, another world. From ashram to ashram, he meets the greatest masters of the 20th century: Swami Shivananda, Mâ Ananda Môyi, Swami Ramdas, Ramana Maharshi. He brings back a founding film, Ashrams, and a book of the same name. These two works reveal to a whole generation that another world is possible, and that from the Orient blows the Spirit. Arnaud Desjardins had thus opened the road to Kathmandu. (…) A seminal text, which marked a whole era, Ashrams remains the living testimony of a world still present.”

1960

Alain Danielou (1907-1994), writer, musicologist, philosopher and translator, returns to France after 25 years spent in India, where he lived, studied and taught. He publishes Mythes et dieux de l’Inde : Le polythéisme hindou (Myths and Gods of India: Hindu Polytheism), in which he seeks to “allow a better understanding of the Hindu conception of the multiplicity of the Divine and of the dangers inherent in the monotheistic illusion.” He has returned to France to speak forcefully of the present-day relevance of “a symbolic mythology, a cosmology that does not separate religion, metaphysics and science”.

1966

Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (AICK in French, or ISKCON in English), boards a cargo ship leaving India for the United States. Alone, he lands in New York.

“The first six months in New York are difficult. A growing group of disciples nevertheless begins to gather around him. They often go with Swami Prabhupada to the public garden Thompkins Square Park to practise there the sacred chanting of the Name of God. Prabhupada organises there the first open-air chanting gathering (sankirtan) ever to have taken place outside India. The development of his movement, still very much present today, is dazzling. In less than ten years, he would make the Hare Krishna mantra known on the five continents, establishing more than a hundred centres there.”

On 16 June 1966, the ORTF broadcasts a programme presented by Arnaud Desjardins, Le Bouddhisme, le message des Tibétains (Buddhism, the Message of the Tibetans). “Arnaud Desjardins publishes several works at the end of the 60s which would have a great impact on the French public and contribute greatly to making Eastern spiritualities known, in particular Indian and Tibetan ones.”

1968

“The year 1968 is marked by a series of revolts, mainly student ones, more or less everywhere on the planet. Beginning of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, clashes between students and police in Italy, then in the United States and in Poland in February. (…) Riots in most of the large cities of the United States after the assassination of Martin Luther King on 4 April. Student riots then break out in Tokyo, soon followed by France in May. A violent confrontation between police and pro-independence demonstrators in Montreal on 24 June 1968, in which 290 people are arrested and 125 injured, would enter Quebec history under the name of the lundi de la matraque (Truncheon Monday). (…) American students rise up against the Vietnam War and call into question the American way of life. On 2 October 1968, in the early evening, the “Noche Triste”, the Mexican army opens fire on students gathered on the Plaza of the Three Cultures at Tlatelolco in Mexico City.

“The year 1968 reflects a turning point in mentalities, in France as in the rest of the Western world. (…). Student youth shows itself receptive to radical thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Noam Chomski and Herbert Marcuse.”

“In February 1968, the Beatles, Mike Love (Beach Boys) and Donovan fly to India to visit Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The Beatles wrote more than thirty songs at Rishikesh, at Maharishi’s ashram, as their White Album attests. The Beatles made the Maharishi the most famous Indian spiritual master on the planet.”

28 February 1968: Creation of Auroville (the City of Dawn) some ten kilometres north of Pondicherry, in Tamil Nadu, India. This experimental town was created by Mira Alfassa (Mirra Richard), better known by the name of The Mother, spiritual companion of Sri Aurobindo, the Indian philosopher. Its vocation is to be “the place of a universal community life, where men and women would learn to live in peace, in perfect harmony, beyond all beliefs, political opinions and nationalities”.

“Moon’s first disciples came to our country on 12 November 1968, called at that time: the Pioneers of the New Age.”

The Children of God (EDD in French, or Children of God, COG), later known by the names of The Family of Love, The Family, and now The Family International (TFI), is a movement founded in 1968 by pastor David-Brandt Berg. The latter was a televangelist preacher who wished to bring the message of the Gospel to the hippie youth of the United States. He had his disciples call him Moses-David or simply MO. He put an end to his many wanderings and settled, in 1968, in Huntington Beach, California. The Children of God, often designated as a “sect” by the media and certain governmental organisations, was among the movements that gave rise to the controversy over sects in the 70s and 80s in the United States and in Europe.

1969

Creation of Aumism by Gilbert Bourdin, or His Holiness Hamsah Manarah, or the Cosmo-planetary Messiah.

“Something really did happen in the 1970s with regard to the ‘sects’, and it intensified after 1995.”

1971

The first organised historic anti-cult group is American: FREECOG (Free the Children of God). It was formed largely in response to the total devotion demanded of members of the Children of God and to the supposed mind-control techniques used by that group. Among the founders of FREECOG were Ian Haworth, William Rambur, John Moody and Ted Patrick, one of the pioneers of deprogramming. “In July 1971, members of the Children of God made contact with Ted Patrick’s son and nephew on Mission Beach, California, and the two prepared to join the organisation. When Patrick heard their account and subsequently began to receive complaints from parents about their children joining the group, he felt increasingly concerned about this organisation and decided to investigate its activities. As part of his investigation, he infiltrated the group and became a member as a new disciple. Shortly afterwards, he founded, with several concerned parents of members of the Children of God, an organisation called The Parents’ Committee to Free Our Children from the Children of God (later renamed Free the Children of God, or FREECOG). Patrick was widely recognised as the first deprogrammer and the originator of the term ‘deprogramming’. Yet it was not until his first deprogramming session (of an ex-member of the Children of God) that he began to use this term.”

“Notwithstanding the sympathy of a few local political authorities, in its rather simple original form the anti-cult movement had little chance of success. On the other hand — according to the model summarised by Shupe and Bromley — three development factors allowed almost continuous growth from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1980s. These are organisational consolidation, professionalisation and the expansion of targets. On the one hand, it must be acknowledged that the anti-cult movements, which had been born as local groups, were able (thanks also to their good relations with a certain press) to link up with one another on a national scale and to bring together people who, originally, were interested only in one particular group (for example the Children of God or the Unification Church). Unstructured groups gradually created visible and significant structures. Shupe and Bromley insist, moreover, on the fact that, especially before 1980, this organisational consolidation would not have been possible without the ‘binding’ role played by the deprogrammers. It is true that, subsequently, the largest anti-cult movements — after the American courts moved from a certain indulgence to the greatest severity towards deprogramming — came to declare themselves opposed to this practice, at least publicly. According to Shupe and Bromley, ‘violent deprogrammers like Ted Patrick were increasingly relegated to the margins, in reality still honoured symbolically within the [anti-cult] movements as founding heroes, but carefully hidden from public view.‘“

1972

“The Children of God establish themselves in France from 1972 onwards. They reject the institutions of this world (family, society) and advocate sexual liberation, while awaiting the return of Jesus Christ to fight against the dictatorship of Satan on Earth.”

1974

On Sunday 19 May 1974, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (aged 48) becomes the third president of the Fifth Republic.

“Until then employed by a recognised and institutionalised Church (at least through the effect of time) to describe schismatic groups, the term ‘sect’ is quickly used to designate groups recently arrived on the national territory, which clash with the socio-cultural landscape of the time. Whether they refer, more or less distantly, to the texts or the spirit of the Catholic religion (Moon, Children of God) or to an entirely different worship (Krishna), they do not go unnoticed. (…) These themes, particularly foreign to the dominant French culture of the 1970s, make these three groups particularly conspicuous. Above all, the practices implemented attract attention and a certain disapproval (which is, however, neither categorical nor general). They share a certain distrust of the family institution, and most followers are invited to distance themselves from their own. For many, this then involves a journey abroad. Likewise, the generalised mistrust of society (which does not prevent significant proselytising) leads them to limit contact with non-followers, which reinforces the commonly shared impression of exclusion. But it is the news items in the papers that will gradually make them known to the public. The followers of the ISKCON (Krishnas), dressed in white or saffron saris (shaved heads for the men), practise strict veganism, refuse all ‘intoxication’ (drugs, tobacco, alcohol, coffee, tea) and recite the Maha Mantra several hours a day, with a view to purifying themselves and attracting conversions.”

“The Association for the Unification of World Christianity establishes itself in France around the mid-70s. Distancing itself from certain points stemming from the Christian tradition, it asserts that Reverend Moon is the ‘Lord of the Second Advent’, come to complete the work of Jesus Christ on earth by founding a perfect family. Proclaimed ‘True Parents’ of the followers, Moon and his wife take their place alongside the United States in the struggle against the incarnation of Satan, communism (in this capacity, Reverend Moon would be received very officially at the White House by Richard Nixon).” “The present organisation dates from 1976, in the legal form of an Association under the 1901 law.”

“Many of these young people leave France for the United States. Reverend Moon is conducting there the Day of Hope campaign, which culminates in the Madison Square Garden speech in New York on 18 September 1974: a turning point. The American press goes wild and the shock wave reaches France a few months later.”

“The French press echoes gigantic weddings celebrated by Reverend Moon between several thousand couples. Widely circulated photos show lines of couples — all dressed identically — awaiting his nuptial blessing.”

“Less noticed, the practices of the Children of God nevertheless arouse indignation among those who get wind of them. Mention is then made of the method of flirty fishing, advocated by Moses David, which consists in encouraging the young women of the group to seduce men in order to bring them to convert or to finance the movement. Mo declares: ‘The little flirty fish uses all the bait at its disposal to bring back to God all the lost souls.’”

In the mid-70s, while the Children of God and other new religious movements were growing and spreading throughout the world, a broader anti-cult movement began to develop in the United States, Western Europe and elsewhere. In the early 80s, numerous parents’ associations came together to form CAN (Cult Awareness Network).

“In October 1974, at their home in Chantepie, Claire and Guy Champollion are worried. One of their children, Yves, 18, has not come home. (…) In less than a day, his parents discover (…) the existence of a ‘religious’ movement: the Association for the Unification of World Christianity. Guy Champollion immediately takes the road to Lyon (…). On the spot, things get complicated: Yves does not want to come home. (…) Yves’s return to the family fold would be short-lived. After a night spent at his parents’ home, he would rejoin the sect… which he has not left in thirty years. The Champollion couple lose a son and begin a fight to which they will devote their whole lives. (…) [They] file, on 18 December 1974 at the prefecture of Ille-et-Vilaine, the statutes of the Association for the Defence of Family Values and of the Individual (which would become the ADFI).”

“The anti-cult association founded by the Champollions (parents of a Moonie who joined in Rennes in 1974) names itself Association de Défense de la Famille et de l’Individu (Association for the Defence of the Family and of the Individual) by a curious phenomenon of theological mimicry with the object of its execration. Questioned about the choice of these terms, Madame Champollion would moreover later express her embarrassment about this terminology.”

“The ADFI branches out until the early 1980s and at the same time obtains recognition from the public authorities: a subsidy from the Ministry of Health in 1977 and again in 1978, enabling it to open a reception centre and a permanent secretariat and to hire permanent staff, subsidies from the DASS, the Fondation de France, the Ministry of Youth and Sports, accreditation from the Ministry of Leisure.”

“The ADFI immediately declares its attachment to the pseudo-scientific theories of the American psychiatrists, notably John Clark, Louis West and Margaret Singer, aiming at a ‘normalisation of society’. The latter is said to be endangered by the new sectarian movements.”

“The phenomenon of resonance between the heartfelt cry of relatives and the drum-beating effect of the local press would be incomplete without the entrance on stage of Father Pierre Le Cabellec. In a Catholic Brittany, the word of a parish priest gives the crusade of the ADFI and Ouest-France the inquisitorial edge that was missing to trigger a collective panic. It is here that one sees how haphazard the manufacture of the image is. In the phase known as ‘the Moon sect’, when the political power remains neutral, the adversary plays the card of religious horror: Moon is then a ‘guru’, ‘the Korean messiah’ who abuses the credulity of the ‘followers’ and ‘indoctrinates’ them with a ‘heresy’. Other ‘sects’ then get talked about, such as the Children of God, Scientology or the Krishna Consciousness movement, but the trisyllabic term ‘the Moon sect’ feeds the fantasies. This movement then appears as the purest archetype of the ‘sectarian phenomenon’. Later, the image of ‘the Moon Empire’ plays rather the card of political horror. The State, fearing to play Nero, seeks to deny the religious side of Moonism and of anti-Moonism. Whereas the established religions, in the days of ‘the Moon sect’, had shown some spiritual solidarity with the families and advised the ADFI, they will come to suspect the State of encroaching on a domain that is none of its business. The ADFI, moreover, renounces the confessional veneer of its beginnings, accepting instrumentalisation by the power, which declares it to be of public utility and gives it subsidies. In the phase of ‘the Moon sect’, the ADFI attracted the parents of Moonies. In the phase of ‘the Moon Empire’, it drives them away and the ADFI tends to become an empty shell: the parents of Moonies move away from it, preferring to pacify their relations with their children. The State used the initial tribal hatred to settle its scores by taking the ADFI under its supervision.”

“The action of these associations is relayed and supported by parliamentarians. In 1974 and 1975, two plans for a parliamentary information mission are launched but come to nothing, and it is within the framework of the law commission that an information initiative is launched in 1978. Alain Vivien, deputy for Seine-et-Marne, is the parliamentarian most involved in the subject.”

1975

“During a trip to Korea, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon presides over the largest gathering ever seen in the world, bringing together more than 1.2 million participants, in the framework of the ‘World Rally for Korean Freedom’. That year, he sends missionaries to one hundred and twenty other countries of the world.”

“The International Society for Krishna Consciousness, born in 1966 at the instigation of S. Prabhupada, likewise experiences rapid development in the West. It relies on the sacred texts of Hinduism (from which it diverges strongly on only one point: Krishna is God, and not an ‘avatar of Vishnu’). Prayer and meditation are regarded as the best means of not losing oneself in the turpitudes of the contemporary world, the dark age of Kali.”

The media echo this richness and this variety of new spiritual approaches.

In a programme of 5/4/1975, TF1 presents a report on young people’s enthusiasm for Eastern religions, and the followers of the Hare Krishna “sect”. Alternating sequences illustrating their life between yoga classes and meditation, and testimonies from the followers. In an interview with the Catholic priest Maurice Maupilier: “Sir, why have young people so readily adopted these Eastern movements?” Answer: “Since society does not satisfy them, since they are not engaged in this society, they refuse it and look for something elsewhere, which will give them a great impetus and a new meaning to their life.” “Do these Eastern religions call into question the traditional Western religions?” “Good question. They certainly do call them into question, and they call them into question more profoundly than ever today. It is one of two things: either these religions you call Western, these traditional religions in the West, no longer have anything to say to the man of today and tomorrow, in which case such a calling into question is perfect, because it makes them die. It contributes to their dissolution, everyone sees clearly, and that is very good. Or else these religions of the traditional type in the West still have something to say to man, in which case a calling into question of this kind is extremely profitable, because it will lead these religions to rid themselves of superfluous baggage, to renew themselves and, returning to their roots, to their essential depth, they will perhaps be able to find a form suited to telling the man of today and tomorrow just what he is looking for and does not have.”

A report on the Buddhist community of the château de Plaige, in Saône-et-Loire, 40 km from Autun, on the 8 p.m. news on A2 on 7/8/1976, Bouddha sur Saône (Buddha on Saône), describes life in this community of prayer and interviews the inhabitants of the surrounding village, all of whose testimonies are full of praise. The journalist comments: “An experience which has enabled these young people to relearn how to live happily. Kalu Rimpoche’s project is no doubt first and foremost that.” At the end of the programme, a song by Guy Skornik: “Everywhere I look, I see only Tao…”

One may also note the appearance of the theme of the “sects” on the radio, as in the Radioscopie programme of Jacques Chancel in which Michel Viot, at the time a Protestant Christian pastor, mentions “a resurgence of satanic sects”. (Radioscopie of Michel Viot with Jacques Chancel, Radio France, 17 June 1975)

“In January 1975, Ouest-France is the first press organ in the world to speak of ‘the Moon sect (…) When ‘the Moon sect’ makes its first entry into the French news in 1975, the movement has already existed for 7 years and has gained all or almost all of its historic figures, without attracting attention. But for a year, it occupies centre stage, with peaks in January-February 1975, June 1975 and January 1976. The persecuting hatred culminates with the abduction of Marie-Christine Amadéo and the bombing of the Moonist centre at the Villa Aublet. These twelve months would see the term ‘Moon sect’ leave a deep mark on French and then world public opinion. (…) In the phase of ‘the Moon sect’, the latter is accused of ‘stealing’ children from their parents, of ‘brainwashing’ them. Yet Marie-Christine Amadéo, although of age when she joined the Unification Church, would be abducted twice by her relatives.”

“The wave of Moonism in Rennes suddenly runs up against three reefs: the ADFI, born in Rennes, represents the resentment of the families who say they have been ‘broken’ by the Moon sect. This cry from the heart and the guts is given regional amplification by Ouest-France: the daily (conscience of the West and voice of the Breton tribe) denounces the peril and alerts the whole of France. Finally, Father Le Cabellec brandishes the danger of heresy. Through his rudimentary theological explanations, he leads the country to develop a passion for christological questions: is Christ God or not? Is there a trinity? Did Jesus come in order to die on the cross? For years, these questions would come up again and again in connection with ‘the Moon sect’. They would disappear in the era of ‘the Moon Empire’. The French phenomenon of the ‘Moon sect’ is thus explained by a regional trio: the tribe of betrayed families unleashes the thunderbolts of the press and the local clergy against young heretics, in a country where the lowering of the age of majority has called into question centuries of relations between parents and children. This cocktail explodes in January 1975, with a new peak in February. For the first time, indeed, a stunned France discovers on television the ‘mass weddings’ celebrated by Moon and his wife. On 8 February 1975, 1,800 couples receive in Seoul the Blessing of the True Parents; among these new couples, there are six French people. Paris Match publishes a long report on the event and does not hesitate to headline: ‘Moon, the living god is taking our children from us.’”

“At the time of my husband’s death (in 1975), there were ADFIs in Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lille, Paris. In Nancy, DEFI (Defence of the Child, the Family and the Individual) dealt specially with the Children of God. The heads of the ADFIs informed as many leaders as possible: religious, civil, administrative, political (the Ministry of the Interior, for example: Guy made reports for the Judicial Police. Even if the official listened to him with understanding and sympathy, and passed them on, he harboured, and left him, hardly any illusions about the final destination of these reports: the filing cupboard).” (Testimony of Claire Champollion in BULLES, 1st quarter 1992)

Publication of the book by Jean-Pierre Morin, gendarmerie captain: Le viol psychique - La psychopolémologie : un nouveau procédé de la subversion (Psychic Rape — Psychopolemology: A New Process of Subversion), from Nouvelles Éditions Roger Garry.

1976

“Creation of the ADIF (Association for the Defence of the Individual and the Family) in Belgium by Mrs Julia Nyssens-Dussart.” “A lawyer by training, Julia Nyssens was the founder and president of the Association for the Defence of the Individual and the Family (ADIF), created in 1976, following the trial and conviction of the Melchior brothers, founders of the Three Holy Hearts.” “It is to her that we owe the general anti-sect mobilisation which led in 1997 to the Belgian parliamentary commission of enquiry.”

7 August 1976: Report on Antenne 2, on the 8 p.m. news, “Tibet sur Saône” (Tibet on Saône): a Buddhist community at Plaige, in Saône-et-Loire. A mother speaks of her son: “He did Chad and then India, for ten months (…). Before, he was a boy like all the others, a little nervous. He has acquired a wisdom, a simplicity (…). We are seeking the truth.” One sees in this report that minds at the time were much more open than today to spiritualities “come from elsewhere”, and the local population displays, with regard to this Buddhist community, “astonishment sometimes, sympathy often”. “They have managed to get themselves adopted by an entire population, even if that population does not always perceive what the meaning of their spiritual quest is.”

“In 1976, Jo Di Mambro founds the Centre for the Preparation of the New Age.”

“In 1976, Madame Lidwine Ovigneur, head of the Lille ADFI, declares to the newspaper L’Aurore, concerning Brigitte Backeland, a young follower of the Unification Church, that after the ‘abduction’ she ‘is now resting in the countryside where she is going to be deprogrammed’. This is not the first case, according to Madame Ovigneur, who adds: ‘Our deprogramming techniques are now well perfected, thanks in particular to the American experiences.’ (Francis Schull, ‘The astonishing story of a “Moonist” boss’, L’Aurore, 27 January 1976) The ‘deprogrammed’ young woman filed a complaint for deliberate assault and battery, attempted rape and death threats.”

“A liberal democracy distinguishes first between the spiritual function and the temporal function, then, within the latter, between the legislative, executive and judicial functions. It then entrusts each of these functions to different powers, independent of one another.”

1977

Publication of Alain Woodrow’s book: Les nouvelles sectes (The New Sects), which symbolises the mutation from an essentially doctrinal polemic against non-Catholic religious groups to a presentation of minority religious groups “soon accompanied by their denunciation as totalitarian associations wearing a religious mask.”

Suicide of Patrick Esnault, a young Moonie.

“The French press invented two expressions that hit home in world popular imagery: in January 1975, Ouest France is the first press organ in the world to speak of ‘the Moon sect’. In the 1980s, Jean-François Boyer, senior reporter at TF1, signs a best-seller translated into many languages: ‘L’Empire Moon’ (The Moon Empire). ‘The Moon sect’ and ‘The Moon Empire’: two hard-hitting journalistic coinages, imprinting on the zeitgeist two images or two mental galaxies comprising subsets: ‘The Moon sect’ evokes images of a Korean messiah, collective weddings, deprivation of sleep and food, zombies, depersonalisation, brainwashing. ‘The Moon Empire’ is a universe of soldier-monks, of spider’s strategy, of infiltration, of entryism. These two images applied to one and the same object are not compatible: the first evokes the subversion wrought by an all-powerful oriental figure come to ‘steal our children’, to prevent them from fulfilling the ambitions and hopes their parents placed in them. The easy clichés will come thick and fast: ‘On one side, powerful, rich organisations, skilled at recruiting. On the other, individuals — often very young — enamoured of ideals, who abandon family, studies, career to follow what they believe to be their spiritual path.’ The second image supposes that a multitude of Reverend Moons are among us, highly intelligent and motivated, working to subvert our elites. Admittedly, these two images follow the objective evolution of the movement itself, which changed in nature and in method. But these two images are also ‘snapshots’ of passing time, two photographs of the France of the 70s and 80s. The image of ‘the Moon sect’ is irrational and archaic, belonging to a psychology of crowds as in Fritz Lang’s M and Fury. The mental image induced by ‘the Moon Empire’ is more sophisticated. It reflects Mitterrandian ideology and thus points to the capacity of a modern State to create mythology. The myth of ‘the Moon sect’ is typical of the French collective unconscious, that of ‘the Moon Empire’ of the French State.”

1978

On 18 November 1978, 914 people are found dead at Jonestown in Guyana (former British Guiana, near Venezuela), where a thousand members of the congregation of Pastor Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple lived. There is talk of poisoning, of collective suicide, of massacre. This event constitutes the first collective trauma that would serve as a foundation for the worldwide anti-cult campaign which was set in motion at that time. Journalists quickly draw a link between the tragedy and spiritual movements as a whole, then designated by the term “sectes” (cults in English), which as yet carried no pejorative charge. Five thousand organisations listed under this designation in the United States suddenly become the object of generalised mistrust.

First request for a commission of enquiry at the National Assembly. It was refused but gave rise, in 1981, to the creation within the Law Commission of an information mission chaired by Mr Philippe Marchand. (cf. Vivien Report)

In February 1978, after abuses of power, embezzlement and other serious misconduct within the Children of God were reported to him, their leader David Berg decided to dismiss 300 of the movement’s leaders and to recast it under a new name: The Family of Love, which would later become simply The Family.

“The ADFI is the ‘transmission belt’ that conveys the totalitarian ideology of the American psychiatrists. It regularly attempts, notably on the occasion of political elections, to impose its theses on the public authorities, media and population, to gain credence for its ‘last Crusade’.” “The ADFI translates, distributes and widely disseminates these American studies. Thus, a 1978 information bulletin declares: ’(…) through the UDAF (Departmental Union of Family Associations)’, the President of the ADFI ‘intends to convey the Clark report to the UNAF and by this route to the Ministry of Health (…)’. The President of the ADFI possesses ‘at present a lecture given to psychiatrists in Germany by Doctor Clark. This is said to be his latest text. This report dates from February 1978. It is being translated, a tool of prime importance which will have to be disseminated as widely as possible (…).’”

The programme on “Les sectes à la française” (Sects, French-style), by Alain Danvers and Maurice Albert. [passage incomplete in the archived source extraction] The tone of this report, made after Guyana, is very different from those of 75 and 76 and aims to show that “a certain sectarianism, an astonishing marginality, secret rites, a liturgy never seen before, capturings, perhaps, hijackings of personalities that many of you will judge aberrant, rightly no doubt, exist in this country (…). The look taken at these sectators is an event.” Several of the people interviewed, faced with the journalists’ leading questions, such as: “Does your enterprise not border on fraud?”, reply by defending themselves against being a “sect”. In only three years, mentalities seem to have changed considerably. The report presents the Druids, Raël, Wicca, the Church of the New Understanding (ex-Scientology, “the first sect to be dragged before the courts a few months ago, indictment, fraud (…). Although the Church’s leaders deny it, Scientology can be likened to a psychotherapy. Problem: what professional competences can the ministers of worship responsible for auditing the followers claim? Scientology’s opponents prefer to speak of mystification or brain-stuffing.”), the Claude Déplace group “La chose” (The Thing) of the astral, Krishna Consciousness (“You advocate unfailing obedience to your spiritual masters. Is that not a dangerous, fascist approach?” From the Krishna follower’s answer: “Any intelligent person could have seen that Jim Jones was not acting according to the scriptures on which he claimed to depend.” To a female devotee: “Have you broken your family ties?” “No, the proof is that my parents came today and that I am getting married.” The mother adds that she finds it very hard to accept that her daughter and the children no longer come home.). The journalist’s closing words: “So, these French-style sects: there is no definition, there are only examples. You have seen six of them and, it seems, there are more than 200 sects in France.”

“The American Family Foundation is founded in 1979 by Kay Barney, whose daughter had become a member of the Unification Church (Moon). Unlike other contemporary associations concerned with the sects, Barney wanted to address professionals and scientists, which is why she created this non-profit association devoted to research and information.”

“In her book Karma Cola, Gita Mehta, an Indian essayist, announced the globalisation and commercialisation of the ‘Orient’.“

1980

The term “anti-cult movement” (counter cult movement) first appeared from the pen of sociologists in 1980 (Bromley and Haden).

“Creation in Quebec of Projet Culte (Cult Project). At the end of the 1970s, the need for information on the sectarian phenomenon grows both in Quebec and elsewhere in the world. After the Jonestown tragedy (…), students at McGill University question the sectarian phenomenon and its consequences for the individual and the community. In 1990, Projet Culte is dissolved and becomes Info-Secte, an independent, bilingual and non-denominational centre run by a board of directors.”

Following the suicide of his youngest son, a follower of macrobiotic Zen, at the age of twenty, the writer Roger Ikor (Prix Goncourt 1955) denounces the sects in his book: Je porte plainte, lettre ouverte au Président de la République (I Am Filing a Complaint: Open Letter to the President of the Republic), published by Albin Michel in 1980: “My son hanged himself on 31 December 1979; he died on 30 August 1980. From January 1980, I had the idea of writing Je porte plainte, but during the eight months Vincent remained in a coma, I was blocked. Immediately after his death I wrote this book, in two months.”

In an article by Emmanuelle Plas published on 6 February 1981 in L’Unité No. 409 (weekly of the Socialist Party), Roger Ikor accuses the public authorities of complicity. Question: “What do you intend to do so that the public authorities act?” Roger Ikor: “I want to proceed in several stages. For the moment, I am calling upon the public authorities to act as I believe they have the right and the duty to do. I call upon them beyond any political idea. It is a request that they do their job. It is a matter of public administration: the young must be defended, for they are under attack from the sects, suicide, drugs. My book has only just come out, so for some time I shall wait. If the public authorities do not act, I shall look into forming a movement that will exert pressure more directly. People speak of a lobby; I am quite willing to call it a lobby: I am ready for anything to make the public authorities act. Since in our society nothing can be obtained without fighting, I shall do so, and even physically if necessary. If I succeed in founding committees, we shall see what means of action we can set up. In any case, people can be told to write to their deputy, to the public authorities, to put pressure on them in this election period. And then, if that is not enough, well then, we will go and raise f…ing havoc in those dens of death that the sects are: smash up the macrobiotic restaurants, the Krishna centres and the rest. At that point, the public authorities will perhaps pay more attention to it. But behind the existence of the sects, there are the causes of that existence and of their influence on the young. I would sum up these causes in one word: our civilisation — beyond capitalist society.”

1981

On 10 May, François Mitterrand is elected the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic. His seven-year term officially begins on 21 May. On 22 May, François Mitterrand dissolves the National Assembly. The legislative elections that follow, on 14 and 21 June 1981, give him an absolute majority in Parliament.

“From 1981 onwards, a will manifests itself clearly. The Prime Minister (Pierre Mauroy) wishes to initiate other working methods.”

Roger Ikor founds the CCMM (Centre Against Mental Manipulations) that same year, from a secular perspective. The CCMM’s website describes its action as follows: “It carries out a work of information, education and warning of the public, founded on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, and with reference to republican values, and to the principle of secularism in particular.” In the strongly emotional family context that prevailed at the creation of the main anti-cult associations, the words of the founder of the CCMM were particularly violent towards expressions of the spiritual and even of the religious.

According to Massimo Introvigne, Italian sociologist and founder of CESNUR: “The theological definition of the sect by the (Christian) counter-cult movement accentuates the importance as targets of the Mormons and the Freemasons, who are practically ignored by the secular anti-cult movement.”

1982

In 1982, the ADFIs federate into the UNADFI, which situates itself in the perspective of the defence of the family and of human rights.

“There was in France, in 1982, the Ravail Report, but it is unpublished and confidential.” “A report is first drawn up, in January 1982, by the Interior-Health interministerial mission, headed by Mr Jean Ravail, inspector general of the Administration. It constitutes the first serious effort at clarification attempted by the public authorities.” (Source: Vivien Report)

The Turpin affair (the abduction by his parents of a young member of the Universal Association of Krishna Consciousness) finds a resounding echo in the media.

Commander Jean-Pierre Morin publishes his book: Sectarus – Le violeur de conscience (Sectarus — The Violator of Conscience) with éditions Eboli (authorised by the Ministry of Defence), in which he writes: “As long as there has not been in France an affair identical to that of Guyana, one can be certain that this text put before Parliament will not obtain the assent of the deputies and senators.”

Two motions for resolutions were tabled in the European Parliament on 9 March 1982 and 13 April 1982. They invoke the distress and the family break-ups caused by Sun Myung Moon’s Association for the Unification of World Christianity (Doc. No. 1-2/82 and Doc. No. 1-109/82).

“A little-known clue shows the extent of the phenomenon of mimicry. On 8 June 1982, a search takes place at 6 a.m. at the headquarters of the AUCM, 18 rue Friant. Several sympathising university professors also receive early-morning visits. What are the forces of order looking for? Weapons, drugs. Who put them on the trail? Two deprogrammers, one of them a former member of the movement, Martin Faiers. In March 1982, the two accomplices had held Claire Chateau captive in a villa in the Doubs. On the orders of the public prosecutor, the police would free the young Moonist. Faiers risks the assize court, but he then confides to the investigating judge that Claire was abducted for her own good and that the police will realise this when they search the premises of the sect. Nothing, of course, would be found. In the months that followed, the AUCM, harassed by a ruinous tax lawsuit, leaves its headquarters at 18 rue Friant. Now, in 1985, a major affair of the first seven-year term keeps the press in suspense for weeks: the Carrefour du Développement affair, linked to the Ministry of Cooperation: Yves Challier, chief of staff of the minister of the time, would be accused of having embezzled 27 million francs between 1984 and 1986 from the ministry’s coffers, using forgery of public documents and breach of trust. Admittedly, the sin of the Carrefour appears venial compared with far heavier financial scandals touching the Mitterrand government. But he who steals an egg steals an ox, and fraud is one of the most frequent indicators of a ‘sectarian abuse’. Now, the sin had been committed at a curious address in Paris: at 18 rue Friant. The venal development company had set itself up in the very place where the police had searched innocent people in 1982.”

1983

“Under pressure from the anti-cult associations, parliamentarians looked into the phenomenon of the sects. A first report, drawn up under the direction of Mr Alain Vivien (Socialist Party), was submitted in 1983.” This report, entitled Les sectes en France - Expressions de la liberté morale ou facteurs de manipulations ? (Sects in France: Expressions of Moral Liberty or Factors of Manipulation?), commissioned by Pierre Mauroy, Prime Minister, from Alain Vivien, president of the CCMM, in 1982 (on 1 September), was completed in 1983 but made public only in 1985 (on 9 April). This report contained nine proposals.

“Mr Alain Vivien’s report divided, in 1982, the 116 sects listed into three categories: oriental, syncretic and esoteric, racist and fascist.”

12 August 1983: Beginning of a trial against Scientology, which would end in 2005 with a judgment handed down by the 1st Chamber of the Tribunal de grande instance (TGI) of Paris, ordering the French State to pay a total of 109,400 euros in damages and other compensation to the sixteen persons implicated, notably for fraud and illegal practice of medicine, in this case. (AFP, 8 November 2005)

1984

“The Order of the Solar Temple is founded in 1984, in France, by Jo Di Mambro and Luc Jouret.” (Jean-François Mayer)

“It may be noted that the European Parliament had itself already devoted a previous report to the sects in 1984 (the Cottrell Report).”

In March 1984, the Youth Committee of the European Parliament approved the Cottrell Report on the activity of certain “new religious movements”. The Cottrell Report led to the adoption by the European Parliament, on 22 May 1984, of the resolution on a common approach by the Member States of the European Community with a view to controlling the activities of the new religious movements in the countries of the European Union.

On 12 February, “the Council of the Protestant Federation of France (FPF), having taken cognisance of the draft resolution on the influence of the new religious movements within the European Community, decided to send a letter to all the European deputies to (…) inform them of its firm opposition to this draft. Without ignoring the painful problems sometimes caused by the development of what are called ‘the sects’, this text seems to us in several respects useless and dangerous. (…) We ask you to reject a draft which could have harmful consequences and brings no positive solution to the problem raised.”

1987

“At the request of the Supreme Court of the U.S.A., the American Psychological Association declared, in a memorandum dated 11 May 1987, that the information was insufficient to take a position on the question of the scientific reliability of the theories of mental manipulation applied to the ‘New Religious Movements’.“

1989

The opening of the Berlin Wall occurs “on 9 November 1989 (…), when (…) the spokesman of the political bureau of the Communist Party announces on East German television: ‘The borders are open with immediate effect’. (…) The fall of the wall which, in 28 years, had caused the death of at least eighty people trying to cross to the West, brings about the collapse of the communist regime.”

“On 29 November 1989, assault on the agricultural community Longo Maï. At seven in the morning, 200 CRS riot police, mobile guards, inspectors of the judicial police and of the DST, and local gendarmes are deployed; lorries block the access roads and two helicopters fly over the site. Everyone is pushed outside, in pyjamas or half naked in the cold, children as well as adults. The adults have to kneel, hands on their heads, in front of their children, at gunpoint. The radio equipment is smashed, all the buildings are searched. It would later be learned that the government acted at the request of the German government, which suspected Longo Maï of serving as a rear base for Kurdish militants. Yet another assault for nothing…“

1990

“Anne-Catherine Bouvier de Cachard is in love with a modest ‘commoner’ of Portuguese origin. This loss of discernment, according to the family, can only be explained by membership of a sect. Yet Peynet’s lovers do not constitute a sect! That group is very much in the majority. With the help of the ADFI, a priest and a commando, the operation is devised and swiftly executed. Kidnapped, drugged, the young woman is ‘treated’ with neuroleptics, a therapy suited to patients presenting serious psychic disorders. This affair took place in 1990 near Châlons-sur-Marne and ended in 1992 with the indictment of two members of the family and of a priest.”

“In 1990, 5,837 cases of sexual abuse of minors were recorded in France by the police and the gendarmerie. They are committed outside of ‘sects’.“

1991

The 1991 Hunt Report, like the Cottrell Report of 1984, states: “The freedom of conscience and religion guaranteed by Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights makes it inadvisable to resort to major legislation on sects […]”

“September 1991: the agrarian community Horus, in the Drôme, sees the gendarmes and the media descend on their property. The report produced from that day is a manipulation of the facts, as is often the case. A lawyer invited to the site served as mediator so that the assault would not turn into a tragedy.”

“The agrarian community, by its way of functioning, can represent a model of economy totally different from the classic models, capitalist or communist. If 50 people are capable of feeding themselves without asking anything more of anyone, if they are capable of staying in good health and, consequently, no longer need to frequent either supermarkets or pharmacies, if they no longer buy chemical fertilisers — in short, if they are self-sufficient — there is there an example that risks spreading like an oil stain. Tomorrow, all those who are on the pavements, notably the unemployed, could very well say: ‘Give us or rent us a plot of land and tools, and we will do the same. We will certainly be better off than on our square metre of asphalt.’ (…) Only here is the thing: the public must not know that this solution is possible. Otherwise, tomorrow morning, thousands of people will settle in the countryside, produce their own food, learn to live in good health, refuse vaccinations and desert doctors’ surgeries, hospitals and pharmacies. In short, thousands of people will cease to be dependent on assistance, and above all… to pay. No government wishes for that.”

1992

“As early as 1992, the ADFI had revealed its plans at a conference of a legal character. Colonel Morin there expounded his theses on psychic rape, as well as a strategy that was indeed applied thereafter. According to him, the minority religious movements had to be fought with the techniques of the secret services. Civil servants would circulate alarmist reports in the media in order to create a climate of fear. Colonel Morin was very quickly appointed, in 1993, to the IHESI. A study group on the ‘sects’ was set up, composed of members of the police and of the Renseignements Généraux, headed by Jean Albouy, assistant to deputy Jacques Guyard, the initiator and rapporteur of the famous parliamentary commission. A psychiatrist, Jean-Marie Abgrall, was also consulted from the outset to lend a ‘scientific’ endorsement to the movement. However, the theses of the two ‘specialists’, Messrs Abgrall and Morin, have been clearly invalidated by the members of the scientific community, notably as regards the brainwashing theory, following studies conducted on former prisoners of war or clinical and quantitative studies conducted in the United States on members of new religious movements.”

“The Institute of Advanced Studies in Internal Security (IHESI) has, moreover, created, in 1992, a working group on the sects. However, this group has no official existence. Furthermore, it does not have sufficient means to ensure comprehensive monitoring of sectarian activities.”

In its Recommendation 1178 (1992) on sects and new religious movements in Europe, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, “taking into account the invitation extended to the Council of Europe by the European Parliament in the Cottrell report to consider this problem”, considers that “the freedom of conscience and religion guaranteed by Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights makes it inadvisable to resort to major legislation on sects, which might well interfere with this fundamental right and with the traditional religions.” It recommends that the Committee of Ministers invite the member States of the Council of Europe to adopt the following measures: the curriculum of the general education system should include concrete and objective information on the major religions and their principal variants (…); equivalent supplementary information on the nature and activities of the sects and new religious movements should also be widely circulated to the general public. Independent bodies should be set up to collect and circulate this information; legislation should be adopted, if it does not already exist, granting legal personality to duly registered sects and new religious movements, as well as to all groupings stemming from the mother sect; in order to protect minors and prevent cases of abduction or transfer abroad, the member States which have not yet done so should ratify the European Convention on Recognition and Enforcement of Decisions Concerning Custody of Children and on Restoration of Custody of Children (1980), and adopt legislation enabling it to be given effect; the existing legislation concerning the protection of children should be applied more rigorously. Moreover, members of a sect must be informed that they have the right to leave it; the persons employed by the sects should be registered with the social welfare bodies guaranteeing them social welfare coverage, and such social welfare coverage should also be provided for those who decide to leave the sects.”

“On 28 July 1992, before the horrified eyes of passers-by, Roger Dorysse fired several rifle shots at his son-in-law, Jean-Richard Miguères. After reloading his gun, the murderer came back to coldly finish off his victim. The Dorysse couple were members of the ADFI. The son-in-law, Jean-Richard Miguères, was the founder of the Ceirus, the European Centre for Initiation into Ufological Research of a Scientific Character. He often gave lectures where he drew full houses. His association was labelled a ‘UFO sect’ (sic) by the ADFI. Roger Dorysse was arrested by the police and imprisoned. On 25 January 1995, he was found guilty of premeditated murder and sentenced to 6 years’ imprisonment. Two days after the tragedy, an article published in Le Figaro Lyon laid the blame entirely on the victim instead of condemning the murderer. Its subheading was even of dubious humour: ‘This time, the extraterrestrials could do nothing. The president of a ufology association died on Tuesday at La Croix-Rousse, shot down by his father-in-law.’ This article quoted the ADFI extensively to explain that the Ceirus did indeed have the characteristics of a sect!“

1993

Tragedy of Waco, in Texas, in the Mount Carmel Davidian community: “The final assault took place at dawn on April 19, 1993, leading to the death of 74 Davidians and the total destruction of their residence. In the eyes of witnesses, the assault resembled a napalm attack like those the American army had carried out in Vietnam (one of the helicopter pilots was a Vietnam veteran).” The most catastrophic action of the American government on its own territory nevertheless served as a lesson to no one.

“On June 9, 1993, in several of the 30 communities of the Family in France, 200 gendarmes detained 43 adult members and 143 minors aged from 3 months (sic) to 16 years. Adults handcuffed, thrown down stairs and dragged across gravel. Six years later, the accused were acquitted (the members of The Family were accustomed to police raids, as their communities suffered several of them in the early 1990s in several countries, with the same results). It should be noted that these heavy-handed assaults on these communities took place in France at the very moment when the catastrophic action of the forces of order at Waco in the United States was receiving wide media coverage throughout the world.” “Following this affair, many members of The Family decided to leave France.”

“Let us end with a mention of Firephim (Federation of minority religions and philosophies), which was created in 1993 and brings together numerous philosophical and religious movements. In its press release, this association stated: ‘The New Philosophical and Religious Movements are coming together, setting aside their points of divergence, and coordinating their actions in order to fight against the injustices, false information, intolerance and all forms of discrimination of which they are the target. Firephim protests against the funding by the public authorities of associations of the ADFI type, which, behind a highly respectable exterior, use public funds to incite hatred and violence and to orchestrate campaigns of intolerance (…)‘“

1994

On September 30, 1994, 5 members of the OTS die in the fire of a house at Morin Heights, in Quebec. On October 5, 1994, 48 charred bodies are found in Switzerland, 23 at Cheiry and 25 at Les Granges-sur-Salvan, including the two masters of the OTS, Luc Jouret and Joseph Di Mambro. In Canada as in Switzerland, the investigation is quickly closed and the theory of collective suicide is officially accepted.

“Many people believe that the religious factor has a negative influence, following David Miller’s observation that 80% of the organised terror and violence in the world plays out in the name of religion.” (The effect of September 11 (Miller 1994)

“If so many minds are fragile and pursuing an uncertain quest, one cannot respond to their expectations without a new attention to the immense needs for education, information, training and, more generally, human solidarity in situations of anguish and loneliness. More than a legal vacuum, it is indeed an emotional and spiritual vacuum from which modern society too often suffers. The law can guarantee freedom against those who threaten it. It can and must ensure equality before it, without arbitrary discrimination. Beyond measures of material solidarity, it is powerless to achieve a true fraternity.” (Paul Bouchet, Appliquer la loi (Applying the law), Le Monde des débats, February 1994)

1995

“On March 20, 1995, a terrorist attack was perpetrated in the Tokyo subway by a few members of Aum Shinri-Kyo, a group founded in 1984 by Shoko Asahara, killing 12 people and injuring several thousand. The event was widely covered by the media and exploited by the activists working for the destruction of spiritual minorities, who seemed, with this event, to hold proof of the harmfulness of ‘sects’. Shoko Asahara was sentenced to death by hanging in February 2004 after 9 years of trial (the sentence was upheld on appeal in September 2006). Although, during those ten years, the full truth about this whole affair was never brought to light, partly because Shoko Asahara always kept silent, the judge declared that Shoko Asahara’s ambition was to overthrow the government in order to become the ‘master of Japan’ and that he had ‘used the rampart of religion’ to hide his acts. At no point was it demonstrated that Shoko Asahara had asked his disciples to perpetrate an attack. Likewise, American researchers who travelled to the scene declared that, contrary to what had been said, Aum Shinri-Kyo did not have the means to produce the sarin gas that had been used in the attack. This accusation of a chemical weapons factory belonging to the sect was one of the most shocking to public opinion, in a period when the threat of the growing spectre of terrorism is brandished daily on television.”

Order of the Solar Temple: On the night of December 15 to 16, 1995, 16 people are burned in a clearing in the Vercors, at St Pierre de Chérenne near Autrans, including 3 children as well as the wife and son of Jean Vuarnet, all members of the Order of the Solar Temple. “The searches culminated on December 23, 1995 at nine o’clock in the discovery of sixteen partially charred bodies grouped in a circle at the centre of a sinkhole in a clearing at the place known as Le Serre du Page.”

Alain Gest (UMP) is appointed in 1995 chairman of the first commission of inquiry on Les sectes en France (Sects in France) at the National Assembly. The report of this commission, presented by Mr Jacques Guyard, establishes a list of 173 movements “of a sectarian character” in France. Mr Charles Pasqua is then Minister of the Interior.

“A second report (No. 2468) entrusted to Jacques Guyard (Socialist Party), entitled Les sectes en France, was submitted to the government on December 22, 1995. There is no need to revisit the methodology of this inquiry. It has been sufficiently criticised and discredited by numerous foreign and French researchers.”

“More recently, after the carnage of the Order of the Solar Temple, in the winter of 1995, the subject of sects kept the media on tenterhooks. On the question, the RG (Renseignements Généraux) did not have much. In a hurry, a ‘report’ had to be fabricated. A civil servant took on the job of compiling the work done by others, notably by the gendarmes. A report had already been written, notably by the Interministerial unit for intelligence research and exploitation of the centre-east zone (CIRER). It was in large part ‘copied out’. The RG report on sects then flooded every newsroom, as a reference document. A few weeks later, certain associations, hastily filed as bloodthirsty sects by the Renseignements Généraux, obtained redress before the courts. The trials took place, without cameras this time.”

Following the publication of this report, numerous spiritual or religious organisations protest in various ways against the stigmatisation of their movement.

The French Society for the defence of the association Tradition, Famille et Propriété (Tradition, Family and Property) publishes, written by Benoît Bemelmans, a document entitled: “The Guyard Report in the light of Catholic doctrine and French law”, “written above all in legitimate self-defence against a slanderous accusation echoed by the Guyard Report: that the TFP is a ‘pseudo-Catholic sect.’” (Source)

“Vie Chrétienne en France, which came into being in 1990 as a pioneering movement of (Protestant) churches” “changes its name and becomes the Union d’Assemblées protestantes en Mission (UAPM) in order to dissociate itself from the error committed against VCF by the Guyard report of the Parliamentary Commission on sects in France, published in January 1996.”

“The Guyard report is so botched that, as the journalist François Devinat rightly pointed out in an article in Libération of February 9, 1996, the authors mysteriously forgot to mention the Order of the Solar Temple among the dangerous movements!” (Source) A quotation from the sociologist Louis Hourmant also appears in this Libération article: “A good part of the anti-sect controversy can be analysed as a product of our contemporaries’ growing illiteracy in religious matters, including among people who nominally declare themselves believers.”

“The Unification Church (Moon) drew attention in 1995 with the largest collective wedding ever organised, uniting 35,000 couples in Seoul.”

December 1995: publication of Jean-François Mayer’s book Religions et sécurité internationale (Religions and international security) (Office central de la défense, 3003 Bern, December 1995, 143 pages). A reappraisal of the impact of religious factors on conflicts: identities, tensions, militancy, strategies: “This very precise study by Jean-François Mayer aims to demonstrate that religious factors must necessarily be taken into account in security policy analyses, which is not currently the case, diplomats and intelligence services remaining ignorant of the subject. The religious interacts with the dynamics and issues that manifest themselves in conflicts. Jean-François Mayer proposes in particular that the long-term analysis of international balances explore in greater depth the probabilities and potential of shifts in religious borders as well as changes in the balance of power between religions, in order to assess their consequences for the map of the world.”

1996

“The alarming conclusions reached by (the 1995 parliamentary commission of inquiry on sects) prompted the Prime Minister of the right returned to government, Mr Juppé, to create an Observatory of sects placed under the direction of Mr Guerrier de Dumast in 1996.” This “Interministerial Observatory of sects” was created by decree (No. 96-387) on May 9, 1996.

Publication of the book Pour en finir avec les sectes - Le débat sur le rapport de la commission parlementaire (To have done with sects — The debate on the parliamentary commission’s report), edited by Massimo Introvigne and J. Gordon Melton, Éditions Dervy: “Following the publication of the Guyard report of the French parliamentary commission on sects, containing a controversial list of very diverse movements, M. Introvigne and G. Melton asked a series of experts to give their views on this document. Even though no author approves of the publication of this list, opinions diverge as to the approach. The advantage of such a work is that it presents very diverse approaches to the phenomenon: sociologists of religion (such as Wilson, Dericquebourg or Baubérot), jurists (such as O.-L. Séguy or P. Gast), theologians (such as Mgr Vernette or Father Bergeron). This very interesting book does not aim to answer all the questions. On the contrary, the two editors of the volume wish to take advantage of the controversy created by the report to raise more questions, while attempting to give the dialogue foundations that are as objective as possible.”

“In 1995-96, Anne Fournier and Michel Monroy, then members of the Centre Roger Ikor, wrote the book Les sectes (collection Les essentiels Milan, number 55). Following the colloquium organised by CESNUR at the Sorbonne in 1996 and the publication of the book Pour en finir avec les sectes (Dervy, 1996), they became aware of the need for a debate on scientific ground with academics such as R. Dericquebourg or M. Introvigne (by listening to these researchers, by meeting leaders of the sects) and proposed this approach to the CCMM, which considered that this was not the purpose of an information and defence association. GRAPHES (Groupement de Réflexion et d’Analyse des PHEnomènes Sectaires — Group for Reflection on and Analysis of Sectarian Phenomena), an informal structure, was born in December 1996 with the objective of the scientific study of the mechanisms involved in the sectarian phenomenon. The activity of GRAPHES has so far been limited to the preparation of a few articles.”

Des religions et des hommes (Of religions and men) is a series of 46 programmes, directed by Claude Théret in 1996, written and presented by Jean Delumeau, member of the Institut and professor at the Collège de France. These programmes were broadcast on La Cinquième at the end of the 1990s, within the programme Voir et Dire. This series presented, in a short (13 minutes per episode) and very didactic manner (Jean Delumeau is an excellent teacher), the various religious approaches currently alive in the world, with their similarities and their differences. On February 29, 1996, a book was also published by Desclée de Brouwer: “Over the centuries, across the multiplicity of places and cultures, religions have diversified astonishingly. Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha and others each founded in their own way rich and diverse traditions that endure to this day. In all their forms, religions have accompanied the history of mankind, inspiring even the most contemporary expressions of literature, architecture, music and painting. At a time when society is opening up to religious culture but when, at the same time, adults no longer know how to pass on even their own religion, the author, member of the Institut and professor at the Collège de France, offers a lively and pedagogical initiation into the religious memory of humanity. An initiation placed under the sign of tolerance.” (Publisher’s presentation)

“The Groupement de protection de la famille et de l’individu (GPFI — Group for the protection of the family and the individual) is an association formed on September 21, 1995 in Veyrier, Switzerland. It ‘studies new religious, spiritual or magical movements or groupings, seeks to know their origins, the doctrines taught, the goals pursued, the methods of recruitment of their followers, as well as their funding, in order to determine their possibly sectarian nature; sees to it that their development does not infringe human rights, as defined in the United Nations Charter and the European Convention on Human Rights, the rights of the family and those of our society; also sees to it that these groupings or movements respect their followers’ freedom to leave without exerting pressure on them, their families and their surroundings; assists victims of abuse; keeps the fruits of its research and analyses as well as the documentation in its possession at the disposal of its members or of victims; reports to the competent authorities all abuses of the constitutional right to religious freedom and any offences. Committee of seven members: Lavergnat François, of Troinex, in Veyrier, chairman; Monod Auguste, of Geneva, in Veyrier, secretary; and Jaquier Gilbert, of Vufflens-la-Ville, in Geneva.’”

“On October 9, 1996, Professor Beljanski (Isère), a 74-year-old doctor, saw more than 200 hooded gendarmes descend on his home, some armed with bazookas, members of the GIGN (to arrest 3 people!), who took him away in handcuffs by TGV to Pau. The assault is described by witnesses as extremely violent. Deeply shocked, he would die two years later, and would be cleared of the accusations brought against him only posthumously. France was in fact condemned by the European Court of Human Rights, for exceeding the ‘reasonable time’ of the judicial investigation and for violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, given Mirko Beljanski’s age and the damage done to his reputation as a scientist and to the seriousness of his research (Beljanski v. France of February 7, 2002 - application no. 44070/98).”

Publication in February of Christian Paturel’s book Sectes, Religions et Libertés publiques (Sects, Religions and Public Liberties), published by La Pensée Universelle. The release of this book would lead to nine years of legal proceedings, ending in a condemnation of France by the European Court of Human Rights in December 2005.

1997

“The truth was never publicly established about the Jonestown affair of 1978. In 1997, 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 strongly do they contradict the picture conveyed by the media for twenty years. Above all, they show that the American government is involved in this affair and tried to keep certain facts secret.”

“I have worked on Jonestown and several other alleged ‘collective suicides’. I believe there has never been a collective suicide in human history. I do not believe that a family, or even three or four people, can decide in a moment of tension to commit suicide together. Even if the brain decides on destruction, the rest of the organism revolts. People cannot kill themselves by putting a plastic bag over their head, because the physical organism automatically forces them to remove it. One would have to be able to discipline oneself like the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves because of oppression in a situation of struggle. But when you are talking about young people of the American middle class, and expecting them all to sit down together and kill themselves collectively, it is not credible.” (John Judge, member of the “Coalition Against Political Assassinations”. He is renowned for his research into certain political crimes in the USA and conducted an investigation into the alleged “collective suicide” of Jonestown in Guyana in 1978.)

“On March 22, 1997, 5 followers of the Solar Temple, including 3 French nationals, are found burned to death at Saint-Casimir, in Quebec.”

“On March 26, 1997, the bodies of 39 young men are found on a property in San Diego, in southern California. These men belonged to a group called Heaven’s Gate, whose leader was named Marshall Applewhite. Talk of collective suicide quickly spread, in the wake of the Solar Temple.”

“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 restored to prominence. Within some ten years, thousands of groups, associations and more or less formal circles come into being, of which the best known are only one aspect. What links these groups is the aspiration to live out sharing, peace and love, but also the notions of transcendence, of the revelation of 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.” (Excerpts from La France antisectes : état des lieux – Plaidoyer pour les libertés individuelles (Anti-sect France: the state of play — A plea for individual liberties), a documentary film by CICNS)

Tabitha’s Place (Ordre Apostolique or The Twelve Tribes) in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques: “On April 7, 1997, following the death of little Raphaël, who suffered from a heart malformation and was nineteen months old, nearly 50 gendarmes, 12 doctors and the public prosecutor of Pau descended on the community’s farm in order to ‘check the state of health of the children’ (during an assault, bungalows of the community were destroyed by bulldozer). They found no trace of ill-treatment and there were therefore no judicial proceedings as a result of this assault. In 1996, 30 gendarmes had already carried out a visit to the same community without finding anything abnormal. The parents of the deceased child were nevertheless convicted in 2001 for ‘deprivation of food and care resulting in death’ (the child had a heart malformation from birth which the parents had not had operated on).” In the wake of the 1996 parliamentary report, the community would for a time once again become a favourite target of the anti-cult struggle.

Ogyen Kunzang Choling (OKC) (Alpes de Haute-Provence): May 30, 1997, 150 gendarmes supported by two helicopters (“to avoid any unpleasant surprise”, according to the gendarmerie commander) storm by surprise, and for six hours, the place of residence of a community close to Tibetan Buddhism, the property of Château de soleils (the same deployment of forces in Belgium, at the same moment, against the same community). Bones quickly drew attention but “fortunately, a doctor called to the scene was able to confirm that these were not human bones” (!). Thirty children were interviewed but no one was taken away by the gendarmes. A trial in 1996 had ended in the acquittal of several members of the community. That did not prevent a new similar “visit” in March 2000 with no more “results”.

“The 1997 annual report of the Interministerial Observatory on Sects published as an appendix (p. 51) the recommendations of deputies J.-P. Brard, J. Guyard and A. Gest to ‘strengthen school monitoring and the health protection of children. The purpose of this proposal is to safeguard children housed in sects, whose education and health are often compromised.’”

“Domaine de Faujas, Doctor Tal Schaller (Drôme): October 10, 1997, three battalions of heavily armed gendarmes enter the property of Doctor Christian Tal Schaller, whom the authorities had linked to the Solar Temple affair because the name of his publishing house was Vivez soleil (Live sunshine)! Military vehicles pushed into the four corners of the property to prevent possible escapes by members of ‘the sect’. After multiple interrogations over six hours, nothing could be found demonstrating any sectarian activity whatsoever on their part.”

November 4, 1997: Bill No. 402 by Mr Jean-Pierre Brard aiming to restrict the granting of building permits to associations of a sectarian character: “It appears indispensable to provide, in a very precise and specific manner, the means to refuse a building permit sought by associations claiming the benefit of the legislation on religious associations and whose activity constitutes a threat to public order. To this end, a list of this type of associations should be drawn up, whose misdeeds are moreover very well known to public opinion and the public authorities. With the benefit of these observations, we ask you, Ladies and Gentlemen, to adopt the following bill. Single article: Article L. 421-1 of the town planning code is supplemented by a paragraph worded as follows: ‘The permit may be refused to any association claiming the benefit of the legislation on religious associations whose activity constitutes a threat to public order and which appears, in consequence, on a list fixed by decree in the Council of State.’”

December 11, 1997: Report A4-0408/1997 on sects in the European Union — Committee on Civil Liberties and Internal Affairs, rapporteur Ms Maria Berger: “By letter of February 18, 1997, the Committee on Civil Liberties and Internal Affairs requested authorisation to present a report on sects in the European Union. (…) In the course of its meetings, it adopted the motion for a resolution by 15 votes to 7 with 3 abstentions.”

1998

“In January, bill by Nicolas About ‘aiming to strengthen the monitoring of compulsory schooling.’ The new law, passed unanimously by some fifteen parliamentarians on December 10, 1998, was published in the Official Journal on December 22.”

In October 1998, the Ministry of the Interior published a circular defining the means put in place to fight against sectarian abuses. In this document, addressed to all prefects, it is specified: “These parliamentary reports constitute only an element of information and proposal; they do not claim to have normative value and cannot serve as the basis either for distinctions between the associations described as ‘sectarian’ and those that are not in the light of the said reports, or for any sanctions whatsoever. As long as an association is not subject to administrative or judicial dissolution, it enjoys the constitutionally recognised freedoms and may carry out the activity corresponding to its purpose within the strict framework of the laws in force.”

October 7, 1998: Creation by decree (No. 98-890) of the Mission Interministérielle de Lutte contre les Sectes (MILS): “Back in power, the socialist government created, in 1998, alongside the Central Bureau of Religions (Bureau central des Cultes) (but with no official link to it), a body charged with fighting sects, placed under the authority of the Prime Minister and called the Mission interministérielle de lutte contre les sectes, whose head was Alain Vivien, a former leader of an anti-cult movement, the Centre contre les manipulations mentales (CCMM — Centre against mental manipulation), founded by the rationalist writer Roger Ikor. The powers of this mission were ill-defined. In principle, it coordinates the fight against sects, which means that the Prime Minister of the time, Lionel Jospin, was making official a combat against sects. This mission was made up of forty people. It maintained close ties with the anti-cult groups, of which it was the official relay. It played an advisory role to the ministries in establishing a network of agents charged with countering sects through anti-sect units in the administrations of National Education, youth and sports, and social affairs.”

1998: The Swedish report (“In Good Faith”, 1998) deplored that, “in France, the State has, on the whole, made common cause with the anti-cult movement”, ignoring the fact that “the great majority of members of new religious movements draw positive experiences from their membership”. The 1998 report of the Canton of Ticino in Switzerland (Dipartimento delle Istituzioni 1998, 17 and 39) states that, although cooperation with anti-cult groups is occasionally appropriate, governments “should avoid becoming accomplices in work that spreads prejudice” or that promotes “anti-cult terrorism”.

November 20, 1998: Bill No. 79 presented to the Senate by Mr Nicolas About, aiming to strengthen the penal provisions against associations or groupings of a sectarian character which, by their criminal actions, constitute a disturbance of public order or a major peril for the human person or the security of the State. This bill would lead, in June 2001, to the About-Picard law (see “2001”, further on).

“The witchcraft trial did not go all the way; Bernard Lempert climbed down from the stake just in time. Yet the outcome had seemed settled for some time: this psychotherapist was accused of being the guru of a sect, and his name found itself inscribed, without appeal, in the famous parliamentary report on sects, in 1996. After two years of a desperate battle against rumour, Bernard Lempert is finally cleared by the public prosecutor’s office of the Rennes court and by the very rapporteur of the parliamentary commission, not without reluctance.”

“A second parliamentary commission of inquiry on the theme ‘Sects and money’ in 1998 led to the publication in 1999 of the report of the same name. The list of sects is supplemented with a few additional movements, including the anthroposophist movement.”

1999

“The number of complaints in France relating to the activities of ‘sects’ rose from 15 in 1983 to 260 in 1999. This may be a sign of greater illegal activity by the groups falling under these charges, but also of a change in the way certain activities are perceived — now problematic, indeed condemned — and of a lesser tolerance towards them.”

In January 1999, Anne Fournier and Michel Monroy (initiators of GRAPHES) publish La dérive sectaire (The sectarian drift) (PUF, collection Le sociologue).

June 10, 1999: the Commission of inquiry into the financial, patrimonial and fiscal situation of sects, as well as into their economic activities and their relations with economic and financial circles, presents its report (No. 1687) to the National Assembly. Rapporteur: Jean-Pierre Brard.

“A new French parliamentary report, dated June 10, is devoted to the money of sects. It is a 322-page document, signed by deputy Jacques Guyard (author of the 1996 report ‘Les Sectes en France’) as chairman of the commission and deputy Jean-Pierre Brard (one of the most extremist members of the Mission interministérielle de lutte contre les sectes) as rapporteur. The parliamentary commission and the Mission for the fight against sects are two different structures and should not be confused, although Guyard and Brard are members of both. The report is divided into three parts. The first concerns the current situation of sects and the way they are organised. It indicates that the list of sects from the 1996 report is still valid, but that new ‘sects’, originally excluded because they had (wrongly) been declared not dangerous, should now be included in it, most particularly Anthroposophy and the Rosicrucian order AMORC. (…) Here, names are given. Budgetary and financial information of an obviously confidential nature (including a considerable number of names of individuals) is thrown out to the general public. It was gathered from tax records (although, says the report, not all tax authorities cooperated), from intelligence service reports, from compulsory replies to a questionnaire sent to 60 groups and from equally compulsory participation in secret hearings (those absent were threatened with fines and prison, as were those who would divulge the content of the hearings). Any other individual or association, anywhere in the world, would simply sue for invasion of privacy and win. In France, parliamentary commissions are exempt from all legal liability, and the privacy of ‘sectarians’ is evidently considered expendable.”

June 22, 1999: “Enough is enough! The Federation of Rudolf Steiner Schools in France is scandalised on reading the passages of the report of the parliamentary Commission of inquiry into the assets of sects that implicate the pedagogical current in which its members work. It wonders about the true nature of the goals being pursued, so flagrant are the lack of rigour, the amalgams and the haste of the drafting. (…) In the name of a supposed protection of the freedoms of conscience, would one today yet again wish to muzzle all those who, on the basis of free thinking, strive to develop an educational attitude that fights against the hegemony of a single way of thinking and the predominance of the materialist dogma in education? (…) Do we want to let develop this insidious attitude which, under the pretext of protecting children, would like to see them educated in a single mould? (…) The Federation of Steiner Schools, a member of numerous international organisations defending freedom in education, will not let itself be insidiously locked into a category of scarecrows without reacting through all appropriate channels aimed at obtaining the re-establishment of the truth and reparation for the harm suffered.”

Report of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, Council of Europe, of April 13, 1999, voted on June 22, 1999. Rapporteur: Mr Adrian Nastase, Romania, Socialist Group: “Why a report on the illegal activities of groups of a religious, esoteric or spiritual character only six years after the Assembly adopted Recommendation 1178 (1992) on sects and new religious movements? (…) The content of the Recommendation (…) remains perfectly topical (…). But two important reasons justify the Assembly’s looking at the phenomenon anew. On the one hand, the number of followers keeps increasing (60% in France between 1982, the date of the Vivien report, and 1995, the date of the Guyard report) despite the information given about the activities of certain sects, notably on the occasion of serious disturbances of public order (killings of the Solar Temple sect, killings of the Aum sect in Japan, convictions of members of sects for rape, fraudulent schemes, etc.) or the accusations made by the Church of Scientology against the German Government, accused of practising religious intolerance and racism (…). On the other hand, the appearance of the sectarian phenomenon in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, where regained freedom has had as its corollary a proliferation of groups offering the spiritual, the esoteric or the religious to individuals who had long been deprived of them. The first danger lying in wait for authorities wishing to mitigate the risks linked to sectarian activities is the conflation of harmless groups with dangerous groups. (…) The second trap (…) is the distinction between sects and religions. (…) These two dangers can easily be avoided by state authorities through a certain caution as to vocabulary and the choice of a mode of action relating to the acts of the groups. (…) It is obvious that the use of the term ‘sect’ is very tempting for state authorities, given that it is easily understood by everyone. State authorities should nevertheless renounce its use insofar as there is no legal definition of this term and it has too strong a pejorative connotation. Today, for the public, a sect is strongly bad or dangerous. To avoid this term ‘sect’, three paths can be envisaged. In the first place, it would be possible to renounce the qualification of ‘sect’ by assimilating all groups to religions. However, in our view, this approach would be mistaken, as it is too restrictive in the face of the diversity of the sectarian phenomenon. (…) In the second place, the State could agree to follow the path opened by certain groups and establish a distinction between religions, by definition good, and sects, necessarily dangerous, or even a separation between good and bad sects. Again, such an approach does not seem acceptable to us. In view of Article 9 of the ECHR, the State is prohibited from making a distinction between different beliefs and from determining a scale of value of beliefs. (…) This type of debate therefore constitutes a trap into which certain groups systematically try to draw the authorities, and which the authorities must absolutely avoid. (…) In reality, the only way to escape this trap is to avoid any qualification of the beliefs in question as non-religious belief or religion. Which brings us to the third and last possible path, which seems to us the only acceptable one. It makes it possible to avoid the obstacles we have mentioned by relying on a more descriptive approach to the sectarian phenomenon and by focusing not on the qualification of the beliefs but on the acts committed in the name of, or under cover of, those beliefs.”

“As of July 31, 1999, 134 preliminary investigations had been handled by the public prosecutor’s office and 116 judicial investigations opened on serious charges such as violence, sexual assault, fraud and abuse of weakness. This more repressive attitude of the public prosecution dates from 1996, just after the trauma created by the collective death of the followers of the Order of the Solar Temple sect. The Minister of Justice of the time, Jacques Toubon, had circulated a memorandum drawing the prosecution’s attention to the dangerousness of the sectarian phenomenon.”

“On July 22, 1999, the official announcement of the ban on Falun Gong was made in these terms: ‘The department of civil affairs of the People’s Republic of China declares that the Falun Dafa Research Society and the Falun Gong organisation under its control are illegal organisations and must be banned. It is consequently forbidden for anyone, in any circumstances, to distribute books, audio/video cassettes or any other material spreading Falun Dafa (Falun Gong). It is forbidden to assemble or demonstrate in support of or to spread Falun Gong, such as sit-ins and appeals. It is forbidden for anyone to organise, coordinate or lead any anti-government activity.’”

UNADFI abandons its suit against Libération: “The main anti-cult association, UNADFI, withdrew on Friday from the lawsuit it had brought against Libération, three days before the hearing, scheduled yesterday in Paris. The Union nationale des associations de défense de la famille et de l’individu had filed a complaint with a civil-party petition after the publication, on March 30, 1998, of an article, ‘The plot that made Bernard Lempert a guru’. Libération showed that this psychotherapist had been classified by error in the list of sects after the strange alliance of the Breton representatives of UNADFI and an association that brought together child abusers and whose president was nostalgic for the Waffen SS.”

2000

“In March 2000, the Paris tribunal de grande instance convicted the chairman of the ‘Sects and Money’ parliamentary commission, Mr Guyard, of defamation against three anthroposophist movements, following his televised appearance on France 2 in June 1999. The grounds for this conviction: ‘The report is not in a position to demonstrate a serious inquiry’ in support of its accusations; the documents produced were not ‘relevant’ and were ‘without probative value’ (Le Monde, March 23, 2000). In September 2001 the Court of Appeal would recognise the defamatory character of the remarks while considering Mr Guyard to have acted in good faith and therefore not guilty of the offence of public defamation.”

March: Launch of the Earth Charter, a declaration of fundamental ethical principles for building a just, sustainable and peaceful global society in the 21st century. The Earth Charter is the result of an intercultural dialogue conducted over a decade throughout the world on common goals and shared values. The Earth Charter project, initiated by the United Nations, gradually became a civil society initiative.

November: First case concerning kinesiology: “On November 12, 2000, Kerywan, 16 and a half months old, died at the family home in Moëlan-sur-Mer (Finistère), weighing six kilos, that is, the weight of a four-month-old child. The experts were to identify a nutritional deficiency that was ‘significant and chronic’, attributable in their view to a diet without animal protein or vitamin supplements. The child had been breastfed since birth by his mother, a follower of a vegan diet. The justice system accuses the couple, already parents of three girls, of having deprived their last child of care not through negligence or carelessness but in the name of ‘ideological conceptions’ inherent in the practice of kinesiology, a psycho-corporal technique developed in the 1960s in the United States.”

“On November 20, 2000 at 6 a.m., a small spiritual community in the Aveyron had to endure the brutal assault of some sixty heavily armed gendarmes. Psychological after-effects are still present in the children and the adults six years later. The long list of accusations proved to be without foundation, and the final convictions, derisory, seem to be there only to justify such a deployment of force.” According to a jurist: “All they had in the file, at the start, was an illegally parked caravan and a failure to make a declaration to the Assedic (unemployment insurance office). Do you realise they sent 60 gendarmes for that!“

2001

“At the beginning of the year, Vivien’s wife had herself taken charge of negotiating at Matignon, in the office of Jospin’s chief of staff, a subsidy of 4.5 million francs for the purchase of a new headquarters for the anti-cult association. The sum was allocated to her in February 2001, from the budget line for the defence of human rights, under the authority of the Prime Minister. ‘Logically, Alain Vivien was consulted,’ notes someone close to the case. Yet Vivien is president of the MILS, but also of the DOM-TOM commission of the Human Rights League since 1996.” (Le Point, October 19, 2001)

Law No. 2001504 of June 12, 2001 aiming to strengthen the prevention and repression of sectarian movements infringing human rights and fundamental freedoms, published in the Official Journal of June 13, 2001.

“This bill was first presented by the centrist senator for the Yvelines (affiliated with the Républicains Indépendants), Nicolas About (see ‘1998’, editor’s note), then, after some reworking, at the National Assembly by the socialist deputy for the Eure, Catherine Picard. This latter bill, ‘aiming to strengthen prevention and repression against groupings of a sectarian character’, was adopted on June 22, 2000, at first reading, by the deputies. The parliamentary shuttle therefore resumed, and a new text, prepared jointly by Mr About and Mrs Picard, was presented to the Senate on January 25, 2001.”

“The law of June 12, 2001 is explicitly a law against sects. Five major provisions make it a law of repression that could prove formidable if circumstances lend themselves to it: civil dissolution of certain legal entities; extension of the criminal liability of legal entities; limitation of the advertising of sectarian movements; punishment of the fraudulent abuse of a state of ignorance or weakness; the right for certain associations to bring civil actions. The origin of the text is a bill by Senator About, adopted in December 1999, which simply intended to allow the application to sects of the 1936 law against combat groups and private militias. The National Assembly, on June 22, 2000, following an amendment by Catherine Picard, introduced into the text under debate the offence of mental manipulation, along with numerous other amendments. At second reading, on May 3, 2001, the Senate corrected the text substantially and the deputies passed it definitively, without major modifications, on May 31, 2001. The parliamentarians stressed at every turn the consensual character of the debate. There was no public ballot either in the Senate or in the National Assembly, and only exceptionally does one find an explanation of a negative vote. There was great unanimity among the speakers as to the obviousness of the sectarian danger. Even the rare parliamentarians who warned of the difficulty of analysing the phenomenon did not question that obviousness. It is true that the debates were largely led by the group of parliamentarians specialised in the fight against sects. In these conditions, the consensus invoked seems rather to have been acquired by default. This underlines a strange perception of the sectarian phenomenon: an apparent obviousness of the danger justifying a fairly strict repression, and a weak mobilisation for a law concerning a fundamental freedom.”

“Any sect leader found guilty of ‘fraudulent abuse of a state of ignorance or weakness’ will be liable to 5 years in prison and a fine of up to 750,000 euros in damages.”

June 18 (AFP): “On June 14 and 15, Paris hosted a working meeting on ‘the illegal activities of bodies of a sectarian character in Europe’, attended by the representatives of 22 European governments, the interministerial mission for the fight against sects (MILS) announced on Monday. (…) Questioned by AFP, the MILS did not specify the names of the participating countries or the subject of the discussions.”

“American observers are worried by the atmosphere of intolerance that seems to be developing in Europe today. In France, the attitude towards sects (the Americans speak of cults) worries the Commission on International Religious Freedom. In particular the Guyard report, which contains a list of movements described as sects, though it was not voted on, continues to circulate, notably within the administration, at the risk of opening the way to discrimination. In the same way, the creation of the Mission Interministérielle de Lutte contre les Sectes (MILS) or the adoption of the About-Picard law in May 2001, criminally punishing the fraudulent abuse of a state of ignorance or a situation of weakness, are liable to violate international religious freedom; not in France directly, but by an effect of contagion in less tolerant countries. Yet the National Commission for the oversight of human rights has held that the freedom of conscience guaranteed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and by the European Convention on Human Rights makes this type of law or report inopportune. The same finding has been made in the United States: the application of the existing criminal law makes it possible to punish acts without stigmatising religious beliefs.” (“The United States and religious freedom in the world”, June 5, 2002)

“On September 5, 2001, the statue of the Mandarom is dynamited by the forces of order, who arrive heavily armed on the community’s property to evacuate ‘the faithful’. The community demonstrated that the accusation made against it of lacking a building permit for this statue was false.”

September 11: fall of the Twin Towers in Manhattan, in the “business centre” of New York. The period following these attacks saw a retreat of individual liberties in many countries.

2002

Publication of Maurice Duval’s book Un ethnologue au Mandarom (An ethnologist at the Mandarom).

Bernard Lempert publishes Le retour de l’intolérance – Sectarisme et chasse aux sorcières (The return of intolerance — Sectarianism and witch-hunting), published by Bayard: “Bernard Lempert shows the affinities between the current ‘hunt for sects’ and the many witch-hunts of history. From the Middle Ages until today, not forgetting McCarthy, there is more than resemblance — a genuine filiation. Drawing on his experience of abuse, he brings out the link that exists between the abusive family — or family-clan — and the ‘sect’. Finally, he points to the risks that this law of exception poses to our democratic life, a law that has already been exported to China via Hong Kong to combat Falun Gong. This disturbing, remarkably documented essay brings out the real cultural, political and social stakes of an attitude of designation and exclusion that is rarely called into question.”

Creation of MIVILUDES (Mission Interministérielle de Vigilance et de Lutte contre les Dérives Sectaires — Interministerial Mission for Vigilance and Combat against Sectarian Abuses) by decree No. 278 of November 29, 2002, by the Raffarin government. Its first president, Jean-Louis Langlais, would take office in January 2003.

“The missions of MIVILUDES form part of the French consensus on the protection of victims and of public order. Vigilance and combat take into account only acts and behaviour contrary to laws and regulations and disturbing public order. (…) The Miviludes is an interministerial structure whose mission is to foster consultation between State services. It is made up of a permanent interdisciplinary team around the secretary general, a magistrate of the judicial order. The President, a prefect without portfolio, is also assisted by: an executive committee bringing together the representatives of the various major directorates of the ministries concerned (order appointing the members of the CEPO); an orientation council. A structure for dialogue, open to civil society, the Orientation Council is composed of 30 members, appointed by order of the Prime Minister: parliamentarians, representatives of the senior civil service, of the associative movement, of the medical world or of the economic and social sector.”

September 17, 2002: Publication by Fayard of Jean Ziegler’s book Les nouveaux maîtres du monde et ceux qui leur résistent (The new masters of the world and those who resist them), in which the author shows that the modern barbarity of the exploitation of man by man has become institutionalised at the global level, hypocritically taking on the mask of the order of things: “At the beginning of this millennium, the transcontinental capitalist oligarchies reign over the universe. […] Their daily practice and their discourses of legitimation are radically contrary to the interests of the immense majority of the inhabitants of the Earth.” It is interesting to note the similarity of the methods employed to defend a dominant ideology tooth and nail against the forces of change. Whether it is a matter of defending neoliberal capitalism against other conceptions of sharing or of living together, or of defending a narrow and perverted version of secularism through the anti-cult struggle, the angles of attack are the same.

2003

Publication of the first issue of the journal Le Monde des Religions in September.

In February 2003, Jean-Marie Abgrall, expert psychiatrist in the OTS case, declares to the newspaper Nice matin: “The Renewed Order of the Temple (ORT), ancestor of the OTS, was a relay of the Gladio network, that is, AMORC, which allegedly contributed to financing the French secret service in Africa and in particular what was called the Foccart networks. (…) It is a truth that goes beyond us, that reaches as far as State secrets; I will speak out one day — like the judge, we all have official versions!”

December 2003: The Stasi commission, which had submitted its report to the President of the Republic on December 11, 2003, affirms that: “Freedom of conscience, equality of rights, and the neutrality of political power must benefit everyone, whatever their spiritual options. But it is also up to the State to reaffirm strict rules, so that this living together in a plural society can be assured. French secularism today implies giving force to the principles that found it, consolidating public services and ensuring respect for spiritual diversity. To that end, the State must recall the obligations binding on administrations, eliminate discriminatory public practices, and adopt strong and clear rules within the framework of a law on secularism.”

”(…) During the Stasi Commission, a woman member of this Commission had proposed that a law make single-sex associations illegal in France. She claimed to know of one (Muslim, naturally!) reserved exclusively for men. At first I said nothing, to observe what would happen. Well, the idea seemed reasonable to many. It had to be pointed out that the Stasi Commission would then be proposing to ban the GOF (Grand Orient de France). What happened: they immediately moved on to the next item of business.”

2004

The MISA affair (Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute) in Romania: “The brutality of the action begins on March 18, 2004 and exceeds anything imaginable for the people concerned. More than 300 gendarmes accompanied by prosecutors simultaneously attacked 16 buildings where MISA members (yoga teaching) were located. They broke down doors and windows even though the entrances presented no obstacles. They struck and violently threw to the ground everyone they found on the premises, threatening them with firearms. Signatures on the statements dictated by the prosecutors were obtained through violence. Personal belongings were confiscated without being recorded in the official search report. Once these people were detained, their lawyers were prevented from making contact with their clients.”

August 22, 2004: The newspaper Le Monde publishes an article entitled L’affaire Marie L. révèle une société obsédée par ses victimes (The Marie L. affair reveals a society obsessed with its victims), by Cécile Prieur: “The credence given from the outset to the story invented by the young woman, falsely assaulted in the RER, illustrates the excesses of the process of recognising victims, launched twenty years ago. This evolution, analysed by sociologists, philosophers and historians, now places them at the heart of democracy.” The article also mentioned a “public opinion that today confers on the victim an almost sacred status”.

October: “The About-Picard law quickly proved to be more than a mere emblem. In October 2004, Arnaud Mussy, a prophet of Néo-Phare, a tiny apocalyptic group in Nantes, was tried by the Tribunal Correctionnel of Nantes for ‘abuse of weakness’. He was found guilty and sentenced to a three-year suspended prison term as well as a fine of 115,000 euros.” It is interesting to read the detail of the events that led to this conviction, considered “emblematic” by the anti-cult actors. As Mr Mussy’s own lawyer admitted: “This is no trivial conviction. It contains a very strong warning! Here we have the first case-law precedent!”

December: The AFF (American Family Foundation) officially changes its name to become the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA).

2005

In the annual report of MIVILUDES, its president declares: “The adoption in 2001 of the so-called About-Picard law constituted a remarkable advance in jurisprudence in the battle against the wrongdoing of fraudulent abuse and the state of ignorance.”

On 27 May 2005, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin published a circular on the fight against sectarian abuses in which it is stated: “Experience has shown that an approach consisting, for the public authorities, in labelling this or that group a “sect” and basing their action on that qualification alone would not make it possible to achieve this reconciliation effectively or to give a solid legal foundation to the initiatives taken (…) the use of lists of groups will be avoided in favour of the use of clusters of criteria.”

“By decree of the President of the Republic dated 29 August 2005, Mr Jean-Michel Roulet, prefect, secretary-general of the Consultative Commission on National Defence Secrecy, was appointed to the presidency of the Interministerial Mission of Vigilance and Combat against Sectarian Abuses. He will take up his duties as of the first of October 2005.”

“On 21 October last, the Minister of the Interior (Nicolas Sarkozy), who in France is in charge of “cultes” (the legal designation used to speak of religions), entrusted Professor Jean-Pierre Machelon, an eminent jurist and historian of European institutions, with the mission of forming a Commission to examine the law of 1905 (Commission for legal reflection on the relations between religions and the public authorities).”

October 2005: The actors of the anti-cult struggle all share the “belief” that the human behaviours observed or supposed in non-recognised spiritual groups are specific to these groups, and that this “problem” should therefore be dealt with in an equally specific way.

Apart from this common characteristic, the various publications of the organisations fighting against “sects” reveal two distinct currents. The first is that of the associations, such as ADFI and the CCMM, of which Anne-Lise Diet, psychoanalyst and author of several articles on “sects”, declares: “These associations are, however, themselves very vulnerable, for reasons they have not always given themselves the means to think through, because they have hesitated to professionalise. Dealing with perverse control and delusion, they are marked by the suffering of the volunteers, most of whom have lost a child, a parent or a spouse to an organisation, and are constantly caught up in the dramatisation produced by the testimonies they receive. As far as we have known them, they have refused the necessary theorisation that only psychoanalysis was capable of providing them, denied the work of supervision of the teams, repudiated the idea that the subject who sinks into an organisation initially consented to it, and that it is this consent that needs to be analysed. These last assertions are felt by the associations as a diminishment of the serious perverse attacks to which followers are subjected by the organisations, and as something that would weaken the responsibility of those organisations. The temptation to reify evil is the major danger of the fight against sectarian organisations, and its most perverse effect is thereby to give them considerable power and importance. (…) The introduction of professionals into the field of volunteer work would have the advantage (…) of immediately breaking away from the unified discourse, virtuous though it may be, which runs the risk of setting itself frontally and in mirror-image against that of the sectarian organisation, and this would make it possible to work in greater depth on the response to the demands of former followers.” The second current is thus that of the “professionals”, and a statement, again by Anne-Lise Diet, reveals to us in what way the members of these non-recognised spiritual groups would fall under their authority: “We quickly dispose of the desire for spirituality often invoked to explain adhesion to a sectarian organisation. The “desire for spirituality” can find in our societies solid institutions that have proven themselves. If these patients do not choose to undertake that demanding path, it is because it is not spirituality that is at issue, but a demand to find outside themselves solutions to their malaise. Which is the royal road for the leader and his organisation.”

In a national colloquium organised in October 2005 by GEMPPI in Marseille on the theme “Refusals of medical care for ideological reasons”, these differences of approach appear fairly clearly between the speeches of the members of anti-cult associations and the professionals (psychotherapy, psychiatry, philosophy) who were invited to present their point of view. Their statements seem more nuanced and sometimes offer elements for universalising the reflection, thus moving out of the “sect or not sect” framework to enter the broader field of what may or may not seem “reasonable” and apply to any person, within the framework of the law.

“On 22 December 2005, a Jehovah’s Witness and former lawyer who had been convicted of defamation against UNADFI obtained redress in Strasbourg. In a ruling handed down by the judges unanimously, the European Court of Human Rights held that the applicant had been the victim of a violation of his right to freedom of expression. It ordered France to pay him 6,900 euros in material damages. Christian Paturel, who is 58 years old and lives in the Eure, had self-published in 1996 a book entitled “Sectes, religions et libertés publiques” (“Sects, Religions and Public Liberties”). In it he denounced in virulent terms the anti-cult movements, and UNADFI in particular, which he compared to the pre-war antisemitic and anti-Masonic movements, indeed to the Inquisition, and which he accused of practising violence to “deprogramme” certain followers.”

2006

“Clearly we are gaining access to another relationship to the world and to others; at present we are passing into another type of civilisation, we are leaving what has been called modernity, which had built itself up, like that, laboriously over the three centuries that have just gone by, and there is indeed something being put in place in our relationship to others. Basically, that is what religion, religiosity, is. One of my colleagues even speaks of “reliance” [re-linking], in the simple sense of the term. More and more, what is primordial is to connect myself to the other, through the fact that I connect myself to nature, to the deity, in a vast or vague way. (…) What can be said, and what is essential, is that there is a return of what we thought we had gone beyond.” (Interview with Michel Maffesoli, sociologist, by the CICNS on 16 January 2006.)

February: The extraordinary police custody of Antoine Faivre, professor emeritus at the Sorbonne, a celebrated historian and author of books on esoteric and philosophical spiritual movements in Europe since the sixteenth century: “My police custody came in response to a book to which I had contributed. This book (Pour en finir avec les sectes — To Be Done with Sects) challenged the Guyard Report, noting that it displayed a superficial, irresponsible and inaccurate knowledge of the (minority spiritual — ed.) groups in France. The Guyard report proposed no satisfactory criterion (in particular, no academic one) for recognising the characteristics of what it called a “sect”, and many groups were alarmed to find themselves, without any prior consultation, on its list of no fewer than 172 so-called “sects”. Indeed, most of the groups listed were what we regarded as harmless NRMs (New Religious Movements — ed.). In the introduction to the chapter I wrote for that book, I had complained that, in particular, no expert had been consulted in the drawing up of the report. I had remarked that it was obvious that none of the people interviewed were academics — none of the competent experts (sociologists, historians of religions, etc.) in the field. (…) And so it happened that at 6.30 one morning, after the publication of Pour en finir avec les sectes, I opened my door to find the police (a lieutenant and two of his colleagues) come to collect a document I was supposed to have in my possession, namely a piece of paper on which the names of the people interviewed were supposedly written. The reason for this unexpected visit, they told me, was that one or more of the deputies in charge of the report had concluded that one of them had given out the list of the names of the people interviewed — thereby betraying the “secret” of who those people were.”

Belgium, 10 April 2006: on the proposal of Mrs Laurette Onkelinx, Minister of Justice, the Council of Ministers approved the preliminary draft law aimed at punishing the abuse of the state of ignorance or the situation of weakness of persons.

May: Publication of Jean-Luc Martin-Lagardette’s book, L’information responsable, un défi démocratique (Responsible Information, a Democratic Challenge). Criticism of the media and of journalists is growing by the day. Economic and advertising constraints, technological upheavals and societal demand are bearing down on the press with an intensity never reached before. At the point of impact of these heavy trends: Information. How is it constructed? What credit should be given to it? Under what conditions do journalists work on producing it? And what place is left for citizens in this process? Jean-Luc Martin-Lagardette offers us a better understanding of the workings of the journalist’s profession. He also proposes concrete measures intended to foster the advent of citizen journalism and responsible information. These measures would restore to the press a credibility that is faltering today, and legitimise the capital role it plays within democratic society. Jean-Luc Martin-Lagardette is an independent journalist, professor of journalism and author of several works on journalism and the environment.

30 May 2006: Jeanine Tavernier, former president of UNADFI from 1993 to 2001, defends the spiritual freedom of AMORC in the preface to a book by Serge Toussaint, Sectes sur ordonnance (Sects by Prescription): “It is in order to remain faithful to myself, to my convictions, refusing silence and cowardice, that I agreed to associate myself with this book, which denounces the injustice of which A.M.O.R.C. has been the victim in having been classified as a sect. The author’s explanations and his erudition allow one to better know and understand the roots of this Order, its evolution, its teaching, its philosophy. Clearly, it is nothing like a New Religious Movement, and even less a sect. But it was enough for a parliamentary commission, or rather a few deputies of a commission, to blacklist it in a report, for the opprobrium, relayed by the media frenzy, to become a public condemnation.”

6 June 2006: “It’s a no! Sébastien Fath, one of the leading specialists in evangelical Protestantism, has declined the post offered to him by the Interministerial Mission of Vigilance and Combat against Sectarian Abuses (MIVILUDES) on its orientation council. This member of the CNRS refuses to serve as a scientific endorsement for a body which, according to him, makes “too limited, and as it were suspicious, use of the work of researchers specialised” in the religious field.”

30 June 2006: A reply by Philippe Vuilque, PS deputy for the Ardennes, to the question posed by the newspaper La Croix, Why another commission on sects?: “For some twenty years, Parliament has been taking a close interest in sects. It was important to continue this work, particularly after the Solar Temple affair in 1995, above all concerning the dramatic problem of the indoctrination of children. Today, vigilance is necessary and indispensable. According to the report drawn up by MIVILUDES in 2005, nearly 20,000 children are concerned. The parliamentary study group I chair gathers dramatic testimonies. My own commitment since 1997, the date on which I joined the first working group, was born of a disgust, an execration for manipulations, and of the will to defend individual liberties. In this sense, Parliament must, in a manner that is pedagogical but also preventive, take concrete and effective action. What we want is to arrive at an assessment of the situation which will allow us both to fight better against sectarian indoctrination and to inform public opinion. For while the sectarian phenomenon is not necessarily greater than before, it is very shifting.”

“On 28 June 2006, the motion for a resolution by Mr Philippe Vuilque ‘seeking the creation of a commission of inquiry into the influence of movements of a sectarian character and the consequences of their practices on the physical and mental health of minors’ was accordingly adopted unanimously by the deputies present. That is, two days before the summer closure of the National Assembly. Everything was done so that, under pressure from a deputy, Mr Philippe Vuilque (PS), who, in the words of Mrs Martine David (PS), managed to “wrest the creation of this commission of inquiry” and “spared no effort to carry conviction”, this resolution, adopted with such urgency as to “upset the order of business of the Assembly”, should be voted unanimously — “a unanimity of which we are sure, deep down”, according to Mr Guy Geoffroy (UMP).”

“PARIS – Georges Fenech (UMP, Rhône) and Philippe Vuilque (PS, Ardennes) were designated on Thursday respectively president and rapporteur of the commission of inquiry into the influence of sects, at the constitutive meeting of the commission, it was learned from a parliamentary source. The commission was created in public session on Wednesday and has until December to deliver its report. Martine David (PS, Rhône) and Alain Gest (UMP, Somme) were appointed vice-presidents, and Jean-Pierre Brard (app-PCF, Seine-Saint-Denis) and Rudy Salles (UDF, Alpes-Maritimes) secretaries. The six deputies, with the exception of Georges Fenech, took part either in the previous commission of inquiry into the financial aspect of sects, which delivered its report in June 1999 and of which Mr Brard was the rapporteur, or in the one chaired by Alain Gest, which had delivered its report in December 1995.” (AFP, 28 June 2006)

“A parliamentary commission of inquiry on the theme of sects (the third in 11 years) was initiated in June 2006 by Parliament. It aims to assess “the influence of movements of a sectarian character and the consequences of their practices on the physical and mental health of minors”. None of the spiritual groups “of a sectarian character” was heard. Some of them received a questionnaire whose method of processing remains unknown. In particular, the focus of many interventions on the Jehovah’s Witnesses is puzzling. The personalities heard were for the most part won over to a discourse fully justifying the fight against “sectarian abuses” regarded as a genuine social scourge. Of note: the absence of sociologists, historians of religions and ethnologists. The intervention of Didier Leschi, head of the Central Bureau of Religions (Bureau Central des Cultes) at the Ministry of the Interior, deserves to be mentioned as having been potentially capable of balancing a partial and biased debate. A number of other speakers also managed to make fairly measured remarks, often poorly received by the commission. Proof of the sectarian danger — a supposed social scourge for minors — in the form of scientific, statistical, cross-checked inquiries verifiable by independent third parties, was non-existent or in any case not referenced during the hearings. The figures supplied during the hearings were approximate and their interpretation haphazard, indeed insufficient, when they did not quite simply indicate the non-existent character of this social problem.”

Among the thirty members of this commission, four (Mrs David, Messrs Brard, Fenech and Gest) were members of the Orientation Council of MIVILUDES.

23 July 2006: Press release by Michel Thooris, secretary-general of the Action Police CFTC union: The Communist deputy-mayor of Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis), Jean-Pierre Brard, attacked the leaders of the Jehovah’s Witnesses on Thursday 20 July on TF1, calling them “perfect delinquents”, while the mayor of Lens (62) wished to ban their assembly, which is being held this weekend at the Bollaert stadium in Lens (Pas-de-Calais). “The Jehovah’s Witnesses are citizens who respect the laws of the Republic. There is no criterion in their everyday life that allows them to be classified as a “sect”,” says Michel Thooris, secretary-general of the Action Police CFTC union. “They cause no disturbance to public order. They work, pay taxes, take part in the economic development of our country and make donations to charitable associations. The mingling of these people of all races and all origins gathering together in peace is a pleasure to see. We have never observed at their gatherings, even going back a very long way in time, the slightest brawl or altercation that would have justified our intervention. If everyone were a Jehovah’s Witness, we police officers would be out of work. We find it hard to understand the controversy surrounding the gathering of the Jehovah’s Witnesses at the Bollaert stadium in Lens (62). To want to ban this type of peaceful gathering is a very serious attack on freedom of worship in our country and a very profound calling into question of the 1901 law on associations. (…).”

“On 6 September 2006, a letter was sent by the CICNS to the Commander of the gendarmerie group of each French department, inviting the forces of order to discover another point of view on spiritual movements than the one they generally know. The CICNS informs them that the “social scourge” denounced by the activists of the anti-cult struggle generally corresponds to no objective reality on the ground, and that we are determined to denounce abuses when there are any.”

The 2006 MIVILUDES report mentions the CICNS for the first time: “One original feature of this report, unsurprising in substance (we therefore expected nothing else): MIVILUDES tries its hand, on pages 14 to 36, at a psychoanalytical and sociological study of the failings attributed to sects. It is clear that certain reproaches addressed to MIVILUDES in recent years have not fallen on deaf ears, and that an attempt to project a more academic and less crudely anti-religious image appeared indispensable to them. MIVILUDES has thus fashioned itself a pretty screen (a reproach readily made against sects) in front of its campaign waged indiscriminately against all the new expressions of spirituality and not against sectarian abuses, as it would have people believe (if it were otherwise, MIVILUDES would have taken on board the warnings we have been addressing to it for nearly three years about the harm caused to many people by the anti-cult campaign as it is conducted today). This quest for a better image would be laudable were it not for this attempt to discredit, in the most superficial and most defamatory manner, the other side of the story provided by critics of MIVILUDES’s action such as the CICNS. Thus one finds this assertion about our association: “The CICNS campaigns … for the liberalisation of intellectual property law” and “its main target is copyright”. What a dubious joke! As if the action of our association were primarily concerned with this question, to which we devoted a small off-topic sidebar on the occasion of a copyright dispute. It is no doubt more fruitful, for MIVILUDES, to define the CICNS on the basis of remarks taken out of the context of its true action (on reflection, this little sleight of hand, which reduces the CICNS’s action to an absurd “fight against copyright” and whose effect would supposedly be damaging to “the economic fabric”, is doubtless no accident and certainly enlightens us as to the fears and objectives of the anti-cult movement). Further on, the traditional affiliation with Scientology makes it possible to add a layer of suspicion for those who might still be inclined to find any interest whatsoever in our work: “Scientology does not appear in the front line, but a careful analysis of the arguments used and the methods deployed (…) against the parliamentary commission of inquiry suggests that it largely inspired them… and perhaps more besides.""

“The Machelon commission delivered its report on Wednesday 20 September. It recommends a “tidying-up” of the 1905 law on the separation of Churches and State: 1. It comes out in favour of the financing of places of worship by local authorities; 2. It proposes to relax the functioning of religious associations by broadening their social object through an amendment of article 19 of the 1905 law, which prescribes the exercise of worship as their “exclusive object”, making it difficult to integrate ancillary activities such as book sales or social or cultural activities; 3. It then deals with funeral legislation: rather than recommending the extension of denominational sections in public cemeteries, it suggests “authorising the enlargement” of existing private cemeteries, or even “opening up the possibility of creating new ones”, which is prohibited by the law of 14 November 1881.” (adapted from an article in the newspaper Le Monde, 21 September 2006)

“The Machelon report reminds us that the last official census of the religious affiliation of the French dates back to 1872.”

“Total silence from France while the government of Borat’s state in Kazakhstan destroys 13 houses of a Hare Krishna community. On 20 November at 6 a.m., an anonymous person delivered a file containing orders from the prosecutor of the Karasai district court. These orders declared that the owners of the houses had to destroy their own houses, or that they would be destroyed by the government at the owners’ expense. “On 21 November 2006 at 1 p.m. the information reached us that, pursuant to a court decision, the eviction of the members of the spiritual organisation “Society for Krishna Consciousness” from the land it occupies near the farm of Sri Vrindavan Dham, and the demolition of 13 houses, would begin immediately. (…) Substantial equipment arrived in this suburban community: trucks, demolition machines, three buses with riot police, a bus with the demolition team and the local authorities, including the Hakim. The electricity had been disconnected that same morning. (…) By nightfall, around 6 p.m., it was all over: 13 houses destroyed, people thrown out into the snow-covered street, the village without electricity, without heating, without water. The witnesses were in a state of shock, but the state of the people thrown out of their destroyed houses, into the dirt and the snow, is indescribable.""

“On 21 November 2006, the third parliamentary commission of inquiry into sects, studying the impact of sectarian abuses on minors, paid a three-hour surprise visit to the community (of Tabitha’s Place, at Sus, in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques), which gave rise, at the 6 p.m. press conference the same day, to an alarmist account of the situation of the children in the community.”

The report of the third commission of inquiry (L’Enfance volée — Stolen Childhood, report No. 3507), presented by Mr Philippe Vuilque (PS), rapporteur, to the presidency of the National Assembly on 12 December 2006, was adopted unanimously by those present. It contains 50 proposals to fight more effectively against the threat of this supposed “social scourge”.

One deputy who was a member of this commission, Mr Christian Vanneste (UMP), refused to vote for the report. In a “contribution to the report of the commission of inquiry”, published on his blog on 6 December 2006, Mr Vanneste explains in particular: “Some reservations must nevertheless be expressed which, I hope, will make it possible to deepen the reflection, and notably on a fundamental problem I had already pointed out during our meetings: the sect is not defined in legal terms. The words or expressions “sects”, “sectarian abuse”, “sectarian phenomenon” are used without differentiation and cover the most diverse situations and persons. In the end, a confusion is maintained. The absence of a definition leads both to an overly broad conception that would embrace minority religious movements devoid of the slightest harmfulness, and would paradoxically exclude therapeutic abuses that lie more in the field of alternative medicines.

(…) I am concerned, in the “Education” section, about the first proposal relating to home schooling: it seems to me that “limiting home schooling to two families” and requiring “recourse to distance education” constitute an intrusion into the autonomy of the family and into private life. In the same way, when the report demands a certain “morality” in distance-learning bodies, it seems to me useful to define the notion beforehand for better legal certainty.

I would therefore like to recall my proposal to draw inspiration from Belgian legislation which, showing a certain common sense, when it speaks of sects, distinguishes harmful movements from the others. (…) Furthermore, the actual dangers to the moral, mental, psychological and material health of the child should be better circumscribed. Proposals numbers 21 and 22, which provide for the setting up of specialised therapists to take charge of those leaving sects, and for the compilation of a social and health monograph on the consequences of young people’s membership of sectarian organisations, seem to me to create certain dangers. It would amount, in the end, to an infringement of the neutrality of the State with regard to religion. From this point of view, the contradiction of the report, which cites both movements with strong moral demands and those given to transgression, is a matter of ambiguity and subjectivity. The potentiality of danger reveals the risk of an attitude of suspicion difficult to reconcile with a democratic and liberal society.”

December: “A group of journalists, concerned about the future of their profession, which is facing a serious crisis of credibility, has decided to reflect on the feasibility of a Press Council in France, by creating the Association for the Prefiguration of a Press Council (APCP). (…) The criteria of information quality that will serve for the analysis of the cases to be examined on an experimental basis by the APCP will be drawn from the various existing codes of ethics, from various ongoing reflections, and from the works of authors who have studied the question.”

2007

January: Release of the first part of the CICNS’s three-part documentary, La France antisectes : état des lieux – Plaidoyer pour les libertés individuelles (Anti-cult France: taking stock – A plea for individual liberties). This first part gives an overview of the ins and outs of the anti-cult struggle in France from its origin up to the 1995 parliamentary report. Key words, little-known facts, a history both troubling and enlightening. The following themes are addressed in particular: the emergence of new forms of spirituality in recent decades; examples of discrimination, the ostracisation of groups and people for their alternative life choices; the tragedies of Guyana, Waco and the OTS, “officially” described as collective suicides; the creation of the ADFI and the State’s support for anti-cult associations; the theory of mental manipulation; the 1995 parliamentary commission of inquiry and its blacklist of sects.

“On the initiative of the president of the UMP group in the National Assembly, Bernard Accoyer, and against the government’s advice, the deputies voted on Thursday 11 January, within the framework of a bill on medicines, two amendments aimed at making an exclusive university training compulsory for professionals practising psychotherapy.”

“On 17 January 2007, 40 heavily armed gendarmes (submachine guns, bulletproof vests, and bursting into the children’s bedrooms in this warlike attire, according to a resident) stormed the Château de la Balme in the suburbs of Toulouse. A psychologist, Claude David, has been in the crosshairs of local anti-cultism for 15 years.”

Release of the book Le temps des victimes (The Age of Victims), published by Éditions Albin Michel, in which “Caroline Eliacheff, psychoanalyst, and Daniel Soulez Larivière, lawyer, cross their experiences and their disciplines to dismantle and explore this current which emerged in the 1980s on all fronts and feeds on the egalitarian ideal and democratic individualism. They denounce the dangers posed to us by this primacy of the compassionate and the emotional which, at times already, harms the interests of victims and could turn against society as a whole.” (back cover)

March: The “Gettliffe” affair makes headlines. Nathalie Gettliffe, a French woman, is in open conflict with her Canadian ex-husband Scott Grant, whom she accuses of being in a sect and of preventing her from seeing her children. She is convicted by the Canadian courts for having abducted her children without authorisation in order to bring them back to France.

The CICNS publishes a report showing how, by means of the psychosis created over the past 25 years in France, the hunt for sects provides an unanswerable (but unjust) weapon in divorce judgments. This report presents several testimonies that reveal the suffering of hundreds of people who are victims of a revenge made easy, as well as the unacceptable complicity of the media and of certain magistrates in cases that would call for far more circumspection. Publicised cases, such as that of Mrs Gettliffe, show to what degree public opinion is manipulated, to the point of condemning without discernment as soon as the word “sect” is mentioned.

CLIMS: The CICNS was invited to speak at the “Dialogue en mouvements” (Dialogue in movements) conference of the Centre de liaison et d’information concernant les minorités spirituelles (CLIMS), in Lausanne. This day showed, among other things, that the question of the place of spiritual minorities is a European one. This question is legitimate since it corresponds to a sociological reality of importance. The answers given differ greatly, France being the example not to follow, a sort of negative reference point since, here, this question has only ever been approached from the angle of the struggle. These European exchanges between associations sharing the same objectives of defending freedom of conscience within a legal framework will assuredly be fruitful. There is no doubt that the European countries capable of applying the principle of secularism otherwise than in speeches will be able to (will have to) exert, within the European framework, a positive influence on the French debate.

Presentation to the government of the CICNS’s flagship project, which sets out to demonstrate the value of an independent Observatory of spiritual minorities, in response to a public action known as the “fight against sectarian abuses” and judged inadequate by many witnesses of our society. It should be noted that such an Observatory is consistent with Recommendation 1412 of 13 April 1999, voted on 22 June 1999 by the Council of Europe, inviting member countries to create or support, if necessary, national or regional information centres on groups of a religious, esoteric or spiritual nature that are independent of the State.

Beijing Olympics: The Chinese Minister of Public Security called on the security services to intensify the repression of “hostile forces” (religious sects and separatist movements) in order to create a “harmonious society” before the Olympic Games.

April: The 2006 report of the MIVILUDES, as well as the contacts the CICNS was able to have with the services of the MIVILUDES, “demonstrate without ambiguity this ‘determination not to retreat a single step’, akin, from our point of view, to ‘wilful blindness’. A campaign is never waged by chance, and while we do not know all its intentions, its constancy in denying the information provided by the CICNS confirms, year after year, that this is indeed a destruction campaign with a broad spectrum of action. It would be utopian to hope for any self-questioning from that quarter.”

Justice: The remarks by Anne Fournier and Catherine Picard against AMORC in their book Sectes, démocratie et mondialisation (Sects, democracy and globalisation), published in 2002 by Presses Universitaires de France, are found defamatory by the Court of Cassation.

May: Sunday 6 May 2007: Nicolas Sarkozy is elected President of the French Republic, with 53% of the vote against 47% for Ségolène Royal. He had not replied to the questionnaire sent by the CICNS seeking from him a declaration of commitment regarding spiritual minorities in France.

“300 to 400 employees are said to take their own lives in France each year at their place of work. Impossible not to draw the connection between suffering and professional situation. While exploring this avenue, clinicians express their concern about this dangerously trivialised phenomenon.” The press begins to report more frequently on the suicides of employees at large companies (EDF, then France Telecom, Renault, PSA Peugeot-Citroën…).

Parliamentarians concern themselves with the practice of massage by non-certified therapists and create a conflation between massage, sects and “sexual abuses”… A new hobby-horse?

June: Three days before the legislative elections, Georges Fenech denounces in an AFP dispatch “the links” existing between the party La France en action, which is fielding 475 candidates in the legislative elections, and “organisations of a sectarian nature”. Thus the word “sect” continues to be used to easily discredit any person or group who causes disturbance.

Bordeaux: A congress on the “mutations of the religious field”, organised from 7 to 9 June at the University of Bordeaux 3, “arouses the fears of Bordeaux anti-cult organisations, which dread a normalisation of certain sectarian movements within the university precincts”. Any mention of spirituality, through colloquia or conferences, invariably produces an outcry in the ranks of anti-cultism in France. Academics pay the price as soon as they take an interest in the study of new religious movements. The message is clear: it is forbidden to look into the question otherwise than through aggression and rejection. The incessant harassment by the activists of anti-cultism, who feel the monopoly on this subject slipping away from them, is one of the great scourges of our democracy.

Kenya: “A paramilitary unit of the Nairobi police kills 37 members of a ‘sect’, Mungiki. The headlines of the AFP dispatches, picked up by our dailies (Libération: ‘Kenya targets a bloodthirsty sect’) and read quickly by our fellow citizens, suggest that this is a terrorist group being repressed by the police of a state under the rule of law. After reading an article in Le Monde diplomatique offering another perspective, it seems that the instrumentalisation of the word ‘sect’ is at work, over there as it is here, and makes it possible to avoid dealing with questions of society.”

UNADFI, through the voice of Jean-Pierre Jougla, addressed the Council of Europe on 28 June 2007. Extract (translated from the English by the CICNS): “Sect followers are chronic victims who suffer prolonged and repeated victimisation over an indefinite period of time and with multiple traumas. They are always (whatever the sect) victims of undue influence and their state of weakness is abused. Unlike ordinary victims of tangible, visible or sudden aggressions caused by a third party, sect followers are aware neither of their status as victims nor of the mental influence to which they are subjected. One can therefore affirm that they are deprived of the lucidity necessary for their free consent…”

AMORC: Fire — an investigation was opened after the blaze that ravaged an AMORC building during the night. “It is a deliberate act against our organisation,” says a Toulouse member of the association.

July: Anne Hidalgo’s complaint is dismissed by the 17th Criminal Chamber, following her suit against Christian Cotten, president of Politique de Vie. This complaint followed the latter’s posting online of a leaflet signed by a Committee of support for Anne Hidalgo, Ms Hidalgo denying any link with the production of this leaflet. Anne Hidalgo’s defence had argued that alluding to this card, as well as to a list of symptoms making it possible to identify members of the new beliefs (“Numerous telephone calls”, “abundant mail”, “meetings during the week or at the weekend”, “long reading time”, etc.), “ridiculed the action carried out by the city of Paris”.

Thirty gendarmes for an arrest in a residential community in Lisieux: A new so-called “sect” case, in which we see 30 gendarmes search a community, seize books “of a more or less religious nature” and place 15 people in police custody, after the courts were called upon by an ADFI following the complaint of an “apostate”. The judicial investigation begins by using the so-called “About-Picard” law on the fraudulent abuse of a state of ignorance or weakness, rejoices Catherine Katz, secretary general of the MIVILUDES.

“The Vatican is going to publish a document reaffirming that the only Church of Christ is the Catholic Church,” several Italian media outlets revealed on Friday 6 July.

“The Rouen Court of Appeal on Wednesday ordered the president of the National Union of Associations for the Defence of Families and the Individual (UNADFI), Catherine Picard, to pay 6,750 euros to the Jehovah’s Witnesses for defamation, it was learned on Friday from a judicial source.” (AFP, Rouen, 20 July 2007)

“According to an AFP dispatch of 31 July 2007, the Minister of the Interior, Michèle Alliot-Marie, is considering an adaptation of the status of religious bodies without, however, calling into question the 1905 law on secularism. The aim will be to ‘allow the establishment of a financial flow between the religious-worship associations governed by the 1905 law and the associations falling under the regime of the 1901 law’.”

August: “On 2 August, the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong officially announced the creation of the movement ‘the Olympic flame for human rights’. It will be lit in Greece on 9 August. Over one year, it will travel the 5 continents to show how the Chinese Communist Party goes against the Olympic spirit by violating human rights, and it will appeal to the international community to put an end to the persecution of Falun Gong and to the organ harvesting of which its practitioners are victims.”

September: Release of the 2nd part of the CICNS’s three-part documentary. The continuation of the CICNS’s investigation into the hunt for sects. A 52-minute report that takes us deep into the workings of “anti-cultism” and its disastrous effects. Through precise examples of groups and people bearing the full brunt, amid general indifference, of the unfounded rumours of dangerousness that are the ferment of the anti-cult struggle, this second part analyses the workings of public action in its fight to save the “victims of sects”. The following themes are addressed in particular: the third parliamentary commission of inquiry on sects: the revelation of the figures and of a deception; the sociologists’ view of the supposed dangerousness of spiritual minorities; the absence of any effort at knowledge on the part of the public authorities in dealing with the question of the so-called sects; very real victims of the anti-cult psychosis testify before our camera: violent and arbitrary arrests, destroyed lives, tarnished reputations, brutalised and traumatised children, everyday discrimination.

“The all-out support of associations financed in part by the State, and of the President of the National Assembly, for two people accused of defamation by a spiritual movement — while the anti-cult activists obviously rejoice over it in the public arena — nevertheless confirms the serious slippages of a State under the rule of law, of a democracy and of its institutions.”

According to a survey conducted exclusively for Psychologie magazine by BVA, spirituality is taking over from religions. The French give spirituality a definition that is more ethical (moral values, love) or philosophical-mystical (inner life, the beauty of nature, the mystery of existence, wisdom) than religious, in the sense of being connected to a god, a faith, a revealed religion.

30 September: “More than a hundred people came to attend the colloquium organised by the CICNS in Paris on the theme: ‘Sects: social scourge or scapegoat?’ It is a difficult topical theme because it disturbs. It troubles the precarious comfort of a society that fixes its ideology on the fear of the one who is different. The speakers present — sociologists, historians, lawyers, from France, the United Kingdom, Belgium and Switzerland — have long been committed to the defence of fundamental freedoms and in particular freedom of conscience and spiritual freedom. Their academic work and their legal actions take place in an often hostile context. Many do not hesitate to go against received opinions on the question of sects, even if it means constantly having to act against their ‘delegitimisation’ (to use an expression of Jean Baubérot during a previous colloquium) because they dare to denounce conflations and discrimination. (…) The wanderings of public and media action on the question of the so-called sects were denounced by each of the speakers in his own way. To fight against possibly dangerous groups, the method employed today in France is a dead end. The example of other European countries shows that an alternative approach based on knowledge is possible.”

October: Publication of the book by Yves Bertrand, director of the Renseignements Généraux from 1992 to 2004: Je ne sais rien mais je dirai (presque) tout (I know nothing but I will tell (almost) everything). Extract: “It is true that the Renseignements Généraux contributed to feeding the reflection of the parliamentary commission of inquiry which, in 1996, delivered a very harsh report on the question, listing no fewer than 172 movements described as sectarian. I do not disown the work we did at the time to enlighten the parliamentarians. But that work has unquestionably aged. And I myself have evolved on the question. Alongside authentic and dangerous sects — practising the de-schooling of children, abuse of weakness, even paedophilia — certain groups were rather hastily saddled with the term sect. The semantics themselves should be changed. The term sect was forged at a time when Catholicism and Protestantism constituted the dominant norm and when the point was, in a way, to stigmatise Christian heresies. Should it be used so readily today? I sincerely doubt it. (…) Should we confuse under one and the same term sects and minority movements that practise proselytism, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses? Frankly, I do not think so. One has the right to criticise Scientology or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but must they for all that be turned into the devil? I even think that by placing on the same level certain societies of thought and authentic sectarian movements that alienate the freedom of their members, we arrive at the opposite of the intended goal. Under the pretext of protecting freedom of conscience, citizens are prevented from embracing the beliefs of their choice, which is the contrary of secularism properly understood…”

Latvia was condemned by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg for interference with the religious freedom of an American pastor deprived of a residence permit. In its ruling, the ECHR recalls that religious freedom implies the freedom to “manifest one’s religion individually or in public and within the circle of those whose faith one shares”. It stresses that this case constitutes “a typical example of an interference with the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion”.

Prefect Roulet, president of the MIVILUDES, was placed under judicial investigation on 23 October 2007 for defamation of the association TFP, which filed a complaint together with a civil-party application. The 2006 report of the Interministerial Mission for Vigilance and Combat against Sectarian Abuses (Miviludes), published in January 2007, devotes a chapter to “Tradition Family Property, an organisation dedicated to fundraising and with an unidentified object”, underlining the lack of transparency as to the destination of the sums collected. In a report broadcast on 24 January 2007 in TF1’s midday television news, Mr Roulet had summarised the arguments developed in the report and declared that the funds could “be used for anything and everything”. It is this sentence that was the subject of TFP’s defamation complaint.

The world turned upside down: a request for impunity for the testimony of the anti-cultists, made by the President of the French National Assembly: “Certain statements by people who testified before the last parliamentary commission of inquiry on sects and minors gave rise to defamation complaints. These uncomfortable consequences led to a bill, presented on 5 November by Bernard Accoyer (UMP), which would grant witnesses heard by parliamentary commissions of inquiry ‘a partial immunity having legislative force, since it is identical to that which article 41 of the law of 29 July 1881 on freedom of the press grants to persons called to testify before the courts.’” (Ouest France, Monday 19 November 2007)

20 December 2007: Speech by Nicolas Sarkozy, President of the Republic, in Rome, Italy, following his assumption of the title of Canon of the Basilica of Saint John Lateran. Extract: “My deep conviction, which I expressed notably in the book of interviews I published on the Republic, religions and hope, is that the frontier between faith and non-belief is not, and never will be, between those who believe and those who do not believe, because in truth it runs through each one of us. Even he who claims not to believe cannot at the same time maintain that he does not question himself about the essential. The spiritual fact is the natural tendency of all men to seek a transcendence. The religious fact is the response of religions to this fundamental aspiration.” Nicolas Sarkozy’s speech provokes sharp criticism on the left, which accuses him of “ignorance” and of “confusion between the religious and the political”.

23 December, on CBS, screening of “In God’s Name”: The French filmmakers Jules and Gédéon Naudet, who were inside the Towers of the World Trade Center at the moment of the aircraft attack, decided following this radical experience to make a documentary about spirituality in today’s world. The film is the result of their encounter with twelve of the most influential spiritual leaders of our time, representing altogether more than 4 billion people. These diverse and powerful voices offer a provocative, compelling and enlightening perspective on a myriad of questions in our post-September 11 world, including the rise of terrorism, fanaticism, intolerance and war.

2008

January: “Who is God?” — one of the phrases most typed into Google in 2007. Also, a study by the Pew Internet Project recently revealed that 64% of connected Americans (i.e. 82 million Internet users) have used the Web for a religious or spiritual purpose. Figures that even prompted News Corporation, the group of Australian magnate Rupert Murdoch, to bet on religion and buy Beliefnet.com, the largest site devoted to spirituality in the United States.

14 January, speech by Nicolas Sarkozy in Riyadh: “Since 1789, no French head of state has spoken out on religions as Nicolas Sarkozy did in his speeches at Saint John Lateran on 20 December and in Riyadh on 14 January, thereby breaking a taboo more than two hundred years old.” “In a few weeks, Nicolas Sarkozy has established himself as the first head of state so anxious to grant religions a place in society and in the ‘politics of civilisation’.”

18 January, Nicolas Sarkozy’s New Year address to the Diplomatic Corps, Élysée Palace. Extract: “Two challenges will help to structure the international society of the 21st century, perhaps more profoundly than ideologies did in the 20th. The first challenge is climate change (…). The second challenge is that of the conditions of the return of the religious in most of our societies. It is a reality; only the sectarian-minded do not see it. It is an inescapable reality which, in its time, had been foreseen by Malraux.”

February: Is the MIVILUDES going to disappear? “According to information from Le Parisien, the Élysée wishes to merge the current tool for combating sectarian abuses, the Interministerial Mission for Vigilance and Combat against Sectarian Abuses (MIVILUDES), into a single entity for the ‘defence of all rights’ which would also take in the Children’s Ombudsman and the High Authority for the Fight against Discrimination (Halde). At the MIVILUDES, however, this rumour is not confirmed.”

Certain therapists are currently accused of an abuse concerning what are called “induced false memories” or “false memories”. These are said to be therapy sessions during which the memory of traumatic experiences that never took place would be “awakened”, at the risk of accusing parents of sexual abuse they did not commit, for example. Certain anti-cult associations present themselves as a place of welcome for “the victims of false memory syndrome”. Which constitutes one more anachronism in the anti-cult struggle, given the capacity of these associations to generate “false traumatic memories” themselves in people, in order to help them destroy a “sect” they have in their sights.

Declaration of support for the reform of the anti-cult struggle in France, initiated by the CICNS: “Our society is at an important turning point in its relationship to spirituality, to minorities and to individual freedoms. Nicolas Sarkozy’s speeches at Saint John Lateran on 20 December 2007 and in Riyadh on 14 January 2008, advocating an open secularism, immediately supported by that of the Minister of the Interior, Michèle Alliot-Marie, for the respect of ‘all spiritualities’, have aroused as much hope as negative reaction in the various strata of French society. (…) It therefore seems important to us that we openly demonstrate our support for the reforms in preparation. This is a moment we cannot let pass, and one that represents a unique opportunity to respond, in a great movement of solidarity, to the need to restore the individual freedoms flouted for 25 years by an odious anti-cult campaign that has bruised thousands of innocent people.”

20 February: “Sects are a non-problem” in France. The sentence comes from Emmanuelle Mignon, chief of staff to President Nicolas Sarkozy, in an interview published Wednesday in the weekly VSD. Emmanuelle Mignon also considers that one “may wonder” about the threat represented by Scientology.

25 February, circular from Michèle Alliot-Marie, Minister of the Interior, to the Prefects and the Prefect of Police, on “the fight against sectarian abuses”: “The legal arsenal available for waging this fight seems sufficient, whether as regards the statutes or the case law. The difficulty lies in its implementation, which can only be based on concrete elements, on established facts that are criminally punishable. The notion of sect, though commonly used, is a notion of fact and not of law. In the eyes of the law, belonging to a movement of any kind is above all a matter of opinion, the freedom of which is a constitutional principle.”

Publication by Éditions Novalis, Quebec, of the book by Micheline Milot, La laïcité (Secularism). Micheline Milot is a full professor in the sociology department of the Université du Québec à Montréal. A specialist in the sociology of religions. In her latest work, she delineates the notion of secularism through a set of 25 questions. Her outside view is precious for French readers accustomed to hearing secularism spoken of in a navel-gazing way, as a French exception.

March: “Mr Fenech is declared to have forfeited his seat as of right” and to be “ineligible for a period of one year from 27 March 2008”. Such is the tenor of the decision handed down on Thursday by the Constitutional Council, a decision that follows the 129 files transmitted by the National Commission on Campaign Accounts and Political Financing after the legislative elections of June 2007.

Speaking this afternoon in London, at the British Council’s “Living Together” summit, the Deputy Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, warned against the expected release of a controversial film on Islam made by the Dutch politician Geert Wilders: “The European Court of Human Rights has, in the past, endorsed restrictions on freedom of expression aimed at protecting religious convictions against gratuitous insults. In that instance, a Christian religion was concerned. I am not taking a position on the advisability of banning Mr Wilders’s film, but I think that everyone should be entitled to the same respect for their religious convictions, whether they be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist or other,” she declared.

The United Nations presents the work of the Tandem Project on three aspects concerning freedom of religion or belief, for the attention of the members of the United Nations, governments, religions or beliefs, universities, NGOs, the media and civil society. The objective of this project is to encourage understanding of, and support for, Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: “Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion”, and the 1981 United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief. Each of these documents invites the parties to use international human rights protection standards as fundamental elements for long-term solutions to conflicts based on religion or belief. Freedom of religion must eventually become a Treaty-based Convention.

Publication by Albin Michel of the book by Jean Baubérot: La laïcité expliquée à M. Sarkozy et à ceux qui écrivent ses discours (Secularism explained to Mr Sarkozy and to those who write his speeches). “Secularism” is nowadays so often invoked, defended, sacralised and criticised that everyone ends up believing that, by dint of repetition, they know the meaning of this term. Nothing is less true, and Jean Baubérot’s latest book endeavours to show that even at the highest level of the State, very personal conceptions of secularism and of its history have been expounded, where a certain distance and restraint were expected.

Publication of the book by Nathalie Luca, Individus et pouvoirs face aux sectes (Individuals and powers facing sects), by Armand Colin. This necessary work on the so-called sectarian phenomenon makes it possible to better understand the French situation, by putting it in perspective within a globalised context. We strongly recommend it to anyone who wishes to move beyond the knee-jerk clichés that generally accompany any mention of the theme of sects in France.

The French, secularism and the role of religions: “On Saturday 22 March, La Croix publishes the results of an exclusive Ifop poll on the French and the role of religions in the Republic. The French see in secularism a fundamental republican value. 79% of the French consider that religions can help to transmit to young people reference points and positive values (respect for others, tolerance, generosity).”

April: “Le Cri du Contribuable” (The Taxpayer’s Cry), the journal of the association “Contribuables associés”, which claims 140,000 members, denounces in its issue 45 the waste of public money by the anti-cult struggle. Taxpayers who cannot get over learning of the expenditure of the Miviludes, but also of the extent of the sums paid to the associations claiming to champion this struggle: 368,373 euros for UNADFI, 897,572 euros for the CCMM (Centre against mental manipulations). “Enough to make the most serene among us shudder, especially when one knows the number of false trails knowingly followed by these various movements.”

The 2007 report of the MIVILUDES gives this mission an occasion to buy back some credibility, with a great show of battering down open doors and hackneyed rehashes about the hypothetical scourge of sects. Its content seeks to mask the great difficulty this outfit has in finding reasons to pursue a battle that is useless, illegal and costly for everyone. (…) This year, a few themes emerge, such as “induced false memories” (a subject of vigilance to be returned to the anti-cult associations when they question their apostates); the devil, always a safe bet, is also on hand, since Satanism makes its reappearance. “Exotic drugs” come to add a necessary touch to this picture, which rests on the usual scarecrows. Mr Roulet, President of the MIVILUDES, also attacks those who criticise his “mission”, not forgetting, in passing and as tradition dictates, to surreptitiously associate the CICNS with Scientology in a pitiful attempt at discredit which betrays only the poverty of the arguments of French-style anti-cultism. He is also dismayed to see that academics can “relay” the words of our association, not having understood that it is rather the opposite that occurs.

Continuity in mediocrity: according to an AFP dispatch of 24 April 2008, Georges Fenech, magistrate and former president of the commission of inquiry on sects and minors, has been tasked by Prime Minister François Fillon with a mission to evaluate the “judicial mechanisms designed to fight more effectively against sectarian abuses”.

CICNS proposal for the United Nations “Universal Periodic Review”: in April 2008, like the 192 other countries of the United Nations, France is inspected concerning its respect for human rights. NGOs, such as the CICNS, were able to give their point of view on the situation. The government of each country will have to answer for complaints before the High Commission for Human Rights.

When Law is no longer the reference for decisions in the chamber: concerning the bill presented by Bernard Accoyer in November 2007, which would grant witnesses heard by parliamentary commissions of inquiry “a partial immunity having legislative force”, “a few snippets of a debate could be highlighted concerning the perception of law and of the courts by the participants in the discussion, drawing on the full record of the sitting devoted to it”, making it possible to gauge the regard certain deputies have for the “Law” — notably Henri Emmanuelli saying: “The Court of Cassation is wrong!”, or Jean-Pierre Brard: “It is we who decide, not the Constitutional Council! (…) Law must go hand in hand with morality!”

May: The community of the Béatitudes of Saint-Luc has been the subject of significant media coverage in recent years, owing to a number of complaints filed against it. The CICNS offers a recapitulation of these events and highlights the role of the media in the construction of a negative image of this group — a media frenzy as intense (and painful for the accused) in the first days of the affair as it became insignificant when it came to setting the record straight. Indeed, after three years of judicial investigation into this religious community, the case is closed with no further action by the courts, the judge having found that the complainants had been neither defrauded nor abused.

Christine Du Fretay, president of the child-protection association e-Enfance (later chair of the management board of HDF Finance), in charge of quality testing of parental-control systems on the Internet in partnership with the Ministry of the Family and the Delegation for Internet Usage, remarks: “In 2008, we note an overall improvement in filtering compared with last year. What falls short is, on the one hand, the easy accessibility of chats and forums to children under 10, and on the other hand, the fact that certain contents relating to sects, and to violence and drugs, are still accessible.”

75 generals manipulated the American media on the orders of Donald Rumsfeld and may have used a “sect” case to cover the revelation of this scandal: “For six long years, the Pentagon deliberately fed disinformation to and manipulated the media covering the war in Iraq. Objective: to influence American public opinion. (…) Between 2002 and the end of April 2008, the Pentagon had all the major American television networks infiltrated by 75 retired senior army officers. All had been hired by these media outlets as analysts, and it was the former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who initiated this vast disinformation programme. While the White House occupied by George W. Bush closely followed the work of the Pentagon’s moles, Rumsfeld had explicitly forbidden his men to reveal to the television networks that they were part of this operation. (…) A study carried out by the Project for Excellence in Journalism of the respected Pew Foundation revealed that, in the week following the publication of the Times investigation into this vast deception, of the 48 main media outlets examined, only the news broadcast of the public channel PBS had devoted a report to the scandal. By way of comparison, over the same period, there were 50 reports on a polygamous sect in Texas! To this day, none of the major private networks that were duped by the Pentagon have said a word about the disinformation operation of which they were victims. NBC can conceivably argue that it belongs to the General Electric conglomerate, a major military supplier. But what about the others?”

A case in the USA that echoes several similar ones in France, in which the media and law enforcement often adopt abusive behaviour. Beyond the possible responsibilities of this American religious group, the case throws light on the fabrications of the prosecution and the media and police excesses of which we are also witnesses in our own country: “Dramatic turn in the case of the polygamous Mormon sect of Texas installed on a ranch. The local authorities are going to be forced to return the 468 children of all ages forcibly removed from their parents. That is what the sect’s lawyers believe, since the Texas Court of Appeals ruled in their favour.”

Letter addressed to Mr François Fillon, Prime Minister, following the rumour attributing to Georges Fenech (L’Express of 21 to 28 May) the post of President of the Miviludes in September 2008. A letter also signed by Human Rights Without Frontiers (Brussels): “We consider that the important subject of the place of spirituality in our society requires the creation of an independent observatory of spiritual minorities. We invite you to take into consideration this observatory project, a presentation of which is available on our site. The MIVILUDES does not fulfil this role. In a short while, its presidency will be vacant and, in order to restore at the very least a calm debate, failing a treatment of a societal subject in its entirety, it seems urgent to us to choose a new president who has demonstrated open-mindedness, a sense of dialogue and of conciliation, and who agrees to surround himself with recognised experts (our country has no shortage of them).”

How to deal with “sects” according to the FBI! An astonishing document to pass on to the French gendarmerie? “There is a tendency to regard ‘sects’ with a mixture of distrust and fear. A good part of this hostility stems from misconceptions about the nature of ‘sects’, based on popular stereotypes or on ignorance. While such misconceptions in the general public are regrettable, they can prove dangerous when they influence the law-enforcement authorities who would have dealings with these groups and are supposed to ensure both the safety of the members of ‘sects’ and that of the public in general. (…) The majority of new religious movements practise their religion in peace and never attract the attention of the public, the media or the authorities. Despite this, these movements provoke negative thoughts in most people because of die-hard myths or misconceptions about these groups and their activities. (…) While it may prove difficult to trust a follower because of his absolute involvement, it is nevertheless important that the authorities be able at least to recognise the sincerity and depth of his commitment. Dismissing the beliefs of NRM members on the pretext of brainwashing and credulity can lead to a poor assessment of NRM leaders and of their members, and lead to dangerous and ineffective police actions.”

The Order of the Rose-Croix rehabilitated after nine years? A piece of news announced by a single magazine (La Croix) and a single comment on the Internet. Rehabilitations remain far less newsworthy than defamations! “The Grand Master of the Ancient and Mystical Order of the Rose-Croix, accused of being a sect, was able to obtain the rehabilitation of his Philosophical Movement after numerous letters and meetings with the actors involved in the fight against sects who, at last, acknowledged their wrongs. (La Croix of 2 June 2008).”

The Bouchard-Taylor commission and “reasonable accommodations”, a reflection on secularism and cultural and religious differences in Quebec: Quebec is a multi-ethnic and multicultural province. This diversity in motion pushes Quebec society to adjust and refine its common public culture. It is a process already under way, since Quebecers have developed an original notion called “reasonable accommodation”. This practice nevertheless led to a “crisis”, with a large number of cases brought before the media in the years 2006-2007: “In order to respond to the expressions of discontent that arose in the population over what have been called ‘reasonable accommodations’, the Premier of Quebec, Mr Jean Charest, announced on 8 February 2007 the creation of the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences.” This commission bears the name Bouchard-Taylor (after its two chairmen). It has just delivered its report. We invite the reader to acquaint themselves with it. It shows how a society, through its public authorities, can launch an in-depth reflection and a genuine public debate on the basis of concrete cases. It is certainly an example for France, where the subject of secularism is “unapproachable” except in an incantatory manner.

The deleterious anti-cult terminology is spreading to all sectors of society. The terms “sect”, “guru”, “sectarian” and other synonyms are no longer reserved for spiritual minorities. Their “success”, linked to their power of discredit, amply verified and used for several decades against these groups, is extending to multiple domains of political and social life. Examples: François Grosdidier, UMP deputy, describes the parliamentary debates on the GMO law as follows: ”(…) My colleagues all kept repeating the same sentences, as if conditioned by a sect; it was impressive”; Marine Le Pen comments on the teachers’ strike: “Today, to improve the level of teaching, the sect of the school temple brings out its banners and organises processions.” The CICNS invites political actors, in particular, to set an example by restoring a sensible and balanced debate on the place in our society of spirituality in its most diverse forms, and by ceasing to feed a phobia which, through the evolution of everyday vocabulary, ends up turning against them.

LAW No. 2008-496 of 27 May 2008 laying down various provisions of adaptation to Community law in the field of the fight against discrimination: “Direct discrimination is constituted by the situation in which, on the grounds of his or her belonging or not belonging, real or supposed, to an ethnic group or a race, his or her religion, convictions, age, disability, sexual orientation or sex, a person is treated less favourably than another is, has been or would have been treated in a comparable situation. (…) Indirect discrimination is constituted by a provision, criterion or practice that is neutral in appearance, but liable to entail, for one of the reasons mentioned in the first paragraph, a particular disadvantage for some persons compared with other persons, unless that provision, criterion or practice is objectively justified by a legitimate aim and the means of achieving that aim are necessary and appropriate.”

June: Sects: a new work site for the MIVILUDES: “Jérémie Assous, a lawyer specialising in the victims of the fashionable reality-TV programmes, has become ‘the nightmare of reality-TV producers’. The title of the Voici article is explicit: ‘The lawyer who makes Real-TV tremble’ (N. Santolaria, pp. 62-63, Voici, 19 June 2008). His argument is simple: in his view, these producers lied for years by making people believe that reality-TV contestants do not work, which according to him is utterly false. Since 2003, we have indeed begun to learn the (very crude) tricks of the reality-TV industry, with its arranged scripts, its rigging galore, its lurid teasers and its abusive contracts that leave a good number of contestants stranded once the sequins are put back in the wardrobe. Jérémie Assous has forged for himself, in the defence of cheated ex-contestants, an interesting cause. More than a hundred victims are said to be crowding into his office, and according to Voici, this is only the beginning! ‘These programmes use methods comparable to those of sects (…) In Secret Story, the contestants had to be able to recite at any moment the ten commandments of the Voice. And to obtain the desired sequences, the production hands out alcohol at will, rations food and installs a system of “punishments/rewards” with the aim of totally subjugating the participants. Deprived of sleep, many fall into depression when they come out of there.’”

“The new Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence (DCRI), officially born this Tuesday from the merger of the DST and the RG, will be intended to ‘beef up’ surveillance of the Islamist movement, perceived as the main external threat.”

On 30 November 2005, the Alpes edition of France 3’s 19-20 news ran the headline À Grenoble, un stand du salon Naturissima montré du doigt avec suspicion de dérive sectaire (In Grenoble, a stand at the Naturissima fair pointed at with suspicion of sectarian abuse). The journalist presents the stand and specifies that the works are signed Mikhaïl Aïvanhov, founder and master of the movement called the Universal White Brotherhood. Isabelle F., an employee of ADFI 2SI (Association for the Defence of the Family and the Individual, Deux Savoie – Isère), is interviewed to answer the question “Sect or not a sect?”. Isabelle F. replies that the books are indeed those of the “Guru Aïvanhov” and that the Universal White Brotherhood is denounced in various parliamentary reports. The Universal White Brotherhood files a complaint against the company France Télévision, against Patrick de Carolis, its president, and against Isabelle F. Isabelle F., De Carolis and France 3 are convicted. The case goes to appeal. The ruling is handed down in May 2008, followed by confirmation of the conviction. Isabelle F. will have to pay a fine of €1,000, €1,000 in damages and €1,500 to the Universal White Brotherhood, in addition to the defence costs, i.e. a total cost of €6,600. Some local anti-cultists are thinking of forming a support committee. Justice is indeed only just when it condemns spiritual minorities, as everyone knows.

The MIVILUDES proudly publishes a new book of redundant anti-cult litanies: “Les collectivités territoriales face aux dérives sectaires” (Local authorities facing sectarian abuses)

July: The fear that freely accessible content could be harmful to children has led to parental-control tools being put on the market. A number of them are now available. These programs are supposed to carry out “the filtering of sites advocating anorexia or suicide, or praising sects, as well as sites of a pornographic nature and gambling sites”. This filtering “has become extremely effective, reaching up to 90% according to the providers” (Le Figaro). A French ranking has even been drawn up: “Thus, Numéricable, Orange and SFR, tied with Télé 2, occupy the three top steps of the podium”. The CICNS writes to Orange Internet about its parental-control software, to find out the sources used to draw up the list of blocked sites in the “sects” category: documents (official or unofficial), persons or bodies consulted, as well as the updating process (frequency, methodology). To this day, this letter has remained unanswered.

The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the Human Rights League (LDH) on Wednesday judged the report of the UN Human Rights Committee “scathing for France”. The organisations ask the French government “to respect the next deadline it has been set (2012) and, in the interval, not to content itself, as is its habit, with ignoring the recommendations of international bodies”. They stress that the 26 recommendations of the Human Rights Committee “concern the fate of foreigners and asylum seekers, the use of DNA for foreigners, the prison situation, and the illegitimate violence committed by law enforcement”. Although there is no specific mention in it of the treatment of spiritual minorities, the mention of discrimination and of illegitimate violence committed by law enforcement is explicit enough…

At the initiative of Human Rights Without Frontiers, sixteen renowned European academics ask the Belgian government to revise its position on the treatment of sects. According to the signed text, the observatory on sects set up ten years ago in Belgium should be replaced by an interuniversity Centre for Information and Advice on communities of faith or belief.

September: “Judge Jean-Christophe Hullin signed, on Monday 8 September 2008, an order sending for trial the Spiritual Association of the Church of Scientology (ASES - Celebrity Centre), the association’s main structure in France, and its bookshop, the SARL SEL, for ‘organised fraud’. A conviction of the Church of Scientology on this count could lead to the dissolution of the two structures under investigation, according to a source close to the case.” Scientology is truly the bête noire of the anti-cult organisations. It is always delicate to mention Scientology in France today. The CICNS has even written a special page to affirm its independence from Scientology (an independence which likewise applies to every other movement), and we felt a hesitation before publishing this commentary. Is Scientology a dangerous group? This accusation concerns, in a general way, all spiritual minorities. It is certain that Scientology has developed judicial expertise and that it uses it, perhaps abusively in certain cases. It is also possible that the anti-Scientology climate strengthens a will to answer blow for blow in a group where the notion of success is central. Nevertheless, in the face of the smear campaigns that have overwhelmed these groups for some thirty years, recourse to the courts is the only means of defence, since public debate is totally biased. The MIVILUDES and all the anti-cult activists would assuredly like to be able to publish unproven accusations with impunity. Let them rest assured: this impunity is the case for most groups, which do not have the resources for legal recourse. Some, on the contrary, because they can, have chosen to defend themselves.

An apocalyptic vision that does not come from a “sect”?: “Many scientists and part of the population are worried about the possible end of the world on 10 September 2008. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, will on that day launch its LHC (Large Hadron Collider). The LHC is the next largest particle machine in the world. Some scientists fear that an enormous black hole may form and suck in matter and, as a consequence, absorb the Earth.”

In their reply to a parliamentary question on the sectarian danger, the public authorities specify (question No. 25789, stemming from a particular type of “perennial chestnut” that produces glitches several times a year): “The risks of sectarian abuses constitute a ground for concern for the Government. These indeed no longer pertain solely to the religious sphere but are also developing in more diversified sectors concerning the whole of the social fabric.” The question of sects has been badly framed for thirty years, and its treatment can only be deficient. The public authorities responded to a worry (in the face of the appearance of new life choices) that should have been analysed at its true value, by transforming this worry into a legitimised fear. The result can only be disastrous. The brush fire has, moreover, escaped the pyromaniac’s control, since anti-cult language now touches the entire “social fabric”. If one confined oneself solely to the use of anti-cult terminology, the political world would be one of the priority sectors of investigation as regards sectarian abuses. If certain self-styled defenders of secularism had some good “faith”, they would note that the accusation of “sect” is today the secular French version of the “possession by the devil” used in former times to discredit the “troublemakers” (that is, those who hold unorthodox ideas). It is not too late to right the ship (rather than adjust the aim). The CICNS hopes that this autumn will be the occasion for the government to demonstrate political courage on the question of the so-called sects, and our association will make proposals along these lines.

The University of Sherbrooke in Quebec offers a master’s degree in the study of contemporary religion. The CICNS advocates making the possession of such a master’s degree compulsory in France for anyone involved in the anti-cult struggle.

“[The financial crisis] worsened in September 2008 with the bankruptcy of several financial institutions, provoking the beginnings of a systemic crisis and putting several States in difficulty. Its consequences included a fall in stock-market prices and the economic crisis of 2008-2009, which caused a generalised slowdown in economic activity, and even recessions in several countries from 2008 onwards.”

October: 1 October: Appointment of Georges Fenech to the Presidency of the MIVILUDES. While the appointment of Georges Fenech, who may be considered an anti-cult ideologue, was, unsurprisingly, hailed by the anti-cult activists, the validation of this choice by the President of the Republic (one can hardly imagine that he had no say in the matter) is regrettable. The “sects” will thus have paid the price of a stormy debate that needed calming, over a secularism the head of state wishes to be “open”: spot the mistake. Choosing to “remove the inhibitions from the fight against sectarian abuses”, in the words of the Minister of the Interior, Michèle Alliot-Marie, appears distinctly cynical in a country known for its excesses in this domain. Georges Fenech stated on France 5 that “500,000 people” were, according to him, “affected by the sectarian phenomenon”. It is likely that the number of citizens receptive to alternative life choices is greater than this figure, and the discredit to which they are subjected has gone on far too long. An evolution will no doubt become possible once these citizens have become aware of the peaceful and electoral force they represent, together. For the CPDH, the Protestant Committee for Human Dignity, this appointment is unwelcome. For its part, the newspaper Libération publishes an article entitled Le controversé Fenech, nouveau pourfendeur des sectes (The controversial Fenech, new scourge of sects).

6 October 2008: Opening of the so-called “Angolagate” trial, before the eleventh chamber of the Paris Criminal Court. It puts on trial 42 protagonists, the main ones being Jacques Attali, adviser to François Mitterrand and then to Nicolas Sarkozy; Pierre Falcone, international businessman; Georges Fenech, former president of the Professional Association of Magistrates; Arcadi Gaydamak, international businessman (absent at the opening of the trial); Jean-Charles Marchiani, adviser to Charles Pasqua; Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, eldest son of François Mitterrand and former head of the Élysée’s Africa unit; Charles Pasqua, ex-Minister of the Interior; and Paul-Loup Sulitzer, writer.

A defamatory AFP dispatch is complacently picked up by the CCMM. The accused is not a Jehovah’s Witness, but the article nevertheless carries the headline: Témoins de Jéhovah, un père condamné pour le viol de ses filles (Jehovah’s Witnesses: a father convicted of the rape of his daughters). Six hours after its release, AFP changed the title of the dispatch — but not the CCMM, nor France 3, nor the newspaper La Croix, the latter two having nonetheless received a letter from the CICNS.

Publication of the book by Michela Marzano, Extension du domaine de la manipulation : De l’entreprise à la vie privée (Extension of the domain of manipulation: from the company to private life), by Grasset & Fasquelle. “Is personal fulfilment through work the new watchword of our era? In the age of ‘the company with a human face’, of coaching and of ethics charters, anxiety has nevertheless never been so intense in the world of the economy. Never have suicides been so numerous within companies. Is there not a perversity in relying on the couple of happiness and toil? Are today’s executives not the consenting victims of a new form of violence? Are the ‘leaders’ not torn between contradictory injunctions? Performance and fulfilment, commitment and flexibility, autonomy and conformity… Michela Marzano, as much a philosopher as a polemicist, casts an unprecedented light on this new form of contemporary alienation: the extension of the domain of manipulation, from the company to private life.”

November: 4 November, election of Barack Obama, the first African American to accede to the presidency of the United States.

“While the government remains cautious on questions of data files after the outcry provoked by the Edvige file — since renamed EDVIRSP —, an email from the intelligence services asking to know the religion of the civil servants of the Rhône-Alpes regional council has aroused indignation, both among the local authorities and at the Ministry of the Interior.”

The CICNS was invited to take part in the Forum of Terre du Ciel in Aix-les-Bains from 8 to 11 November 2008, whose theme was: “Spirituality and Society: a just vision for just action”. Over four days, more than a thousand people followed the conferences, round tables and workshops, and during the breaks went from stand to stand to talk, to buy books or CDs, or to have them signed. The CICNS was present at a stand throughout these 4 days and the encounters were numerous. The CICNS project for an independent Observatory was presented as a replacement for a partisan and aggressive MIVILUDES. In response to a question implying that the struggle had calmed down recently, the CICNS spokeswoman was able to show that this was not at all the case and that the appointment of Mr Fenech to the Presidency of the MIVILUDES was, on the contrary, the sign of a hardening of the government’s positions. Likewise the recent adoption of a law tailor-made for the informers against spiritual minorities, which gives those heard by parliamentary commissions an immunity similar to that of parliamentarians. The virulent attacks against the France En Action movement were, among other things, mentioned to underline that the anti-cult struggle is no longer limited to spiritual movements but affects most political or humanist initiatives proposing an alternative, thereby affecting a growing number of citizens. The spokeswoman concluded by recalling that the foundation of our action was the recognition of the intrinsic unity of humanity in its desire to know itself better and to live in harmony in its diversity.

Publication of the book by Jean Baubérot: Une laïcité interculturelle : Le Québec, avenir de la France ? (An intercultural secularism: Quebec, the future of France?), by Éditions de l’Aube: “Jean Baubérot studies the evolutions of secularism in Quebec, in a pluricultural, political and media context specific to this province and within the wider framework of Canada. This study takes as its starting point the crisis of the ‘reasonable accommodations’ (RA) which led the Quebec Premier, Jean Charest, to set up in February 2007 a commission, known as the Bouchard-Taylor commission, ‘on accommodation practices related to cultural differences’. In his synthesis, Jean Baubérot sees in the Quebec model a future for France: ’(…) It seems to me that through the trials and errors, indeed the excesses, described in the previous chapters, Quebec has gained a certain lead over other countries, notably France.’ ’(…) the power of the majority must be balanced by the guarantees given to minorities. Democratic debate, which associates different minority points of view with the constitution of the political community and with its decisions, is capital. The attention paid to minorities is one of the most essential criteria of democracy and of its famous “values”. Yet today, in modern societies that claim to be democratic, legitimacy comes from numbers. The quantitative reigns supreme, whereas it is (most often) synonymous with impoverishment, when it is not worse.’”

“A study by the National Observatory of Delinquency (OND) reveals that nearly half of the victims of physical violence suffer it within their own home.” Now there is a statistic that might perhaps deserve a parliamentary commission of inquiry (assuming such commissions really serve any purpose)? Instead of that, parliamentarians prefer to multiply them on the subject of spiritual minorities, the overwhelming majority of which are harmless but are treated like a terrorist threat (the CICNS would like to know the share of cases of sectarian abuses among the figures of this study by the Observatory of Delinquency).

The programme Le débat of 11 November 2008, hosted by Benoit Duquesne on the website of the parliamentary channel, presents an episode on the international community of Auroville, in India: “At a time when everything seems to be collapsing, when the stock markets are playing yo-yo, when redundancy plans are multiplying, when liberalism is being called into question, we offer you a close-up on a utopia, Auroville, a city created in the south of India 40 years ago”. The report preceding the debate, made by Hélène Risser and Thomas Raguet, can be seen as the sequel to a 1973 report made by Jean-Pierre Elkabbach and Nicole Avril and presented in these terms on the INA website: “Auroville (The City of Dawn) is located near Pondicherry, in Tamil Nadu in southern India. This city, built on 20 km2, was created by Mirra ALFASSA, better known under the name of ‘The Mother’, and Sri Aurobindo, the Indian thinker of the ‘new man’. Auroville rests on a ‘universal’ community life, in which everyone would learn to live in peace, in perfect harmony, beyond all beliefs, political opinions and nationalities. The project aims at the creation of a new man.” The debate that follows the report is balanced. No member of the MIVILUDES or of the anti-cult associations is present on the set; the notion of a sectarian movement is raised when the reverence of Auroville’s inhabitants for the Mother is mentioned, but this mention is made more in the form of a question mark than of a peremptory assertion. Regardless of the varying efforts of each of the debaters to truly understand the preponderant spiritual meaning given to their project by the inhabitants of Auroville, they maintain an open and tolerant spirit throughout the exchanges. A spiritual minority in France, by contrast, is invariably saddled with the insulting label of “sect” and is looked at by the media and the public authorities only through the prism of the apostates. What is the reason for this difference in treatment? (…) As Maurice Duval suggests, the acceptance of a different life choice is proportional to the number of kilometres separating it from our dominant life choice. Difference can even take on an exotic and likeable value when it does not risk interfering with our habits. The debaters on the programme moreover all acknowledged that an experiment like Auroville would be impossible in France.

Catherine Picard, president of UNADFI, has received the Legion of Honour!

In the United States, spirituality is no longer merely a matter of personal growth for top executives. It is in the process of penetrating the culture and organisation of work. The founder of the Green Mountain Coffee Roasters roastery, in Vermont, hired his spiritual master to teach meditation to those of his employees who wish it. Robert Stiller has also set aside a room for this activity. The same at Google, which organises meditation seminars in its offices in Mountain View, Pittsburgh, London, New York and Sydney. Since October 2007, Google has been offering its employees a meditation and mindfulness course called Search Within Yourself. In fact, silence and meditation rooms are multiplying. “Companies have a certain reluctance, because they do not want to proselytise among their employees,” he says. “But as long as you stay away from religion, there will be enthusiasm. People need it.”

December: The profusion of information and disinformation assails the citizen and seems to have the consequence of shifting many debates to the extremes. Since it is difficult to make oneself heard, to say nothing of making oneself understood, the tendency seems to be towards a radicalisation of discourse. What is exchanged is not considered opinions but stereotyped thoughts that clash. In such a context, it is no longer merely a matter of answering one’s contradictor on the substance, but of discrediting him beforehand. In France, a fashionable method for achieving this objective is to use the anti-cult terminology, whose power to do harm no longer needs demonstrating. The CICNS notes numerous examples showing that anti-cult terminology now concerns many sectors of society.

Georges Fenech, recently appointed president of the MIVILUDES, was questioned on Monday 8 December 2008 in court, during the trial over the sales of arms to Angola. Theatrically playing out the throes of injustice in the face of the suspicions weighing on him (the charge is “receiving misappropriated corporate assets”, the association of which he was president having received 100,000 francs in 1997 from a company selling arms). He even explained that he “could no longer stand up”, and thus obtained a suspension of the hearing.

In a verbal slip, Georges Fenech, the new president of the MIVILUDES, invited on 19 November 2008 by the journalist Paul Vermus to a debate on integration and sects, notably declared (VSD): “If I give you the names of the sects I have in my sights, I face a lawsuit on the spot… Not easy to keep five hundred sects and communities under surveillance; that concerns five hundred thousand people, of whom eighty-five thousand are children.”

Jean-Pierre Brard is convicted for having censured an elected councillor wearing a cross, in these words: “I would ask Mrs Vayssière to remove any form of provocative religious exhibitionism, which is a violation of secularism.” “The ex-mayor of Montreuil had deprived of the microphone an elected councillor wearing a Christian cross, during a municipal council session in 2006. He will have to pay 5,000 euros in damages to the complainant. (…) The deputy most consulted on questions of secularism was found guilty of ‘refusal of the benefit of a right by a person entrusted with a public-service mission on grounds of religion’ (discrimination punished by article 432-7 of the criminal code).”

“Freedom of expression and religion at the heart of the 20th annual Andersen-Ottaway conference of the World Press Freedom Committee: ‘The greatest threat to the freedom of opinion and expression defended by Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights lies in the current debate on expression and religion,’ declared the American First Amendment specialist lawyer Floyd Abrams during his lecture. (…) A United Nations resolution currently under consideration by the General Assembly in plenary session, which calls on member States to take measures to prohibit or punish what is called ‘defamation of religions’ or ‘incitement to hatred’, has been criticised by organisations defending freedom of expression as being deemed a threat to Article 19. (…) In a joint address delivered as part of a conference convened by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in October, Ms Asma Jahangir and Mr Doudou Diene observed: ‘Freedom of religion confers on believers the right to act in accordance with their religion, but not the right to have their religion itself protected from all unfavourable comment.’”

Will the case of the ex-director of Libération advance the rights of all citizens? The degrading police custody undergone by the former director of the newspaper Libération, over a defamation case, aroused emotion and indignation in the political class and in the media world (Le Monde). These reactions are understandable, but the CICNS hopes that this ongoing case will not become an occasion to illustrate political opportunism or the corporatism of journalists. The media could seize on it to re-evaluate their treatment of the question of sectarian abuses, taking into account the work of the CICNS and thereby allowing attacks on the dignity of persons to constitute a real file on the government’s desk.

“Today, many parents wish to integrate a spiritual dimension into their children’s education, outside the dogmas of the established religions from which they have moved away or of which they are wary. ‘While there is a clear decline in institutional religious practice,’ observes the philosopher Michel Lacroix, ‘there exists in parallel a need to believe in a transcendent reality in order to give meaning to existence. And it is probably this faith that adults wish to transmit to their children. For some, it takes the form of a spirituality without God; for others, of a divine principle placed at the centre of their beliefs; but it can also be the love of the beautiful, the true and the good, the three Platonic values.’”

Plus belle la vie, a popular fiction watched daily by millions of French people, presented from 8 October to 15 December 2008 (episodes 1063 to 1111) the storyline of a young woman (Mélanie) who progressively becomes the “victim of a sect” before finally being “freed” from it. This plot, purportedly realistic, imposes on viewers the conflations conveyed by the anti-cultists, in abundant detail. It is a consensual bias, which unfortunately has an effect redundant with the “hunt for sects”. It is the bias of caricature, on the theme of the “sect”: breach of trust and fraud, against a background of mental manipulation by a pseudo spiritual guide. In the film, many totally unrealistic details are presented as plausible. The script reproduces the anti-cult archetypes to the point that one might believe it to be a form of propaganda that does not speak its name, in which culture ends up making itself the spokesperson of the dominant ideology.

2009

January: A journalist evaluates the latest episode of “Les infiltrés” on “sects”. This new programme, offered by France 2 and presented by David Pujadas, has been contested by the profession for its dubious practices. “It is important to make a distinction between the print press and television. There is quite a difference between making a hidden-camera report and writing a report without revealing one’s true identity as a journalist. (…) What is most striking in this programme is how poorly concealed the people filmed without their knowledge are. (…) Throughout the viewing of this programme, while my journalist’s heart rises up against the incredible violation of professional ethics, my critical citizen’s mind is also put on alert. Admittedly the images are telling, they reveal many things… But above all sensationalism.”

February: Are the vigilance committees on sectarian movements ill-informed and outside the law? The Local Security Contract (Contrat Local de Sécurité, CLS) aims to strengthen the fight against crime in given territories in France. Within this framework, thematic watch units have been set up. The vigilance committee on sectarian movements is one of them. In Villeneuve d’Ascq, David Deshayes, coordinator of the Local Security Contract, comments on the work of the unit concerning sectarian movements: “Some (sects) are banned in France, such as the Church of Scientology, whereas they are legal in Belgium.” Not only is this gentleman very badly informed, but he adds: “At the city level we are vigilant not to endorse (…) sectarian movements (…) In this regard it has already happened that we refused to lend a hall. All this, while of course respecting everyone’s right to believe in what they want.”

The parliamentary channel and the MIVILUDES sign a partnership. The parliamentary channel LCP-AN “wishes to lend its support to the MIVILUDES by fostering the conditions for informing citizens about the risks of sectarian abuses, but also by informing viewers about the actions carried out by the MIVILUDES”. The presence on the board of directors of LCP-AN of figures such as the deputy Jean-Pierre Brard, who has demonstrated on many occasions a total lack of restraint in their “fight” against spiritual minorities, does not bode well. The CICNS therefore invites the editorial teams of LCP-AN to heightened vigilance in order to offer a balanced reflection.

According to a local ADFI, there are said to be dozens of sectarian schools in its region: “According to ADFI Lyon, there are in the region some thirty schools whose sectarian character is attested by testimonies. A few are said to operate openly, but most are said to have no address so as to vanish more easily into thin air. Some of them are said to bear names as fanciful as school of intuition, school of biological decoding, school of awakening, or school of the intuition of the touch of light.”

Angolagate trial: Georges Fenech, former president of the Professional Association of Magistrates (APM) and current president of the MIVILUDES, who received a transfer of 100,000 francs from Pierre Falcone and has always declared that he did not know what Brenco’s activities were, failed in an “elementary duty of prudence”, because he “should have sought to find out where these funds came from”. “This was not just any association, but an association of magistrates of the judicial order!”, the prosecutor recalled, stressing that Mr Fenech should have exercised “heightened vigilance”, all the more so as he himself, in his capacity as a former investigating judge, had dealt with cases of business criminal law. According to the prosecution, he therefore knew the illicit nature of the payment. A six-month suspended prison sentence was requested; the judgment will be handed down in autumn 2009.

Book burning: “On 10 February 2009, the Journal Officiel published a question from the UMP deputy Didier Robert: “Regarding sects, [Mr Didier Robert] would like to know what measures are envisaged to control and prevent the distribution, publication and open sale, on national territory and on the French-speaking Internet, of works published or written by persons identified as belonging to and promoting these sectarian movements.”

“Several members of the FF2P have been approached to adhere to the GEMPPI’s ‘Charter of practitioners and actors of body and mind’. Yet its article 2 is unacceptable. Here is its text: “Art. 2: He conducts a practice respecting the principles of secularism and respect for the human person, in particular by refraining from steering his clients or users towards any beliefs or religions whatsoever. His activity as a practitioner or actor of body and mind is independent of any membership of groups designated as sects in the French parliamentary reports ‘Les sectes en France’ (1995), ‘L’argent des sectes’ (1999) and those that will subsequently be published on this theme, or named as such in the reports of the MILS or the MIVILUDES.” (…) This GEMPPI Charter aligns itself ‘blindly’ with certain (past and future) stances of the MIVILUDES that are sometimes arbitrary and have several times been called into question by CNRS researchers and by specialists. (…) The very notion of a ‘sect’ has, moreover, never been defined. Only sectarian abuses, endangering freedom or safety, should be prosecuted, and not mere membership of this or that movement (…). This is clearly a new ‘witch hunt’, condemned by scientists and by all foreign countries!”

A Moon member wins against Russia: “An American missionary of the Unification Church, better known as the ‘Moon sect’, had Moscow condemned on Thursday by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) for the brutal conditions of his expulsion from Russia, where he had settled in 1994. Patrick Francis Nolan, who worked with various groups of the sect of South Korean origin in Russia, had been apprehended at Moscow airport on 2 June 2002, on his return from a trip to Cyprus. He had been detained for a whole night and then directly expelled to Estonia without the possibility of taking his 11-month-old son, who had been entrusted to a nurse. Father and child were only reunited ten months later. In its ruling, the Council of Europe’s court condemns Russia for arbitrary detention, violation of the right to respect for private and family life and of the right to freedom of religion, and for failure to respect the procedures required for the expulsion of foreigners. The missionary, who currently resides in Georgia, is awarded 7,000 euros in moral damages.”

In an article dated 13 February 2009, Le Parisien reports Georges Fenech’s intention to publish a new blacklist of sects. The president of the MIVILUDES disguises under less polemical terms his persistent intention to discriminate against spiritual minorities and the alternative practices labelled as sects. Thus the expression “list of sects” is replaced by “reference framework of movements and practices displaying sectarian abuses”. Only those who wish to take part in this regrettable practice of registering people will let themselves be convinced by this linguistic artifice. It is comforting to note, still according to the article in Le Parisien, that the Ministry of the Interior has taken up this new list project in order to denounce it and to stress the need to keep the MIVILUDES’s action within bounds. The CICNS therefore invites the Prime Minister François Fillon and Madame Alliot-Marie, Minister of the Interior, to prohibit unambiguously and firmly any proscription list. Only a body such as an independent observatory of new spiritualities should be authorised to publish a “reference framework” on movements studied while respecting the adversarial principle.

Astrology is an ancestral knowledge for some, a hoax for others. It is not for us to comment on this practice, except when the reading of the course of the stars turns into “disaster”. Such is the case for a Canadian site, Planète Québec, which treats its readers to a Chinese horoscope regularly warning of the danger that sects supposedly represent. These “celestial interpretations” seem directly inspired by anti-cult agencies.

The case of Dr Guéniot: In June 2006, the criminal court of Lille sentenced at first instance Doctor Gérard Guéniot to two years’ suspended imprisonment and a definitive ban on practising medicine for failure to assist a person in danger after the death, in 1997, of a cancer patient, Evelyne Marsaleix, treated with homeopathy (AFP dispatch in L’Express). Dr Guéniot appealed against this decision. Dr Saint-Omer, a colleague of Gérard Guéniot, also tried in June 2006 on the same charge, was sentenced to two years’ suspended imprisonment. He did not appeal. On 17 February 2009, thus 13 years after the facts and following ten years of judicial investigation, “The Court of Appeal of Douai acquitted Dr Gérard Guéniot (62 years old). (…) In the 87 pages of the judgment’s reasoning, the Court of Appeal of Douai explained yesterday that Dr Guéniot had examined the patient only once. And that consequently he could not be convicted of ‘failure to assist a person in peril’”. In 20 Minutes, Dr Guéniot’s defence counsel, Me Xavier Autain, explains that: “Gérard Guéniot had not opposed the young woman undergoing chemotherapy.”

Publication of a CICNS study on “Sectes, médias et pensée unique” (“Sects, media and one-track thinking”): A certain number of intellectuals have produced a critical analysis of the mass media. Their work and perspectives allow us to better understand how the public debates organised in these media operate. After quoting some of these authors, we offer several comments on and critiques of the programme Les infiltrés dealing with the theme of sects and broadcast on France 2 on 17 December 2008.

Georges Fenech’s hypocrisy on the question of “lists of sects”: “It should be recalled that the list of these movements, drawn up by the parliamentary commission of inquiry in 1996, has no legal value. The decisions of mayors or presidents of departmental councils who had relied on this list to refuse an accreditation or an adoption have all been annulled by the administrative courts. For my part, I am very reluctant about the establishment of such lists: there is first of all a risk of stigmatising a movement by mistake (there have been such cases). Moreover, these lists are only a snapshot at a given moment of an evolving sectarian landscape. Finally, it allowed a sectarian organisation not appearing on it to invoke that fact to claim there is nothing to fear from it. It is therefore a double-edged weapon.”

The deputy for Asnières sees sects everywhere: “Throughout the previous term of office, the denunciation of sectarian practices was a recurring activity of the former municipal team (Affaire Elahi… la mairie d’Asnières au four et au moulin). This theme was used on several occasions to obtain the departure of a deputy mayor, to harass an inconvenient association (the Métro neighbourhood association wins before the Court of Cassation), to hamper political opponents… The denunciation by Manuel Aeschlimann of sectarian practices in his constituency has always been radical… However, one notes that these attacks are very often concentrated against the same foundation. To sum up, our deputy sees sects everywhere, but it is often the same one… (Libération: Le maire d’Asnières voyait des sectes partout). What would our Minister of the Interior say if she learned that a deputy of our republic has extracts of a note by this same Miviludes distributed? This note lists a series of associations or companies presented as close to a Parisian foundation, and on that basis describes them as a ‘sectarian nebula’. The label ‘sectarian nebula’ has no legal meaning. This document has never been published in the form of an official report, nor even cited, in any of the interministerial mission’s annual activity reports. It takes the form of a simple anonymous note printed on plain paper. The deputy denounces a neighbourhood association as being close to this foundation. Carried away by his demonstration, Manuel Aeschlimann presents, in the course of his speech, the members of this association as veritable political adversaries: ‘During the campaign (this association) was very active, since through various leaflets it gave official support to all those who wanted to see us defeated…’. (…) Using this new key of interpretation, the judicial harassment of the members of this association, the circulation of ‘genuine-fake’ notes from the Renseignements Généraux, the slanderous denunciation of one of its members, take on a new meaning. It casts a different light on the way certain residents of Asnières may have been treated on the pretext that they had stood in the way of an elected official.”

March: According to an AP dispatch of 27 March 2009 (published by the Nouvel Observateur): “The Investigating Chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal on Friday validated a dismissal order issued in favour of members of the Church of Scientology placed under investigation for ‘fraud’ and ‘illegal practice of medicine’, declaring inadmissible the appeal lodged by a victims’ association, the UNADFI”. (On 6 April 2010, the Court of Cassation would definitively reject the appeal lodged by the UNADFI (Droit des religions)).

On 8 March 2009, the webmaster of the site Prevensectes was found guilty of defamation against the “SARL L’Ermitage alias Libre Université du Samadeva Edition L.U.S. by the 17th Criminal Chamber of the Paris Regional Court for having published an article entitled Euphonie Gestuelle du Samadeva (…) on Prevensectes in February 2007.”

Release of the third instalment of the CICNS documentary: “La France antisectes : état des lieux – Plaidoyer pour les libertés individuelles” (“Anti-cult France: state of play – A plea for individual liberties”), dedicated to the rehabilitation of spiritual minorities committed to respect for the human being. This third part dissects the media treatment of the theme of sects, the media’s bias in favour of the anti-cult discourse and of the “apostates’” version, and the impact of this partial stance on political action and civil society. The conclusion of this trilogy nevertheless remains optimistic about our capacity to overcome irrational fears in order to defend spiritual freedom. The following themes are addressed in particular: the bias of televised debates, with supporting examples; the editing techniques used to “get a message across” (see also our comments on television programmes); three heavily publicised cases of “victims of sects”, analysed in an adversarial manner; 2008, a dark year for spiritual freedom around the remarks of Emmanuelle Mignon, and many others.

“Three Masonic obediences - the Grand Orient de France, the Grande Loge féminine de France and the Fédération française du Droit humain - announced on Wednesday, in a press release, the creation of a ‘joint mission of vigilance on sectarian movements’. These three obediences deem it ‘opportune to recall their very firm position with regard to sectarian movements or movements with sectarian tendencies which, through their abuses, undermine the fundamental freedoms of citizens and constitute a threat to democracy and Human Rights’.” (AFP, 12 March 2009)

“Researchers declare, in the American journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of 9 March, that they have located the area of the brain that controls religious faith. According to their work as reported in The Independent, belief in a higher, celestial power is an evolutionary asset that helps humans survive.”

The Daily Nord publishes an investigation into “sects”: “Sect. The word intrigues, worries, makes people smile, terrifies, provokes debate, and has done for years, in particular in the decade that followed the social revolution of 1968. Yet major abuses and threats of collective suicides no longer make the headlines. Have sectarian abuses, since that is what we must call them, disappeared for all that? DailyNord has looked into this oh-so-delicate question, which ruffles many sensibilities.”

A real “dérapeute” (a pun on “therapist” gone off the rails) on a grand scale, of whom, however, little will be heard: “The rigged trials of an American anaesthetist: ‘Doctor Scott S. Reuben has confessed to having falsified at least 21 clinical trials of drugs intended for anaesthesia. It is an enormous scandal in world pharmacology.’”

Presented by Pakistan and supported by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a resolution was examined on 26 March in Geneva at the UN Human Rights Council and adopted by a majority of member countries. This text is concerned about conflations of Islam and terrorism, the negative stereotypes circulating about religions and media incitements to religious hatred, in particular since the development of the Internet. It stresses that the exercise of freedom of expression should entail obligations in return and even bear limitations. The defamation of religions constitutes, the resolution notes, “a serious affront to human dignity, leading to restrictions on the religious freedom of its adherents, to incitement to religious hatred and to violence”. This motion was voted for by twenty-three member countries of the United Nations (…), eleven voted against (…) and thirteen abstained.

May: “The CICNS has observed and deplored on several occasions the spread of anti-cult terminology into all sectors of society. Unsurprisingly, this discriminatory vocabulary is extending to judicial cases, even when they have no direct connection with a spiritual group or an alternative therapeutic practice. When the sectarian thesis is not considered relevant to dealing with the heart of a case, some aspect of the judicial procedure often refers to it and thus helps to associate, in the collective unconscious, the term “sect” with the infinite panoply of human turpitudes. Thus recently, several cases, such as this one: “The Fritzl case”, which is “a case of incest discovered at the end of April 2008. At 42, an Austrian woman, Elisabeth Fritzl, declares that she was imprisoned, raped and physically assaulted by her father, Josef Fritzl, for 24 years. Throughout all those years, J. Fritzl hid from his family, including Elisabeth’s own mother (Rosemarie Fritzl), the detention of his daughter, making them believe she had joined a sect.” Few observers seem aware of this linguistic drift, which has several major regrettable consequences. It serves as an inappropriate emotional catalyst for a society that has lost its bearings. Furthermore, in a totally unjustified way, any group labelled a “sect” becomes a potential carrier of all the deviances aggregated over time under this term. This weight of words necessarily has an impact, which we denounce, on the conduct of judicial proceedings involving spiritual minorities.

7 May 2009: “The Jehovah’s Witnesses movement on Thursday obtained the official status of a religion in Austria, in application of a judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs announced. The fifth largest religious community in the country, with 20,000 adherents, this millenarian movement of Christian inspiration born in the United States in the 19th century becomes the fourteenth religion officially recognised by the Austrian state. This decision follows a ruling by the ECHR, which in July 2008 put an end to 30 years of efforts by the movement to obtain recognition from Vienna.”

Creation of a technical support group on non-conventional practices with therapeutic aims: On 19 February 2009, the official journal published an order of 3 February 2009 from the Ministry of Health and Sports creating a technical support group on non-conventional practices with therapeutic aims. Article 2 indicates that this group’s mission is to assist the “policy of combating dangerous non-conventional practices with therapeutic aims, and the identification of promising practices” through “the development of criteria for assessing and ranking possible dangerousness”. This group will include, among others, a representative of the MIVILUDES. Without much illusion, the CICNS will be interested to observe the unprecedented capacity of such a group to “identify promising practices”.

Read in the press: The GEMPPI (Groupe d’études des mouvements de pensée en vue de la prévention de l’individu) is considering creating in Marseille a centre to validate (or not) alternative medicines… according to their own criteria of validity (source: La Provence).

The CICNS comments on the treatment of the theme of “sects” in numerous television and radio debates: The American media have introduced two rules into their relationship with the general public: the Fairness doctrine, which obliges television channels not to limit themselves to a single point of view in the presentation of a controversial public issue. The personal attack rule, which requires channels to send within eight days a copy of the programme concerned to all those who were attacked by name on air, so that they can defend themselves. In France, as in many other countries, the world of television generally feels obliged to present truncated debates to satisfy an undemanding public fond of the sensational. A genuine debate on spiritual minorities, in such a context, will therefore never take place. These soulless programmes, flattering the basest instincts of human nature, unscrupulously deepening the trenches of division, cannot be watched without a pang. But we can certainly cast on them a gaze that will help ensure that intolerance is not the only voice to be heard.

Questioned by a parliamentarian on the means of action available to “parents concerning an adult child integrated into a community of a sectarian character”, the Minister of Justice specifies: ”(…) by a ruling of 8 April 2008, the investigating chamber of the Court of Appeal of Caen indeed admitted the civil-party application of the parents of an adult person who had lived from 2002 to 2007 in a presumed sectarian group. The Court of Appeal of Caen considered that the parents, but also the sister, of this person could have suffered direct harm resulting from the complete severing of ties with the latter, by reason of the offence of abuse of weakness of a person in a state of psychological subjection committed against her. This decision shows that the existing legal tools give means of judicial action to the parents of a person integrated into a community of a sectarian character (…) the content of this decision was circulated to magistrates by way of a dispatch sent to the public prosecutors general on 5 January 2009.” (JO) What meaning remains in article 1 of the law of separation of the Churches and the State: “The Republic ensures freedom of conscience. It guarantees the free exercise of religions subject only to the restrictions enacted hereinafter in the interest of public order”? (1905 Law) Anti-cult psychosis, full-blown media lynchings, attempts at censorship, irresponsible statements and publications by the MIVILUDES, blacklists, mental manipulation, virulent anti-cult associations accredited by the State, the About-Picard law, the law protecting witnesses before parliamentary commissions, case law facilitating challenges to the responsibility of an adult of full capacity in his spiritual choices (above): such is the context in which a French adult is today supposed to exercise in complete “tranquillity” his spiritual freedom when his choices depart from recognised dogmas. Some call this “French secularism”. It takes only a little intellectual honesty to see that this version of secularism is defective. It is not surprising that it arouses, among people attached to the spirit of the law, keen questions, as does the alibi of defending human rights, so frequently do the decisions taken in their name end up, more and more often, in the negation of fundamental rights and freedoms.

Publication of Nicolas Walzer’s book, Satan profane : Portrait d’une jeunesse enténébrée (“Profane Satan: Portrait of a darkened youth”), published by Desclée de Brouwer. Nicolas Walzer holds a doctorate in sociology and is a researcher at the CEAQ (Paris V, Sorbonne). In this work he offers a sociological study of Satanism through the analysis of its links with the metal and gothic cultural phenomena. This book has the merit of clarifying notions amply muddled by the MIVILUDES. The thesis of the dangerousness of Satanism conveyed by the interministerial mission is invalidated by N. Walzer. The sociologist advances his demonstration by proposing a terminology that distinguishes between “Satanism of the religious type and, on the other hand, the satanic imaginary of the cultural type”. He thus differentiates what he considers to be a cult by the suffixes “ism”, “ist” (Satanism, Satanist) and what he links to a cultural practice by the suffix “ic” (the satanic imaginary). According to him, “French Satanism has in any case always been embryonic. Unlike the satanic imaginary, it is not a social fact but an ultra-minority fact”. He estimates the number of Satanists in France at around a hundred.

The Élysée pushes for the drafting of a code of ethics for journalists: A council of “wise persons” charged with drafting a code of ethics for journalists is expected to be set up in the coming days. The Élysée is keen on it and is putting pressure on press publishers to bring this matter to a conclusion.

The murky case of Robert Le Dinh, accused “of various sexual assaults and abuse of weakness with extortion of funds, for facts going back to the year 1997”: “The problem for the accused — and it can never be stressed enough that he is innocent as long as the court has not convicted him — the problem, then, is that since 2001 the Law has introduced the notion of ‘mental manipulation’, which the UNADFI – Union Nationale des Associations de Défense de la Famille et de l’Individu – invokes to accuse Robert Le Dinh of sectarian abuse.” A support committee has been formed for his defence.

“The Journal de Montréal used ‘unjustified’ clandestine methods during an undercover report on the Raelians, finds the judge of the Court of Québec: In a decision handed down at the end of March in the small claims division, Judge Grenier consequently orders Sun Media Corporation to pay damages totalling about $10,000 to two disciples of Raël, who did not appreciate being identified in the Journal. Mr A and Mrs B (they can no longer be identified), respectively a building contractor and a psychologist, complained of an invasion of their privacy, owing in particular to the ‘unauthorised use’ of their name and photo.”

The CICNS’s review of the MIVILUDES 2008 Report: The media ground was well prepared. On 19 May, as every year, the MIVILUDES delivered its report with great fanfare, and its thunderous declarations echoed through numerous media outlets… Ad nauseam, this “information” floods the French media landscape. Alarmist statements and the most fanciful figures were repeated into the ears of the French in an incantatory manner, and complaisant journalists took part, without the slightest distance or the slightest request for a source or an opposing view, in this moving inventory of a country under siege. Professional training, the lobbying of the “sectarian movement”, the fight against “sectarian abuses”, the health dossier and psychotherapists, Satanism and a long list of the contributions of State bodies to the action against sects during 2008 are the main themes addressed in the report of this mission, of which Nicolas Walzer, sociologist, said in a podcast of 26 April 2009 on RTBF: “With two colleagues, we did an internship within the MIVILUDES, for four months, where we truly became aware of the MIVILUDES’s lack of rigour, which was a real problem, and we are not the only ones to point out this problem. All sociologists of religion at the present time are rising up somewhat against the MIVILUDES’s conclusions, to the point that Nathalie Luca, a sociologist quite well known for working on the problems of sects, resigned from this MIVILUDES, just as we did, because we quite simply realised there was alarmism, a lack of administration of proof, conclusions that were absolutely not scientific and a lot of conflations, above all — conflations which are unfortunately reproduced by the press.”

The CICNS moreover evaluates the action of this mission, whose current policy is doomed to fail on its two main objectives: defending the (real, potential) victims of sectarian movements and, in moving from the fight against sects to the fight against sectarian abuses, ensuring that an end was put to discrimination. To defend the victims of sects, it would have been necessary to follow an appropriate methodology: cataloguing these victims, in order to assess their number and verify the relevance of large-scale public action on the subject; categorising these victims as “real victims” or “non-credible victims”; qualifying, for the real victims, the offences suffered; assessing the offences caused by individuals or those which could be attributed to the doctrine of a movement; establishing figure-based comparisons between the crime observed within spiritual minorities and within society at large in order to verify whether these minorities might be a particular hotbed of crime (we think not, following our own investigations). This groundwork would have required the cooperation of recognised and independent experts in several disciplines (sociology, theology, psychiatry, psychology, law, etc.), publishing referenced results evaluated in a cross-checked manner. To ensure that an end was put to discrimination against spiritual minorities, it would have been necessary to draw up an assessment of the damage caused by the policy of fighting sects (parliamentary reports of 1996, 1999, 2006, MILS), analysing it qualitatively and quantitatively; to verify, within the groups arbitrarily labelled dangerous sects, that people no longer suffer for their spiritual choices in their professional, associative or private lives. A prevention effort oriented on a “case by case” basis, without conflation, without the use of rumour as a weapon of discrimination, would have been such as to clean up the debate on this question of society. It must be noted that the results obtained by the MIVILUDES on the first objective are non-existent. The attentive reader will be hard pressed to find, in the mission’s successive reports, credible investigations into the victims of sects. (…) This disinformation allows the Mission to consolidate at little cost (or at great cost to the taxpayer…) the false idea of a social scourge (on the basis of information mainly derived from the anti-cult associations) but ultimately prevents it from properly taking care of the real victims (those that may exist in any human group) by asserting that everyone is a victim. As for the second objective, putting an end to discrimination, it is not excessive to say that on the contrary discrimination has been institutionalised, through a demeaning official rhetoric (the anti-cult terminology) and specific legislation (the About-Picard law, the law protecting witnesses before parliamentary commissions). Faced with such a failure, responsible public authorities (or ones on the way to becoming responsible on this subject) should conclude that the MIVILUDES is unsuited to dealing with a badly framed question of society and decide to create an independent Observatory of spiritual minorities.

19 May: “Ce soir ou jamais” on France 3: “Sects, what are we fighting against?” During this programme, Georges Fenech, president of the MIVILUDES, surrounded by educated personalities not easily manipulated (sociologists in particular), has this moment of lucidity: “I ask myself every day: what is my mission, what is my area of competence? Am I not going beyond what my mission is? Am I not going to pass a value judgment on beliefs?”. The CICNS has an answer to give him, if he is asking himself sincerely and if he is prepared to question himself.

“Elected members of the American Congress wrote, on Thursday 21 May, to the French ambassador in Washington to protest against the possible creation of a directory or ‘reference framework’ of at-risk sectarian practices in France, as recommended by the Miviludes (Interministerial mission of vigilance and combat against sectarian abuses). ‘As an ally of the United States, committed to our shared concern for fundamental human freedoms, we sincerely encourage the French government to ensure that any new policy affecting religious freedom is in conformity with France’s international obligations,’ the members of Congress write to Ambassador Pierre Vimont. For the parliamentarians, the Miviludes’s recommendation is a ‘blacklist’. They further recall that such a ‘list’, drawn up in 1995, had been rejected in 2005 by the French government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin.” In parallel, following the publication of the MIVILUDES guide, La justice face aux dérives sectaires (“Justice confronted with sectarian abuses”), an article by Janey DeMeo entitled “Religious freedom in France under attack again” appeared on the ASSIST site.

June: Le Courrier des Maires publishes a long article on “the legal arsenal for fighting sects”.

The archives of the Journal Officiel indicate that from November 96 to May 2009, more than 9,350 associations under the 1901 law with a spiritual or religious purpose were created in France, and nearly 1,300 were dissolved, that is, 7 times more creations than dissolutions.

A CICNS overview of economic and financial systems in the world: “Within the broader framework of the abuses of the financial system, the litany about the alleged depravity of ‘sects’ with regard to money is grotesque. It is a dishonest exercise in disinformation in a society where money serves as oxygen, indeed as a hallucinogen.”

11 June: The WHO declares a state of global pandemic for the 2009 Influenza A (H1N1).

“Three inspectors [from a] bureau of the OSCE presented themselves (…) at the headquarters of the Miviludes, rue de Bellechasse in Paris. The reason for their visit: to audit this emanation of the French public authorities to verify that it does not infringe human rights and religious freedom. “The height of irony,” according to an official accustomed to working with the experts of the mission for the fight against sects. Questioned about this episode, the president of the Miviludes, Georges Fenech, did not wish to comment on it.”

“Mgr Anatrella reacts to the report on sects: “Let us avoid a witch hunt.” The annual report of the Miviludes, published on 19 May, points to the explosion of pseudo-psychotherapies subverted for sectarian ends. While he acknowledges the existence of these abuses, Mgr Anatrella, a psychoanalyst, nevertheless warns against the risks of generalised suspicion that accompany their denunciation.”

”… the report of the admirable MIVILUDES. According to it, there were about 150 ‘sects’ in France 13 years ago; thanks to its ever-so-intelligent work, there are now said to be about 600! In 10 years, it will be announcing 2,000!” (Jean Baubérot)

Publication of Arnaud Esquerré’s book, La manipulation mentale – Sociologie des sectes en France (“Mental manipulation – A sociology of sects in France”), published by Éditions Fayard: In this work, Arnaud Esquerré addresses the contemporary question of “sects” by analysing the accusation of mental manipulation levelled against the groups so labelled. This accusation is, according to him, what most characterises the anti-cult fight waged in France today, and the analysis of the notion of mental manipulation makes it possible to decipher it.

Marcela Iacub “cites the law of 12 January 2001 amending the penal code in order to fight gurus of all kinds, and comments: “The word ‘sect’ never appears in the text! On the other hand, there is talk of ‘techniques liable to alter judgment’ and of ‘psychological suggestions’. Is that not the most obvious definition of seduction and love? she smiles. Someone could file a complaint, on the pretext that under the sway of love, their judgment was disturbed when they had sexual relations with their lover, when they gave them a diamond ring or decided to marry them!”

July: On 30 July 2009, AFP published a dispatch stating that: “The Miviludes (…) will not publish its ‘reference framework’ on sects, which will nevertheless be accessible to professionals on request (…) The Miviludes indicated that Matignon had decided in favour of non-publication” (L’Express). The Ministry of the Interior must therefore be congratulated for its action, which managed to put some brake on the ignominious practice of lists. But should we be satisfied with the decision taken by Matignon? No, because this list, validated by a State body, does indeed exist and will be accessible to professionals. Georges Fenech provides some edifying details: “Professionals of the justice system, associations, the movements themselves, the public authorities, the ministries and local elected officials who often consult us, about the rental of a hall for this or that conference or about granting someone accreditation as a childminder. Private individuals too can already consult us, even if we do not currently hand over documents.” (Libération) In other words, everyone or almost everyone will have access to it and, in the Internet age, the chances that this list will remain confidential are slim. (…) Jacques Miquel, present on the set of the programme C dans l’air of 3 August 2009, entitled “Secte ou pas secte” (“Sect or not sect”), president of the CCMM, a privileged partner of the MIVILUDES, expressed himself on the subject: “There was talk at one point of a reference framework on movements with sectarian abuses, and I heard that it will unfortunately not be given to the public. I would like to point out one thing that surprises me a great deal: in this country nobody would think of going mushroom-picking without a field guide, and believe me, I am an amateur mycologist — movements with sectarian abuses are far more toxic than mushrooms.” Comparing the 500 practices and movements catalogued by the MIVILUDES to poisonous mushrooms gives a fairly precise idea of the level of adversarial debate that will be offered when the reference framework is consulted — a framework which Mr Miquel tries to make us believe will be “non-public”, which is inaccurate since he is evidently confusing it with “non-published”.

“Switzerland: alternative medicines obtain constitutional status: While in France the political and health authorities tend rather to wage war on them, non-conventional medicines have just been overwhelmingly endorsed in Switzerland, which has enshrined them in its Constitution following a ‘votation’ (popular vote).”

Jean-Pierre Brard at the National Assembly, during the discussion on “Lifelong professional training”: “The amendment we are submitting to your vote today proposes to prohibit, for a period of five years, the function of professional training provider to any legal or natural person found guilty of offences such as abuse of weakness, fraud, illegal practice of medicine and pharmacy, usurpation of title, drug trafficking, incitement to suicide, crimes against the human species, or making dependent or psychologically fragile persons work for derisory sums. (…) This prohibition would in most cases come as a supplementary penalty in addition to the penalties already provided for these offences. Dear colleagues, you know the skill of all these dream-sellers who take advantage of the fragility and despair of people who are searching. This amendment makes it possible to clip the wings of all these apprentice swindlers, who, at times, are in fact no longer apprentices, but well and truly certified swindlers.”

August: Interview with Olivier Bobineau on Rue89: “In its latest report, made public on 17 May, the MIVILUDES highlights the increase in the number of sectarian movements. It points in particular to so-called ‘personal development’ techniques (psychoanalysis, coaching…). But for Olivier Bobineau, a former member of the mission, its approach is unsuited. The consequence, for this specialist in religions: the Interministerial mission of vigilance and combat against sectarian abuses overestimates the sectarian phenomenon in France.”

September: “The NGOs fighting sectarian abuses have just crossed a new threshold. The European Federation of Centres of Research and Information on Sectarianism (FECRIS), already present within the Council of Europe, has just been recognised by the UN. Created in 1994, this organisation based in Marseille brings together some fifty European associations working on sects. The decision of the UN Committee on Non-Governmental Organisations grants this federation privileged access to UN bodies thanks to the ‘special consultative status’ obtained on 7 August.”

“Membership of a movement considered sectarian is not in itself an offence, nor even a threat to public order.” Answer by the Minister of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Inclusive Development to a deputy’s question.

MAM wants to restore the threat of dissolution of sects: The Minister of Justice described as an “error” the legislative amendment that led to the removal of the possibility of dissolving sects for fraud. A “clerical error”: that is how Michèle Alliot-Marie on Tuesday described the legislative amendment, revealed the day before, annulling the possibility of dissolving an association or a religious organisation convicted of fraud. This amendment had been voted on 12 May, as part of the law known as the “law of simplification and clarification of the law and lightening of procedures”, a catch-all text voted on the initiative of the UMP deputy, Jean-Luc Warsmann. Questioned on Europe 1, the Minister of Justice announced that this error “will be corrected as soon as possible”. “On the occasion of the next criminal-law text I am going to table a measure that will effectively make it possible to dissolve, in particular, associations, groups or sects that have carried out fraud,” announced Michèle Alliot-Marie, confirming an announcement by the Chancellery on Monday. “It will be a supplementary penalty, as it used to be,” she added.

Freemasonry and sects: A certain number of actors are working, in France, to degrade the debate on the question of “sects”; among them are the main Masonic obediences. Their official stances seem to us incoherent and irresponsible in view of the eventful history of Freemasonry. Given both the impossibility of defining a sect and the very characteristics of Freemasonry, it is impossible to delude oneself about a hypothetical difference between the Masonic lodges and the other spiritual minorities. How, then, did Freemasonry come to position itself so negatively in the anti-cult discourse? (…) Behind the incantatory declarations about attachment to freedom of conscience, to the values of the Republic, to secularism, other reasons emerge, of which we cite a few as avenues for reflection: intellectual laziness in the face of one-track thinking, the two Frances on the backs of the spiritual minorities, the stigmatised turned “stigmatiser”, an elite in power that wishes to remain there.

“Police officers summoned by an investigating judge to be heard on the way they conducted a series of interrogations — that is rare. That these same officers end up admitting they invented confessions — that is unheard of. Yet that is the astounding scene that took place on 25 June in the office of a judge in Charleville-Mézières: pushed into their last entrenchments at the end of an interminable confrontation of nearly eight hours, two officers of the prestigious Regional Judicial Police Service (SRPJ) admitted having invented the confessions of persons under investigation whom they were tasked with interrogating. The facts, extremely serious, go back to April 2004. Three social workers of the DISA, the departmental child welfare service, were suspected of acting, in their professional life, under the influence of a sect.”

The CICNS took part on 29 September 2009 in a working session on freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief organised by the ODIHR (Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights). The ODIHR is one of the institutions active in the field of human rights protection within the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe), which brings together 56 States located in Europe, Central Asia and America: “The OSCE is the largest of the regional security organisations. It deploys a wide range of activities covering the three dimensions of security: human, politico-military and economic-environmental.” Each year the ODIHR organises days devoted to the implementation of the human dimension (Human Dimension Implementation Meeting). In 2009, these days took place in Warsaw from 28 September to 9 October (HDIM); the session on freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief took place on Tuesday 29 September. France was represented by the French ambassador to the OSCE and by Georges Fenech, the president of the MIVILUDES. The value of this time for public, uncensored speech must be acknowledged, on subjects that are generally not dealt with democratically in the respective countries, and notably in France. The document presented by the CICNS can be consulted in French and in English. One intervention must be mentioned, that of the representative of the FECRIS, an anti-cult association at the European level, closely linked to the UNADFI. This organisation declares in its document (CICNS translation): “We do not think that sects have any role whatsoever to play in a body such as the OSCE. Sects are rarely persecuted. They are neither religions nor belief systems. Their participation within the OSCE and in similar gatherings is an affront to the victims of sects and to their families: it confers a false respectability on activities that would be mocked by any concerned and liberal-minded person anywhere in the world. Moreover, we fear that their presence undermines the credibility of the OSCE and diverts attention away from its precious work of defending human rights and freedoms.” These antidemocratic remarks, entirely in line with those that the MIVILUDES and the French anti-cult associations may make, reinforce the need to organise, as the OSCE does, meetings making it possible to establish a respectful dialogue (even if some cannot bring themselves to it) between all parties. In the afternoon, the CICNS was able to ask a question on the notion of mental manipulation, asking whether it was conceivable to provide for a clause, in the Guidelines, requesting that States refrain from using pseudo-scientific notions to discredit minorities, and in particular in laws such as the About-Picard law. The answer from the PEC (Panel of Experts and Advisers) was positive and this clause will be studied (to be followed). Another question put by the CICNS to the PEC concerned the advisability of creating an independent Observatory of spiritual minorities at the European level. It was not dealt with in the session.

“Since 1 September 2009, six judicial police (PJ) investigators have been working full time on sectarian abuses. They belong to the Central Office for the Repression of Violence against Persons (OCRVP), a structure created in 2006. Since 2007, the Office had been seized on several occasions with complaints concerning sects. Hence the decision to create a specialised group of six ‘volunteer’ officers. Until now, investigations related to sects ‘were essentially handled by the local PJ services. The objective is to centralise cases and cross-check information, including at the international level, explains the head of the OCRVP. Psychologists and psychiatrists explaining the phenomenon of the hold exerted over victims may be called in as reinforcements, and as regards the “financial side”, the investigators will be able to call on other judicial police services.’”

“On 23 September the Senate adopted the bill on career guidance and professional training, which foreshadows a genuine reorganisation in this area. Among the measures approved is the creation of a ‘fund for securing career paths’ which will receive 5 to 13% of the sums collected each year - between 300 and 900 million euros - to train a priority public, namely the least-qualified employees and unemployed. (…) The senators adopted a measure dear to the Secretary of State for Employment, Laurent Wauquiez, which aims to equip the training sector with an ‘anti-sect arsenal’: a ban on persons convicted of ‘fraud or sectarian abuses’ from holding positions of responsibility in training bodies, and authorisation for prefects not to register centres whose project has no professional vocation or in fact amounts to a ‘sectarian practice’.”

October: On 9 October 2009, Barack Obama receives the Nobel Peace Prize.

Jean-Luc Martin Lagardette, a journalist specialising in the ethical questions of information, author of Les droits de l’âme (“The rights of the soul”), gives the CICNS his enlightened point of view on the anti-cult struggle and the role of the media.

Tuesday 13 October 2009: The scandalous MIVILUDES raid on the Moulin des Vallées: “The residents of the monastery received an unexpected visit, in any case an unsolicited one, which is part of French anti-cult policy — that is to say, in classic fashion, beyond the law, the rules of propriety, indeed of journalistic ethics.” The Moulin des Vallées was founded in 1999 in the department of Ille-et-Vilaine in France. It presents itself as an ecumenical monastery, inspired by André Chouraqui, who contributed greatly to building this place. It brings together around 70 qualified health practitioners around the teaching of the philosopher Frère Abel. The letter sent by some of the residents to the Prefect of their department sums up their situation (reproduced with their permission): “We were present at the Ecumenical and Lay Monastery of the Moulin des Vallées, on Tuesday 13 October, during the visit of the MIVILUDES, which we perceived as extremely violent, a veritable ‘raid’, as it was described by the journalist of ‘Aujourd’hui en France’, Madame Anne-Cécile Juillet, in her article of Friday 16 October. With hindsight, a feeling of having been taken by the throat, of having been abused, remains. We witnessed, dumbfounded and powerless, this astounding intrusion: we experience such a procedure as a violation, so brutal was this MIVILUDES raid. We were stunned that such methods should be employed in the name of the interministerial commission for the fight against sectarian abuses. We were subjected to an uninterrupted barrage of questions, which we made every effort to answer regarding the capacity claimed by Mr Fenech, and we were particularly shocked by the sectarian insinuations he uttered, cutting us off at every moment. Our answers were given no credit whatsoever: we had been judged and condemned in advance. Indeed, through a succession of assimilations, insinuations and inaccuracies, our choice of life was denigrated and compared to movements whose principles are in complete opposition to our values. Why was Mr Fenech, who was acting in the capacity of a ministerial officer, accompanied by journalists to conduct an official inquiry? We thought we had before us genuine investigators, wishing to gain a deeper understanding of what is lived in our Monastery, and from this lightning visit we retain the feeling of having been duped, cheated in our good faith.”

By a judgment dated 21 October 2009, the Paris Regional Court condemned the publication director of the magazine Marianne for having published an article entitled “Le procès d’un gourou” (“The trial of a guru”) containing defamatory statements against Gérard Guéniot, who had been definitively acquitted by the Court of Appeal of Douai in February 2009.

On 27 October 2009, the criminal court sentenced the Spiritual Association of the Church of Scientology-Celebrity Centre and its bookshop SEL to a total fine of 600,000 euros for “organised gang fraud”, following a complaint filed in 1998 (Nouvel Observateur). The Church of Scientology appealed against this decision.

Jean-Pierre Brard convicted on appeal for defamation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses: “The terms ‘perfect delinquents’ [their peremptory character] denote a sufficient absence of restraint, and exceed all the more the admissible limits in matters of freedom of expression in that they emanate from a parliamentarian who is a specialist in sectarian abuses (…) How then, in a country that is at the forefront of legislation on the fight against so-called ‘sectarian’ movements, can a deputy who is a ‘specialist in sectarian abuses’ describe the faithful of a contested community as ‘perfect delinquents’ without being able to provide the slightest proof?”

An article in La Croix of 18 October 2009 reveals (source AFP): “Two new ‘databases’ intended to strengthen the police’s investigative resources have been created by decrees published on Sunday in the Journal Officiel, after the withdrawal of the Edvige file, an object of controversy, and the disappearance of the former RG file”. Following the numerous criticisms levelled at the Edvige file, the restrictions placed on the data recorded will nevertheless include a certain number of derogations, notably, the AFP dispatch specifies, for “sectarian activities or (…) in the political, philosophical, religious or trade-union domains if they may endanger public safety”. After the MIVILUDES’s “reference framework” of sects, which is supposedly not a “list”, here now are the police “databases” that supposedly have nothing to do with the Edvige “file”. Changing vocabulary as an artifice for trying to smuggle through what has been loudly refused by public opinion is decidedly a French speciality.

Resistance to sects: The sociologist Régis Dericquebourg sets out several ideological factors in which the resistance to recognising minority religious groups resides, and proposes four points of reflection for getting out of this impasse: 1. (…) Religious tolerance is no substitute for religious freedom. The latter presupposes recognition and a jurisdiction against religious discrimination in the same way that legislation against racism exists. 2. We must enter into an accepted pluralism which, in the words of J.P. Willaime, manifests itself in a creative management of religious diversity within the framework of a cultural secularism. 3. We must consider, with C. Taylor, the dilemma of the collective project and social fragmentation. Why not recognise the innovations brought by minority religious groups (women’s rights, religious freedoms, utopias, values, egalitarian demands) and consider them constitutive of our civilisation? For that, minority religious groups must be recognised. (…) The theory of amplified deviance teaches us that the more a group is rejected, the more it behaves in a deviant manner and the more it is ostracised. 4. We must enter into what J. Baubérot calls a deliberative secularism, which implies questioning minority religious groups about their values, about their practices — that is to say, giving them a voice in debates that are not rigged, as are the lamentable television programmes hosted by showmen. The leaders of minority religious groups must also not shirk, and must answer the questions put to them.

Angolagate: The judgments were handed down on 27 October 2009, with six acquittals and thirty-six convictions pronounced. Georges Fenech was acquitted, but here are the exact words of the judge: “After seventeen years of professional experience, Mr Fenech certainly noticed that the company Brenco France did not have the volume of activity or the renown of backers such as the IUMM or the AXA group, which had seen fit to lend their support to the professional association of magistrates [APM]. Having had occasion to deal with economic and financial offences, the simplest arithmetic surely made him notice that the sum of 100,000 francs allocated [by Mr Falcone] represented about half of his association’s annual budget (…) Even in the enthusiasm of a fruitful fund-raising drive, he could not abstract himself from the common-sense questions that might be raised by the conversion of this sum into fifty subscriptions to a review of relative interest [Enjeu Justice, the review published by the APM, whose relative interest I confirm], intended for a company about which he said he knew almost nothing. It is nevertheless not possible to deduce (…) that what amounts, at the very least, to a patent lack of prudence and discernment characterises the intent constituting an offence of receiving the proceeds of crime. In the absence of objective elements providing proof of criminal intent and making it possible to forge a conviction which, though it be an inner conviction, cannot validly rest on presumptions, however strong they may be, Mr Fenech must be acquitted.”

By a judgment dated 21 October 2009, the Paris Regional Court condemned the publication director of the magazine Marianne for having published an article entitled “Le procès d’un gourou” (“The trial of a guru”) containing defamatory statements against Gérard Guéniot, who had been definitively acquitted by the Court of Appeal of Douai in February 2009.

“A 69-year-old German from Ludwigshafen was prosecuted yesterday before the criminal court of Colmar for defamation against several hotels of the tourist resort of Le Hohwald. Between 12 and 18 December 2006, he had circulated several letters and open letters in German spreading the rumour that these establishments harboured members of the Osho Bhagwan sect, specifying that it was a criminal sect.”

“In France, teenagers are more open than other young Europeans to the teaching of religions at school. Tolerance characterises their generation in matters of religious pluralism. These elements emerge from a survey conducted by the sociologists Jean-Paul Willaime and Céline Béraud, which is being published in book form these days (Les jeunes, l’école et la religion, éd. Bayard).”

Publication of the book by Philippe Merlant and Luc Chatel, Médias, la faillite d’un contre-pouvoir (“The media, the bankruptcy of a counter-power”), published by Fayard: Philippe Merlant and Luc Chatel in their turn perform a work of public salubrity by analysing without evasion the reefs on which the media have run aground, and propose avenues for achieving quality citizen information.

November: “A study by the University of Chicago on religious trends reveals that ever more Americans pray (59% against 52% in 1990), but that they feel less and less officially affiliated to a religion. ‘We are witnessing the dissociation of spirituality and religion,’ explains Omar M. McRoberts, sociologist and researcher at the University of Chicago. Still according to his analysis, we should expect to see ‘even more new versions of religiosity appear, in response to the changes in spirituality’.”

“Thierry Ardisson, television host, has just been ordered by the Paris Regional Court to pay 20,000 euros in damages for defamation of the ex-husband of Marie Laforêt. The latter, whom he welcomed in 2002 onto the set of his late lamented weekly Saturday night show Tout le monde en parle on France 2, had accused her ex-husband of having wanted to draw her into the Order of the Solar Temple, considered one of the most dangerous sects in France, of having murdered his first wife and of having uttered death threats.”

Publication of L’appel des appels, pour une insurrection des consciences (“The appeal of appeals, for an insurrection of consciences”), a collective work edited by Roland Gori, Barbara Cassin and Christian Laval. (Ed. Mille et une nuits, November 2009, 384 pages): An exemplary book in the history of revolts against the dehumanisation of individual and social life in France – the “generalised imbecility” – and of the means to be deployed for the advent of “another possible life”. We strongly recommend reading it in full: “We, professionals of care, social work, justice, education, research, information, culture and all the sectors dedicated to the public good, have decided to constitute ourselves as a national collective to resist the deliberate and systematic destruction of everything that weaves the social bond.”

Parliamentary mission on the full-face veil: some twenty recommendations with diverse implications, including this one: “The Interministerial mission of vigilance and combat against sectarian abuses (Miviludes) could be called upon to draw up an inventory of sectarian abuses within Islam.”

Rituals without religious trappings: “Secular funerals, baptisms without priests or pastors, weddings outside the church. Many are those who say they have no religion but who do not want to give up a ceremony for all that. So they invent new rituals for themselves, even if it means using the services of a ‘celebrant’, who offers made-to-measure rites of passage. From the cradle to the grave, by way of divorce and the menopause, all the great stages of life can give rise to a secular ceremony.”

December: “Renault has been condemned for ‘inexcusable fault’ in a case concerning the suicide of one of its employees in 2006. The diamond-logo group has one month to appeal against this decision.”

“In 2001, the eleven members of the Védrines family withdrew from the world, secluded in their château de Martel in Monflanquin (Lot-et-Garonne). Ceasing overnight all social and professional activities, these women and men, aged at the time from 16 to 85, obeyed nothing but the injunctions of their guru, cutting all ties with the outside world, including with their relatives, be they spouses, cousins or friends. As early as 2001, Jean Marchand, husband of one of the victims, had alerted the authorities.” The Thierry Tilly affair (or that of the “recluses of Monflanquin”), like most of the cases filed in the “sects” category, is a fresh illustration of a collective blindness, relayed and fed by most of the mainstream media. (…) Faced with the objective, rational and legal impossibility of reproaching them with anything whatsoever, given the current state of the investigations, people speak of a “virtual prison” (there is no prison), of “disappearance” (it seems that people know where these persons are, since they are said to be recluses), of a “sect” (there is no sectarian framework in the usual sense used by the anti-cult current), of “mental manipulation” (no one among the persons concerned has filed a complaint) — the pearl coming from Me Picotin, lawyer for the plaintiffs (the latter being the members of the family who no longer see their relatives, something a democracy makes entirely possible and legal), who declares himself helpless before “manipulated people” (that is his interpretation of the situation, until proven otherwise), the article pointing out a little further on that they in fact have “all their wits”, without seeing any contradiction in this — or else taking the reader for a fool.

Another element, far more worrying, is the use of “deprogramming”, a practice of the anti-sectarianism of the 1970s-1980s in the United States which had finally been banned because of its violence and its serious excesses, only to reappear later under another name, “exit counseling”. Me Picotin, lawyer for the civil parties in the “Monflanquin” case, reveals nothing less to the newspaper Sud-Ouest than that he himself has created “a unit of exit councellors” (sic) in Aquitaine (“I had to work alone for a long time and resolved to get help from a unit, which I created in Aquitaine, of ‘exit councellor’ on an American model”).

CICNS commentary on Jean Ziegler’s book Les nouveaux maîtres du monde… et ceux qui leur résistent (“The new masters of the world… and those who resist them”), published by Fayard in September 2002: Jean Ziegler’s book shows us that the modern barbarism of the exploitation of man by man has become institutionalised at the world level, hypocritically taking on the mask of “the order of things”. Yet today an ever-growing number of people are rising up vigorously against injustice and poverty, to form a “new planetary civil society”. It is interesting to note the similarity of the methods employed to defend tooth and nail a dominant ideology against the forces of change. Whether it is a matter of defending neoliberal capitalism against other conceptions of sharing or of living together, or of defending a narrow and perverted version of secularism through the anti-cult struggle, the angles of attack are the same.

Georges Fenech creates an anti-sect police: “On Thursday 26 November, around 250 people gathered at the Hôtel de Ville in Lyon to draw up an inventory of sects in France. The occasion to present the first European police force specialised in the matter. (…) The CAIMADES, the Unit for assistance and intervention in matters of sectarian abuses, [is] a small group of six officials (police and gendarmerie) whose vocation is to ‘provide assistance to all the police and gendarmerie services that may be confronted with cases of sectarian abuses’. ‘Dealing with a theft, a hold-up, or even a rape is easy, adds Commander Malfay. Dealing with mental hold proves a little more complicated.’ The CAIMADES therefore has ‘interview templates’, a sort of guidelines allowing officials to interview people about their past, so as to help the psychiatric experts determine whether or not there was a mental hold, an allegiance to a guru, an impairment of freedom of choice, etc. — in other words criteria that make it possible to specify the offence of mental hold. By way of special training, the group in question calls in particular on Professor Parquet, psychiatrist at the University of Lille II.”

A further retreat of democratic guarantees: “The National Commission on Security Ethics (CNDS) is anticipating its dissolution. On Tuesday 24 November, it was due to present the self-critical assessment of its eight years of existence, and to lament the transfer of its missions to the Defender of Rights, a new institution which will in time bring together the missions of the Ombudsman of the Republic, the Children’s Defender and the CNDS.”

A citizens’ rally to defend alternative medicines: “Non-conventional medicines (MNC, the official term for natural and traditional medicines) have just formed a national network for the first time. The Alliance for Health (Alliance pour la santé, APS) came into being this Tuesday 24 November at a meeting at the Mutualité (Paris). With the support of a political patron, Jean-Marc Governatori.”

“It is the return to values such as humility and renunciation, the recognition of the power of nature and of the necessary solidarity among all men, that will save us. This is not a moralising discourse but a common-sense reflection. We must return to peasant common sense and to humanist values, for they reconnect us to our deep nature. We must live more in harmony with nature, for that is the condition of our happiness.” (Tristan Lecomte, Alter Eco)

Lille: “The meeting of the Rose-Croix AMORC will indeed take place. Last week, the Association for the defence of families and the individual, a reception and assistance centre for victims of sectarian movements (ADFI-Nord), called on the city and the prefecture, deeming that it would be good for the Rose-Croix AMORC meeting scheduled for Wednesday at the MEP to be banned. While stressing that it “understands the reservations” of the ADFI, the municipality nevertheless did not wish to cancel this meeting.”

In conclusion of a symposium organised on 26 November 2009 in Lyon by the MIVILUDES, Jean-Marie Bockel, Secretary of State for Justice, thanked the mission for its work of “understanding sectarian abuses comparable to mutant viruses, which spread, in often insidious forms, the poison of the manipulation of human conduct and minds, injurious to the dignity of persons and to fundamental freedoms”. The very great majority of the people who make alternative life choices (more than 500,000, then), notably spiritual ones, do so with awareness, conviction and a keen sense of a necessary evolution of our “living together”. To suggest that their activities could be assimilated to risks as great as “mutant viruses”, what is more in a period conducive to pandemic fear, is a malicious and contemptuous expression towards these hotbeds of innovative ideas for our society that are the cultural creatives and the new spiritualities.

“During the symposium on sectarian abuses organised by the Miviludes on 27 November in Lyon, Madame Picard ‘deplored the reduction of its subsidies while sectarian movements are only growing stronger’.”

The notion of “sectarian abuse” as seen by the “Nouvelle revue internationale de criminologie”: “The refocusing of the action of the French public authorities on behaviours has correspondingly been accompanied by an extension of the field of investigation and, consequently, by an increase in the number of groups liable to be subjected to examination. The application of the notion of ‘sectarian abuse’ no longer depends strictly on the lawfulness of the practices of religious or philosophical groups, as the designation ‘harmful sectarian organisation’ would seem to require. The representation of the ‘sectarian phenomenon’ is no longer linked to the presence in the public space of a particular class of groups; every group presents dysfunctions which must be detected and limited in their deleterious effects. The notion of ‘sectarian abuse’ thus comes to support an extended regulatory apparatus centred on vigilance, which moreover intends to actively make citizens responsible by inviting them to take part in this enterprise of uncovering risks for themselves and for the social body.”

Klimaforum, 11 December 2009: “There was talk of spirituality this morning in the green zone (Green hall) of the Klimaforum. While the negotiations were momentarily suspended at the Bella Center, the civil society present at DGI Byen was pleading for more sustained collaboration with religious and spiritual communities with a view to better care and greater awareness among the populations regarding environmental questions. (…) The members of the panel were keen to recall that the solution to this climate crisis lies within each of us, and that it was important to picture the chaos for which we are preparing as an opportunity to be reborn. The notion of sacrifice was taken up many times, as if to insist on the fact that the comfort to which all once aspired must today be transcended.”

“70% of the world’s population discriminated against in its religious freedom: A very comprehensive report by the Pew Forum, made public three days ago, opportunely provides factual details on the extent of restrictions on religious freedom, which prove far more widespread than is often imagined. (…) These data, produced by an independent research institute of excellent reputation, confirm one thing: religious freedom constitutes more than ever a strategic stake in the ongoing process of globalisation.”

Burqa, the full-face veil and sectarian abuses: “The parliamentary information mission on the full-face veil, which took place during the second half of 2009 under the chairmanship of the deputy André Gérin, its initiator, did not avoid the pitfalls that mar every political debate in France relating to the religious or the spiritual. The mission’s objective was ‘to establish an inventory of the practice of wearing the full-face veil in France, endeavouring to understand the origins of this phenomenon, its scale and its evolution’. It was easy to foresee that this apparently circumscribed subject would, in the current context of the debate on national identity, spill over in every direction and that, consequently, the structure of the mission would not be suited to its treatment. That is what happened, and this debate on the full-face veil is an opportunity to entrench a little more broadly the French anti-cult discourse.

16 December: release of James Cameron’s film, Avatar, which the press describes as “an emotional journey about redemption and revolution. It is the story of a wounded former marine, driven to colonise and exploit an exotic planet rich in biodiversity, who ultimately finds himself leading the indigenous people in a battle for their survival”. For James Cameron, one of the main ideas of the film is that it “questions us about the fact that everything is connected, human beings to one another and each of us to the Earth.”

Mr Fenech, under the Tahitian sun, hunts the Polynesian “sect”: “About twenty pose problems that can cause prejudicial situations” (sic), plus one “textbook case”, “the Church of Mount Thabor” and its organic garden of Eden, which are nevertheless much appreciated by the President and the former President of Polynesia. “Questioned about his church, frequently compared to a sect, the spokesman for organic agriculture for this organisation, Sen Jen Wu (Chinese-Taiwanese, with an Australian passport), does not dodge the question. ‘It was also said that the apostle Paul ran a sect. In fact, the apostle had preached the truth. And there were people who could not stand the apostle Paul. A good tree bears good fruit. A bad tree, bad fruit. Today, everything we have done at Tikehau and at Mount Thabor is what the other churches cannot manage to do. So where is the proof that we are a sect? Everything we believe conforms to the Bible. Our work is entirely at the service of men. We lead the populations towards God, by planting organically for example. We have paid a very great price for that. But God has rewarded us by revealing to us the effective micro-organisms.‘“

2010

January: The impact of the word “sect” on a spiritual minority, testimony from the Brahma Kumaris: The Brahma Kumaris is a religious group respected throughout the world, holding consultative status with the UN and UNICEF. It was nevertheless listed in the 1996 parliamentary report on sects. Some French members testify here to discrimination, defamation and even an attack, suffered as a consequence of this French anti-cult campaign, which is drawing increasingly significant criticism.”

On 7 January 2010, some twenty people and gendarmes in fatigues burst into the Chardenoux estate early in the morning, securing the entrances to the property with guns drawn. All the equipment was carried off. No justification would be given to the members of the association, who had to endure a full day of tendentious interrogations (about vegetarianism, the obligation to do gymnastics, or to wear a uniform (?)). The CICNS invited all persons concerned to send a letter to the ministerial offices to express, in solidarity, their disagreement with the excesses of the anti-cult struggle in France, and to contact journalists so that they might look into the subject more attentively than they have done to date.

Janine Tavernier, former president of UNADFI, criticises the police action at Terre du Ciel: “My main concern during my term as president of UNADFI, from 1993 to 2001, was that the fight against sects should not itself become a vector of sectarianism. As my associative circle did not follow me in my ethical demands, I resigned as president of UNADFI in September 2001. The search carried out at Terre du Ciel only confirms my fears. Faced with such actions, I wish to express my support for this association, which carries out, in a spirit of freedom and with respect for individuals, activities for individual and collective human progress. Is it reprehensible to be outside ‘single-track thinking’?”

On 15 January 2010, a colloquium on the theme “What regulation for new religious movements and sectarian abuses in the European Union?” (see the detailed programme) was organised jointly by the National Research Agency (ANR), the Cultures and Societies in Europe laboratory (LCSE), the University of Strasbourg, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of Religious Facts (IESR), the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS – Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of Religious Facts), and the Institute of Social Sciences of Politics (ISSP Cachan). Starting from a brief history describing this social issue’s arrival at the front of the stage, Nathalie Luca (EHESS) launched the discussion by presenting the main characteristics of the day’s theme: a terminology that poses problems (the term “new religious movement” is imprecise; the term “sect” has become pejorative), and whose choice might say more about our institutions than about the problem they are trying to describe; very different responses from one country to another, even though the spiritual minorities are the same, with similar behaviours, in all these countries; a European Parliament which, recognising the contradiction that can arise between “guaranteeing individual freedom” and attempting “to prevent certain abuses”, has left the States to choose their own solution.

The Collectif Alsace-Moselle Pour la Laïcité (Alsace-Moselle Collective for Secularism) is calling for the creation in France of an offence of abuse of “the credulity of the people”. Will it be applicable to popular credulity on the subject of sects?

Jean-Pierre Brard convicted again: “The former Communist mayor of Montreuil had refused to give the floor to an elected councillor, Patricia Vayssière, in 2006, because she wore a cross ‘conspicuously’, in the name of the defence of secularism. He has just been sentenced on appeal to a 500-euro fine, 2,000 euros in damages and 2,000 euros in procedural costs by the Paris Court of Appeal, which held that the mayor had committed the offence of discrimination, and that no legislative provision authorised the mayor of a commune, in the context of municipal meetings, to forbid elected officials from publicly manifesting their religious affiliation, notably by wearing an insignia.”

“I, Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim 16 January 2010 Religious Freedom Day. I call upon all Americans to observe this day with events and activities that enlighten us about this essential foundation of our Nation’s liberty, and show us how we can protect it for future generations, here and throughout the world.”

February: The recent bill of Orientation and Programming for the Performance of Internal Security (LOPPSI 2, see a general presentation in Le Monde) is part of a repressive French legislative movement that seems to know no limits, and it will probably find its translation into the field of the anti-cult struggle. Let us note once again that a well-chosen terminology attempts, as is customary in government communication, to make artificially positive measures that many commentators consider liberticidal (thus video-surveillance becomes video-protection). One of the key points of the LOPPSI-2 apparatus is the filtering of the Internet. Officially this filtering targets child-pornography sites, but there is no doubt that once in place, a filtering system could be applied to other areas.

MIVILUDES publishes ten tips for parents to protect their children from sectarian abuses in the field of health. Example of a criterion of suspicion: “Does the practitioner criticise the State services in charge of minors?”

According to UNADFI, Eastern philosophies are supposedly sources of sectarian abuses: “It therefore does seem, following studies and testimonies, that we must be vigilant about the sectarian abuses which result from the acculturation of religions come from Asia. (…) Tibetan Buddhism is also beginning to raise a few questions, due essentially to sometimes indiscriminate recruitment and to the lack of discernment of the lamas themselves, who, by virtue of their famous compassion, are not very particular about their alliances.”

March: The book On a tué ma mère ! (They Killed My Mother!), by Nathalie de Reuck and Philippe Dutilleul, with a preface by Guy Rouquet, rides morbidly on the “anti-cult” literary wave. The publisher’s blurb speaks volumes: “This book retraces the story of Jacqueline Starck and sheds light on the methods of these health swindlers who claim to draw at once on ecology, spirituality and depth psychology.” It is, in essence, a discourse devoted to casting suspicion on all so-called parallel, gentle, alternative or non-conventional medicines and, in the same stroke, on any non-conventional appreciation of the world.

“What spirituality for a world in crisis?”, a gathering in Paris on 18 March 2010, with talks, first-hand testimonies and exchanges with representatives of various spiritual orientations: “In what way are our societies going through a crisis? Crises? What can the great spiritual movements express on this subject? How do religions and spiritualities understand this time of crisis?”

A spiritual minority, the Grail Movement, has just been banned from holding a conference in Boulogne-sur-Mer. According to the mayor of that town: “Given the specific nature of this movement, listed in the parliamentary report on sects, I am going to issue an order so that this meeting does not take place” (La Voix du Nord). This “ordinary discrimination” is commonplace, despite the administrative courts’ rulings handed down against offenders. Once again, the 1996 report on sects serves as a reference, although it has no legal value, and despite the Raffarin circular of June 2005 recommending that it not be used.

Georges Fenech on the TV news on TV8 MontBlanc: “pseudo-treatments” have become MIVILUDES’s primary concern.

A bill aiming to “strengthen civics lessons and to institute the teaching of religious facts” was presented by some forty UMP deputies and was registered on 5 February with the presidency of the National Assembly.

Legal advice intended for elected officials on how to formulate attacks against “sects” effectively: “Many decisions by local elected officials are overturned by the administrative courts because of the poor wording of their reasoning. They often focus on membership of a movement instead of concentrating on the defence of good communal order.” …Or how to manipulate the text of the law in order to drive spiritual minorities out of society.

Various public figures have just launched an appeal for “a more ethical treatment of the affairs by the media” following the accusatory statements about Pope Benedict XVI’s handling of the paedophilia affairs within the Catholic Church. This appeal says, by way of introduction: “We regret the media frenzy and one-upmanship that accompany these affairs.” The CICNS is not surprised by the sudden mobilisation of figures of Christian sensibility, but this appeal would gain from being extended to all the affairs — often less serious ones, moreover, when they are not simply fabricated out of whole cloth — that strike at various spiritual minorities.

French anti-cult policy has succeeded in normalising a stigmatising vision of spiritual minorities, and then of alternative therapies. But this success heralds its coming failure. The general public, although affected by the artificially generated climate of fear, has well understood that most “anti-cult” accusations are in fact applicable to all human groups. When a major political party, indirectly in charge of the State through its ministers, suffers the same type of accusations as a spiritual minority, is it perhaps easier to see the absurdity of these sweeping accusations? MIVILUDES was founded on this absurdity and sustains it daily.

Georges Fenech is getting a tan in New Caledonia: “A population more permeable to superstitious discourse”: “I am going to meet the various authorities, the elected officials and the magistrates, as well as the only association fighting against sectarian abuses. I am also going to meet the Jehovah’s Witnesses, some of whose practices pose difficulties. They have agreed to receive me.”

In response to question No. 50823 from Mr Michel Zumkeller (UMP), who wished “to know the actions carried out to fight against the influence of sects in the areas within its remit”, the Directorate for Youth, Popular Education and Associative Life (DJEPVA) stated bluntly, in a reply published in the Journal Officiel on 9 March 2010, page 2803 — besides its membership of the “operational executive committee of MIVILUDES” and its contribution “to the latter’s annual activity report” — that “for the year 2009, no report of sectarian abuses was transmitted to the DJEPVA”.

A report by the High Council for Integration suggests limiting freedom of religious expression: “Prohibit elected officials from wearing a religious sign or religious clothing within the deliberative assemblies of public authorities. Prohibit Muslim mothers who wear the headscarf from accompanying pupils on a school outing. The High Council for Integration (HCI) is preparing to formulate recommendations that go in the direction of a limitation of freedom of religious expression and an extension of the principle of neutrality, which until now has concerned only public services or agents of the State.”

April: According to a statement from Terre du Ciel: “The first line of inquiry (sectarian abuse) has been completely abandoned. They are now on a mundane financial trail.” According to the CICNS, the “sectarian trail” is never the right one. Even if traces of this slanderous and defamatory attack on this centre will remain, the disagreement massively expressed by the centre’s friends and by our campaign of letters to the authorities will at least have made it possible to eliminate the “sectarian” motive of this attack. But the “financial trail” remains a very effective tool for crushing an organisation, whatever the official motivation.

Publication of MIVILUDES’s 2009 report: “The Assembly came to the conclusion that it is not necessary to define what sects are, nor to decide whether or not they are a religion. However, the groups designated by this name arouse a certain concern (…) and this must be taken into consideration (…) That said, nothing prevents sociologists of religion, within their field of competence, from pursuing this interesting reflection begun almost thirty years ago,” p. 19 of the report.

A few gems picked out from the media frenzy that followed the publication of the report on Georges Fenech’s mission: “The public must be alerted: everything that is natural can partly conceal sectarian abuses.” – “The Mission does not call into question the power of the traditional shaman, ‘ferryman’ between the spirits and the members of his group.” – “The Miviludes will soon launch a poster campaign aimed at parents of school-age children.”

Gilles Devers, a lawyer, offers a further essential reminder amid the ambient confusion: “Secularism applies in the relationship between public authorities and religions. On the other hand, it cannot be imposed directly on society or on individuals.”

“A study recently published by the University of British Columbia (UBC) shows that spirituality (belief in a higher power) very strongly influences the happiness of children aged 8 to 12. The study also shows that religiosity, on the other hand (the fact of attending church meetings), has little influence.”

Interview with the CICNS spokeswoman: Ouvertures, la tribune de l’honnête homme du 21e siècle asked the Centre for Information and Advice on New Spiritualities for its analysis of the latest MIVILUDES report. For the CICNS, “the Miviludes is a bad response to the phenomenon of emerging alternative groups, a phenomenon that it would be better to study methodologically and impartially rather than to repress blindly.”

Pryska Ducoeurjoly, investigative journalist, author of La Société Toxique, manuel de dépollution mentale (The Toxic Society: A Manual of Mental Depollution) (Editions ResPublica), following the publication of the MIVILUDES report: “It is important to become aware of the malevolence of the public authorities towards alternative therapies, hastily labelled sectarian. Paradoxically, the official discourse appears just as sectarian towards them, which has the effect of clouding our critical thinking. Are we not, here again, the victims of an enormous mental manipulation?”

“‘More than 13,500 children aged 6 to 11 do not go to school, of whom nearly 1,900 follow no distance-education programme,’ stated Georges Fenech, president of the Interministerial Mission for Vigilance and Combat against Sectarian Abuses (Miviludes), on Wednesday 7 April, when presenting his annual report.” However, only 45 resulted in requests for re-enrolment in school.

“Hors les murs” (Outside the Walls), a collective of parents who educate their children at home, challenge the president of MIVILUDES with a pertinent question: “Are you authorised to decide that families who do not send their children to school are part of sectarian abuses?”

Questions from the Nouvel Obs to Michèle Alliot-Marie: “Why does France want to ban the wearing of the full-face veil?” MAM’s reply: “The law is the same for everyone, and that is the basis of the unity of the Republic, and that is why we refuse to let some people group together into communities that live together according to their own rules and do not live with everyone else. It is a choice that distinguishes us, including from countries such as Great Britain and the United States, which for their part recognise communitarianism.”

May: Mobilisation: CICNS campaign for the creation of an independent and competent Observatory of spiritual, therapeutic and educational minorities to replace MIVILUDES: several thousand signatures are needed and expected in order to allow our country to wake up from its long wandering. Opportunities for mobilisation are not frequent and have been largely ignored in the past. The time has come to speak out. Beyond our differences, we have the possibility of demonstrating, for the first time in our country, concrete and constructive solidarity around the defence of our individual freedoms.

The 21st Psycho-social Forum, currently being held in São Paulo from 13 to 15 May, examines the psychosociological roots of the current crisis in the light of psychoanalysis. “This forum is an opportunity to become aware of the psycho-social pathology from which society suffers, and of the pathology of power of a certain oligarchy,” explains Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco. “The belief of European leaders in their plan stems as much from a serious psychological denial as from the immoral will to maintain illusion among the populations. It will inevitably end in the bankruptcy of the system.”

The CICNS was present from 22 to 24 May at the “Spirituality and Society” forum organised in Aix-les-Bains by the Terre du Ciel association. There we were able to present the state of play of this French-style “anti-cult struggle”, whose ins and outs are poorly understood by the general public. Several round tables and workshops made it possible to lift the veil of ignorance for an audience of nearly a thousand people. Part 2 of the CICNS documentary, “La France antisectes : état des lieux” (Anti-cult France: the State of Play), was much appreciated and applauded by the sociologists and jurists present, whose comments and criticisms we had requested. Several hundred signatures were ultimately obtained in support of the creation of an independent and competent Observatory of spiritual, therapeutic and educational minorities.

From group spirituality to individual spirituality: “Mass spirituality, so to speak, no longer has the same appeal it once had. Nowadays, we tend to speak of an inner journey rather than of dogmas and rigid beliefs.”

Commentary on the book La société des victimes (The Society of Victims), by Guillaume Erner, published in 2006 by Éditions La Découverte: “In this work, Guillaume Erner analyses the preponderant place held by ‘victims’ of every kind in our society. According to the sociologist, the ‘victim’ has become — for the worse, most of the time — the measure of political action, of the treatment of information in the media, of the reflection of the ‘compassionate’ intellectual.” Although Guillaume Erner does not explicitly address the question of “sects”, the French anti-cult struggle would nevertheless be a prime example to illustrate his analysis. French policy in this area, compassionate and victim-centred to a fault, was built around the narrative of “victims” to the exclusion of any other consideration. In the very words of a former president of MIVILUDES, Jean-Michel Roulet: “Were there but a single victim, the action taken is justified!”

The National Commission on Security Ethics (CNDS) swept aside because it displeases the authorities?: “Secretary General of the National Commission on Security Ethics from its creation in 2002 to September 2009, Nathalie Duhamel analyses the stakes of the announced disappearance of this independent administrative authority. (…) The law setting out the powers of the ‘Defender of Rights’ will soon be debated in the Senate and then in the National Assembly. It is urgent to mobilise so that this institution does not become an empty shell which, although enshrined in the Constitution, would be the signal of a weakening of the rule of law.”

“The Council of State met in plenary assembly on Wednesday, in the presence of the Secretary General of the Government. During this assembly, the sages reportedly issued an ‘unfavourable opinion’ on the government’s bill seeking to completely ban the wearing of the full-face veil in France. (…) Le Figaro recalls that in their study submitted to the government a month ago, the Sages had specified that the ‘European Court of Human Rights has enshrined the principle of personal autonomy’, according to which everyone may lead their life according to their own convictions, including by putting themselves physically or morally in danger.”

June: Abuses of the anti-cult struggle? “Yes, but still…”: in the interview given to the CICNS, the sociologist Raphaël Liogier sums up in a single sentence the adherence of certain intellectuals to the French anti-cult struggle: “Yes, but still!” Faced with the patent lack of evidence for the sectarian danger as presented by the parliamentarians and MIVILUDES, relayed by the media, their definitive argument boils down to: “Yes, but still!” Despite the abundance of facts presented on our site demonstrating the abuses of the French anti-cult arsenal, we are often confronted with the same type of reaction. In the anxiety-inducing climate generated around spiritual minorities, this posture is hardly surprising among the public far removed from alternative spiritual and therapeutic currents. It is more so among the broad public interested, closely or from afar, in these new currents, whom some have grouped under the name “the cultural creatives”.

Georges Fenech welcomes the decree regulating the profession of psychotherapist, which will make it possible, according to him, to “fight against charlatanism”. According to MIVILUDES, 30% of psychotherapists supposedly have no “recognised training”. Psychotherapists, in order to keep or obtain their title, will therefore have to appear before “a jury of psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts”. But, behind the scenes, the genesis of this decree reveals numerous approximations and misfires, and many see in it a “will to regain control over a space of individual freedom that escaped authority”, or even a takeover of psychotherapies by psychiatry.

Observatory of subsidies: “An association that ‘works’ can do without subsidies: members pay their dues as long as the association seems useful to them. Is UNADFI (97% subsidised) useful, when by the admission of its own president, Catherine Picard (former PS deputy), one cannot define what a sect is? (…) In view of this non-definition, any association, any school of thought is a potential sect; the door is open to all abuses. Including for our wallets.”

July: Cover letter accompanying the first 1,000 signatures in support of the creation of an independent Observatory of spiritual minorities, addressed to Mr Nicolas Sarkozy, President of the Republic, and to Mr François Fillon, Prime Minister, on 21 June 2010.

Report of the US State Department on religious freedom in the world for 2009: “(In France) the treatment of minority religious groups regarded as dangerous sects remains a subject of concern.”

The evangelical churches unite in solidarity, beyond their differences, in part to resist the assaults of the highly questionable French anti-cult struggle: “On 15 June, a page of history will be written. The National Council of Evangelicals of France (CNEF) is to be officially created.”

The religion of the market: “The gods of this religion are the financial Markets. Temples are dedicated to them, which go by the name of stock Exchanges. Only the high priests and their acolytes are invited into them. The people of believers are invited to commune with the Market gods through the small screen of the TV or the computer, the daily newspaper, the radio or the bank counter. To the most remote corners of the planet, hundreds of millions of human beings, who are denied the right to satisfy their basic needs, are invited to celebrate the Market gods.”

“The public authorities refuse to designate groups as sects. In France, indeed, no one may be troubled for their beliefs. It is one of the foundations of our Republic. Opinions are not punishable; only acts can be. Our line of conduct is firm and clear.” – David Sénat, Adviser on legal matters and religious affairs to the Minister of the Interior

“Persecutions against religious minorities are on the increase, according to a report published on 1 July by Minority Rights Group International (MRG). This British NGO, active in more than 60 countries, is concerned about three trends: the rise of religious nationalism, the economic marginalisation of religious minorities, and the abuse of anti-terrorist legislation.”

Following the MIVILUDES report that puts the emphasis on unschooled children, the collective “L’école en pyjama” (School in Pyjamas) runs the National Education system through the sieve of the criteria for sectarian abuses, then concludes: “They come nit-picking at us while everything is collapsing around them… Come now, Mr Fenech, go look after your own schools, after all those you send to the shrink, to the speech therapist. After all those who leave your system with no future… and leave us in peace! Is other people’s happiness so unbearable for you? There is not a single figure in this report on unschooled children belonging to a sect! What a joker!”

August: It is official: police custody (garde à vue) is unconstitutional: “‘The whole of the ordinary-law procedure is no longer suited to current circumstances.’ That is the clear, clean-cut opinion delivered yesterday by the Constitutional Council on the subject of the French-style police-custody procedure. An opinion long awaited, but which leaves the government time to adapt: the decision will take effect only on 1 July 2011.”

“Since the beginning of July, people wishing to practise under the title of psychotherapist must meet strict criteria. A regulation long awaited, but which leaves part of the profession indignant. (…) the revolt around this decree risks having counter-productive effects for the general public in terms of legibility. The FF2P, for example, is preparing to have its members listed in the yellow pages under another designation, most likely ‘certified psycho-practitioner’. PsY en mouvement, another professional organisation of psychotherapists (4,000 members), has for its part informally consulted its troops. The result: a majority say they are ready for ‘collective civil disobedience’ by keeping their plaque, even though 60% intend to register on the lists to claim the title officially.”

“(The Miviludes) intends to conduct a modern public policy, yet it is the only one not to respect its three fundamental criteria: a definition of the object of its work (…), the exposition of a methodology (…), a genuine evaluation of its action (…). (The reference framework) is a veritable blacklisting, a document that claims to designate good and evil, which is hardly admissible on the part of a public policy.” – Olivier Bobineau, sociologist, former adviser to MIVILUDES

The CICNS offers its Que sais-je ? on mental manipulation, the spearhead of anti-cult rhetoric in France, as well as a substantial dossier on the subject. According to Roland Campiche, director of the Observatory of Religions at the University of Lausanne, “there is no sect without the approval of the disciples”, and therefore without free and voluntary adherence. The sociologist denies the existence of mental manipulation: “The American expert assessments that studied this notion concluded that it had no substance, and that the individual remained capable of discernment when involved in a sect. That said, one cannot disregard the exploitation by sects of a person’s temporary weakness. But beyond that, the individual’s responsibility remains engaged. We live in a society where individual responsibility is strongly emphasised. So why should people not also be responsible in the field of religion?”

Review of the book Les jeunes, l’école et la religion (Young People, School and Religion), edited by Céline Béraud and Jean-Paul Willaime, published by Éditions Bayard in October 2009, which summarises research in France centred on the point of view of adolescents aged 14–16: “While it is true that 45% of them consider that it is not something important in their personal life, and that 33% even admit that religion bores them, 82% acknowledge that religion has an important place in history and 59% think that talking about religion helps them to better understand what is happening in the world.”

An important piece of case law: a well-being massage practitioner, accused of usurping the title of masseur-physiotherapist, has finally been acquitted by the court of Saint-Étienne, which declared that his activity “is not a medical act”.

The 14 deaths of reality TV: “reality TV”, the official mass-stupefaction activity, is now responsible for the deaths of at least 14 people. But who worries about that when there are “sects” to hunt (the ones that stop people watching television, according to the President of MIVILUDES)?

Colloquium “Young people, religion and secularism”: this colloquium “proposes to take stock of the question of freedom and secularism in places of education (…) How are the principles of secularism and religious freedom applied in the various educational establishments? (…) What of certain more or less sectarian or esoteric movements that attract the young?

The Jehovah’s Witnesses accuse Crédit Agricole of discrimination: “The affair began on 4 August 2009, the date on which ten Jehovah’s Witness associations received a registered letter from their bank — Crédit Agricole — specifying that their bank accounts would be closed within a period of sixty days. The leaders of these associations claim to be victims of discrimination, which prompted them to file a complaint. The matter is therefore now before the courts.”

“An ideological discourse, and therefore as un-secular as can be, republican feminism continues to demand a coercive policy against certain women in the name of their freedom, where secularism advocates respect and freedom of expression and belief for all individuals regarded as adult and responsible. A republican feminist such as Elizabeth Badinter was thus able to proclaim, without batting an eyelid, before the recent parliamentary Mission on the wearing of the full-face veil, that freedom of conscience could not be completely respected in France since the State was fighting sects (…).”

September: Jean-Luc Delarue: after the cocaine, he is asked to become exemplary again in order to be able to continue “giving moral lessons” on television: “Jean-Luc Delarue has just been suspended from the airwaves by the president of France Télévisions, René Pfimlin, because of his problems with drug addiction. For René Pfimlin: ‘One cannot have addictive and criminal practices and be on the air every day, sharing emotions, giving people lessons.’” This presenter has put together several “programmes on the theme of sects”, notably in his series “Ça se discute”, all of which were a parody of debate and an insult to intelligence.

“Hervé Machi, a magistrate, has been appointed secretary general of the Interministerial Mission for Vigilance and Combat against Sectarian Abuses (Miviludes) as of 1 September, according to an order published on 3 September 2010 in the Journal Officiel.”

“Since Law No. 2007-293 of 5 March 2007 reforming child protection, and its Title V (Protection of children against sectarian abuses), ‘any refusal of vaccination’ (and also ‘the intent to hinder its execution’) for the compulsory injections (polio, diphtheria, tetanus) is punishable by six months in prison and a 3,750-euro fine! (…) Later, Philippe Bas, minister with responsibility for social security, the elderly, disabled persons and the family, tried to backtrack. He presented another amendment to remove the increase in penalties (…) His amendment was ultimately not adopted, which means that the toughening of the sanctions against vaccination refusals does indeed remain in the law. A decision motivated by fear of ‘sects’ and not by strictly health-related considerations.”

LOPPSI 2 law: “We are discovering Article 32 ter A of the LOPPSI 2 law, currently under examination in the Senate (from Tuesday 7 to Thursday 9 September), supplemented by a government amendment (No. 404, see at the bottom of the page), in which provision is made for an expeditious and arbitrary procedure conducted by the Prefect to evict squatters from housing, premises and land. It sidelines the intervention of the judge, ordinarily the guardian of the ‘citizen’s home’ or of the ‘principal residence’. It is therefore a violation of the principles of Republican Law.”

Over the past few years, master’s-level professional training courses on the relationship between religions and society have appeared, responding to the need of various professions to open up to these issues?

September 2010: An IPSOS/government information service poll commissioned by MIVILUDES (which finances it with public money), conducted with a sample of 962 French people, reveals that 66% of the French believe that “sects” are a significant threat to democracy. Let us give MIVILUDES credit for having fully achieved an objective that is also its trademark: frightening the citizens.

The Lé Dinh case: remarkable closing speeches by the lawyers on the implacable mechanics of so-called “sect” trials. Maître Lebonjour, of the Toulouse bar: “There has been much talk of a sect in this trial. Be careful not to mix up facts and beliefs… When morality enters a courtroom, it is the justice of the ayatollahs that enters… You are here to judge what Robert Lé Dinh did or did not do! (…) Here, there are no material facts, no technical elements; everything is nothing but words, and they are highly contradictory!” Maître Martial, of the Agen bar: “I am angry and I am afraid, because the sect is being posited as a premise. You have been mired in the discourse of sectarian abuse… Before being the victim of a sect, one is the victim of oneself. Will I have enough power to pull you out of this spider’s web?”

The visible dissensions between the Ministry of the Interior and MIVILUDES indicate that the perception of spiritual minorities is (fortunately) not the same everywhere. MIVILUDES regrets in particular that not all prefectures have set up specific groups to fight against sectarian abuses, and that the victim-defence associations can only make their voices heard within the framework of the departmental council for the prevention of delinquency; its competences being particularly broad, the “sectarian abuses” component is often neglected. The Mission complains of not being systematically invited to the meetings of the departmental groups, and of no longer being sent the notes and documents of the Interior Ministry’s intelligence services.

October: New MIVILUDES guide 2010, “The protection of minors against sectarian abuses” — or the politics of fear: Georges Fenech, still awkward with legal terms, treats us to a brand-new expression, “movements bearing sectarian abuses”, from the very first page. Then he immediately follows up with a question that illustrates the habitual language games of this outfit: “Who can tolerate a child being sexually abused, mistreated, deprived of care, or of an education that allows him to become a free citizen?” No answer is given to this rhetorical question, the answer being subliminal, generated in the imagination of readers who should by now have well understood where the tormentors of children are to be found. The first pages of this “guide” are striking for their repetition of a more alarming and ever more clearly stated will to take into account risk, and no longer only a proven situation.

In this new guide, MIVILUDES announces that between 50,000 and 60,000 children are victims of sectarian abuses, whereas it announced 60,000 in spring 2008, 80,000 in October 2008 and 85,000 in November 2008. These figures might suggest a sharp decrease in the number of children in danger in two years, but Georges Fenech does not mention it, the figures supplied having no foundation. They have moreover been revised upwards by certain associations (the Réseau parental, for its part, speaks of 100,000 children in danger). Since anything at all can be said, why hold back? Almost all the major media relayed, without any critical scrutiny, these figures given without proof by Georges Fenech. By their attitude, they promoted this guide, which demonstrates, on the part of MIVILUDES, a Machiavellian will to exclude.

Everything is said, by a reader from Réunion: “We wish very strongly to remind certain people that France is, admittedly, a secular Republic, but a secular Republic of Christian allegiance, and that, consequently, Réunion, which is majority Christian, does not have to suffer diktats from the other, minority religions.”

A Catholic priest writes a new book on the “new beliefs”. He sums up: “A jumble of contradictory aspirations (…) signs of a pathetic quest.”

Fenech in his own words: “There is no authority in France that applies labels: you are a religion or you are a sect” but… “The Jehovah’s Witnesses are an organisation of a confessional character which incontestably poses difficulties.” (“Envoyé spécial” programme, 25 September 2010)

“Most scientists are not the rabid atheists people would like to make them out to be. A significant number of scientists from the greatest universities in fact see no conflict between their faith and their profession (…) a survey of 1,200 scientists classes 30% of them as agnostics/atheists, 50% as religious, and 20% as practising a non-conventional spirituality (…). The study demonstrates that the proportion of virulent atheists is a minority.”

The case of the Direction des interventions sociales Ardennaises (DISA): After six years of rumours, of confessions invented by two officers of the prestigious SRPJ, of prosecutions, of police custody, of denunciation in a MIVILUDES report and of media hammering, the courts have just issued a dismissal in the case of the Disa of the Ardennes: the three social workers implicated for alleged sectarian behaviour had nothing to reproach themselves for.

The “Gettliffe” affair made headlines in 2007. By an astonishing repetition of events, Nathalie Gettliffe and Francis Gruzelle are today in a publicised conflict over the custody of the two children they had together. Nathalie Gettliffe asserts that Francis Gruzelle “played a superb role at the time of (her) story [Cicns: the one with Scott Grant]. (…) He would like to bring this affair back into the media, to live off this conflict again” (L’Express). Francis Gruzelle, for his part, speaking of Nathalie Gettliffe, states: “She is making the same accusations against me that she made against Scott Grant, minus the sect” (Elle). “Minus the sect”. But did “the sect” play any role whatsoever in the separation of the first couple?

An Opinion Way survey of June 2010 indicates that one young person in two is in psychological difficulty in France (to be compared with Mr Fenech’s figures, already inflated as they are, on children in danger in sects)… Where are the deputies and their commissions of inquiry to take this problem into account? Perhaps out hunting those who make proposals to help these young people? Who knows?

A historic complaint by a spiritual minority following a “raid” by the president of MIVILUDES, for fraud, violation of the home, illegal exercise of authority, harm to the human person, violation of individual liberties: the members of the Community of the Ecumenical and Lay Monastery of the Moulin des Vallées were subjected on 13 October 2009, on their property in Ille-et-Vilaine, to a brutal raid by the president of MIVILUDES accompanied by journalists, experienced “like a rape”. On 19 May 2010, they decided to file a complaint that will mark a milestone in the history of the resistance of spiritual minorities to the abuses of the French anti-cult struggle. The complaint was dismissed on the documents, without further action, by the public prosecutor of the Rennes court on 10 September 2010, but the complainants nevertheless still legally have the possibility of pursuing the action in court.

An edifying Masonic controversy, in which Catherine Picard, current president of UNADFI and a sister of Le Droit Humain, protests at the organisation of a Grand Orient de France colloquium at the headquarters of AMORC. It must be acknowledged that we are far from a dispassionate debate devoted to a better knowledge of the subject — on the part of the media, of UNADFI and of the Masonic obediences alike — and that the climate is hardly conducive to rigorous and balanced information.

November: “The Grande Loge de France (GLDF) is also part of MIVILUDES, the Interministerial Mission for Vigilance and Combat against Sectarian Abuses.”

17 November 2010: International Religious Freedom Report 2010: “While cases of violence or discrimination based on religious affiliation were noted, the report considers that ‘prominent leaders of society have taken positive steps to promote religious freedom’. The report nevertheless reiterates its ‘concerns’ with regard to MIVILUDES, considering that there is said to be discrimination against the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientologists, and other groups regarded by MIVILUDES as ‘dangerous sects’. ‘These groups fear that MIVILUDES reports have contributed to public mistrust of minority religious groups and contributed to acts of discrimination against them.’”

The Minister of Ecology is questioned about certain statements in the recent MIVILUDES report concerning hypothetical “sect” methods in his area of competence. The minister’s reply: he “has not been made aware of any particular facts within his services that could amount to sectarian abuses”. One confirmation among so many others of the “non-problem”.

Nathalie Luca: “If we want sects to stop manipulating people, then it must also no longer be possible for the other actors in society to manipulate them. If we want to teach prudence, it must not be limited to spiritual groups. Vulnerability is not exploited only by spiritual groups; it is exploited by all social actors. It is a serious mistake to want to apply double standards. To revive critical thinking, we must strive, through an educational approach, to give it substance in each and every human activity.”

The CICNS, having obtained 1,700 “paper” signatures, and after having informed the French government of this ongoing mobilisation of the French population against the abuses of the anti-cult struggle, is now continuing this campaign via the Internet.

The CICNS has received two testimonies from teachers following its comments on the latest MIVILUDES guide, “The protection of minors against sectarian abuses”. These points of view “from the field” clearly put into perspective the needs of minors today and the dramatic absurdity of the anti-cult struggle which, in addition to tarnishing the reputation of thousands of people, diverts attention from the realities. These teachers in the field contest the “concerns” of MIVILUDES and suggest that the State look after the children (and their parents) who are genuinely in difficulty.

The 2010 report on freedom of religion in the world once again mentions the discrimination against spiritual minorities in France and the restriction of freedom of religion.

Promotion of informing on people on the basis of one’s personal impressions or rivalries: Benjamin Mine, doctor of criminology at the Catholic University of Louvain, publishes an article that questions, on the basis of the French situation, “the implications that recourse to the notion of ‘sectarian abuse’ could bring about in Belgium within the regulatory framework aimed at combating the reprehensible actions of groups commonly described as ‘sects’”. He points out in particular that: “The appellation ‘sectarian abuse’ also supports, in our view — through measures for the prevention of a collective and individual risk — the promotion of a certain representation of the contemporary individual. (…) It no longer falls exclusively to the public authorities to carry out this mission of vigilance. Every individual, taken individually or collectively, is increasingly involved in this enterprise of spotting ‘sectarian abuses’. (…) A little over 50% of the judicial files consulted between 1991 and 2005 were opened following an upward movement of information resulting from the filing of a complaint, a denunciation, or, to a lesser extent, a simple statement intended to communicate certain information.”

December: On Thursday 9 December 2010, Jean-Luc Delarue’s programme presented by Sophie Davant, Toute une histoire, had as its theme: They were swept up by a sect — how can they be freed? Jean-Luc Delarue has mistreated the theme of “sects” on numerous occasions, and this programme, which he produces, is no exception. He has become one of the principal media illustrators of the victim posture, with all that it entails in emotional sensationalism. It is not, of course, a matter of denying the suffering expressed by his guests, but of denouncing the way in which this suffering is used to build ratings (probably his main objective), but also to roll out, insidiously, the official anti-cult discourse — which, it is true, is supported at the highest level of the French State through MIVILUDES.

A guru at the Élysée? Or, more simply, a very widespread practice that has only been a problem since MIVILUDES was given the mission of creating panic and making everything suspect?: “The France 3 journalist Patrice Machuret has just written ‘L’Enfant terrible’, a book that deals with life at the Élysée under Nicolas Sarkozy. ‘Choice excerpts’ in which we discover that Nicolas Sarkozy, to relieve a few muscular problems to which he is prone, has reportedly been calling on a ‘guru’ — ‘for fifteen years’, according to the ‘guru’ himself, interviewed by the book’s author. ‘Guru’ is the nickname given to an etiopath (half physiotherapist, half osteopath)… A practitioner who has never been registered with the Order of Physicians!”

UNADFI and the CCMM “denounce a disengagement of the State reflected in falling subsidies” while, at the same time, MIVILUDES seems to be expanding.

Following the announcement that a Masonic lodge sat within MIVILUDES, the latter had a denial published: “MIVILUDES wishes to make clear that neither the GLDF nor any other Masonic organisation forms part of the bodies of MIVILUDES, an exclusively governmental mission.”

The New Age current likes to appropriate the most diverse prophecies. Those associated with the Mayan calendar are no exception and, according to the latter, something is supposed to happen around 2012 (some have set the date at 21 December 2012). (…) The anti-cult struggle has been doing its work for long enough that, in the village of Bugarach, in the Aude, a high place of New Age culture, the elected officials are worried. Without laughing, the mayor asks: “Will we have to, as in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, bring in the army to channel the crowds?” Le Figaro also notes: “This 21 December 2012 is far from being taken lightly by the Miviludes. Thirty apocalyptic movements identified in France, bringing together 30,000 members, will be in the mission’s crosshairs.” Next April, it will submit a report to the Prime Minister on these apocalyptic movements.”

LOPPSI 2: By replacing “in-depth knowledge of the social body” with “in-depth surveillance of the social body”, suspicion and mistrust take root in every stratum of society. The deputies, who are supposed to represent us in an enlightened manner, have just demonstrated once again their lack of clear-sightedness by voting for, among other articles, Article 4 of the LOPPSI 2 law on surveillance of the Internet.

The HADOPI law (High Authority for the Dissemination of Works and the Protection of Rights on the Internet), supposed to protect artistic creation on the Internet, is, for some, yet another opportunity seized by the public authorities to filter the Net. This law — protection for some, surveillance for others, whose technical contours and their consequences remain vague — will nevertheless lead to the installation of an IT, telecoms and software infrastructure which, while it will make it possible, after a fashion, to penalise illegal downloads (the controversy over the reliability of the IP address as a means of identification not being closed), will also be capable of monitoring any type of traffic. However, while the Hadopi law is open to criticism on more than one count, as it stands it nevertheless makes the prohibition of defamation on the Internet much stricter, and in particular in “discussion forums”.

There is a recourse against the complaints so easily filed at the gendarmerie/police station, and for which the informers think they have immunity: a complaint for slanderous denunciation. A calumny is punishable by 5 years’ imprisonment and a €45,000 fine.

Denis Robert, interviewed by Nexus.fr, on the subject of freedom of the press: “The heart of the problem has a great deal to do with the economics of the press. It is in very poor health. The result is great timidity, because defamation proceedings are expensive. One sign is revealing. It now takes only three months to try a defamation case. Before, you had to wait two years. It is not because the courts have more resources, but because there are fewer and fewer complaints, and therefore fewer and fewer articles giving rise to these complaints. So more and more self-censorship. So more and more censorship.”

Simultaneous doublespeak from Georges Fenech on France Info: “It would be malicious to say that the NEF is a sect — MIVILUDES does not say so — but what is certain is that this banking organisation draws its inspiration from a doctrine which, all the same, has been the object of our vigilance for a number of years.” (unlike the doctrine of a conventional banking organisation, which requires no vigilance?)