The l'Essentiel Affair

The l’Essentiel Affair

On 20 November 2000 at 6 a.m., a small spiritual community in the Aveyron had to endure the assault of some sixty heavily armed gendarmes…

A jurist: “All they had in the file, at the outset, was an illegally parked caravan and a failure to declare to the Assedic. Do you realise they sent 60 gendarmes for that!”

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In 1993, Magali Guérin and Olivier Manitara settled on the Domaine de Terranova in the region of Montlaur in the Aveyron, to pursue their activities there as publishers, lecturers and writers in the field of spirituality and philosophy. The publishing house Telesma also publishes a review: “L’Essentiel”.

Having bought a large estate dotted with dwellings, they decided to let these out. Their tenants, too, had come seeking calm, far from the noise of the cities and their agitation.

Phase 1: Approach

The gendarmes pay frequent visits to make contact with the newcomers — to “make friends”, in their own words. Already they speak, “in all friendship”, of the question that preoccupies them: are they dealing with a “cult”? They are at times cumbersome visitors, making the trainees passing through somewhat uneasy by asking for their papers and the reason for their coming. They push their ambassadorial work with the tenants as far as inquiring after their well-being and their identity.

On the days of courses organised at Terranova, they do not hesitate to spend hours at the edge of the road leading to the estate, to welcome all the trainees and check their papers. Olivier loses a little of his calm when the gendarmes ask him to pass them information about his tenants, systematically and regularly. Faced with his indignation, the gendarmes then take a less amiable tone and declare: “In any case, we don’t want you here… We’re going to make your life hell.”

Phase 2: “Investigation”

So they set about making their life hell — rapidly, with the official opening of an investigation. Gendarmes conceal themselves (badly) behind bushes to spy on them. They also make a few passes by helicopter. Well yes — the “dangerous cult” budget is not that of just any suspect… The checks intensify. One tenant would be checked several days in a row on leaving her home (in case she had changed identity during the night?).

The gendarmes then station themselves at the entrance to the estate to ask the trainees for their papers, and make regular visits to the premises of the publishing house on assorted pretexts — checking the legal deposit, the joint committee registration… They would go so far as to visit certain tenants at their workplace, or simply to inform their employers, for whatever use it might serve: “You know, Miss X, your employee — she lodges up there, where the guru is with his cult…” Not easy to have a contract renewed in such conditions…

Five years would pass in this fashion, made up of assorted harassments and calumnies. Despite this, Olivier and Magali hold firm. One can even say that on the Terranova estate the activities are prosperous, despite the instability of local employment and the extreme conviviality of the gendarmes, which drove some tenants to return to the city and its — all things considered, very relative — agitation.

Phase 3: The assault

“I heard great noises”, “They came into my home screaming, blinded me with a floodlight”, “I could just make out a man with a bulletproof vest and a helmet”, “They struck me, twisted my arm, put me on the ground, a pistol to my head”.

At dawn on 20 November 2000, 60 armed men — gendarmes and special brigades of the army, equipped with bulletproof vests, pistols and rifles — storm the premises, smashing in the doors and screaming… waking a dozen adults, among them two pregnant women, and two children.

Men in pyjamas, unarmed, with no combatant past whatsoever, are thrown to the ground and subdued, a weapon pressed to the temple. Q., aged 3, is held at gunpoint while Magali, his mother, is forced to undress completely. One of the men would spend the whole day handcuffed behind his back, with his hands pulled up high enough to accentuate the sensation of oppression and distress. Magali has to fight so that the children are not taken away by the DASS, as had been planned.

The premises are searched from top to bottom, ransacked. “I need all the cult’s papers,” shouts a gendarme. All the computer equipment is confiscated, even though the financial brigade had already made a backup of everything it contained. It was thus a “gratuitous” harassment aimed at preventing the business from functioning.

The scenario of a film noir (1)? No — the reality of the nightmarish awakening of peaceful French citizens whose five years of police surveillance had shown nothing but their harmless and non-violent character. What we are describing here are indeed the phases of a process of intentional destruction of an entity supposed dangerous, and not an equitable process of investigation.

Phase 4: Legal proceedings

(Police custody, imprisonment at home, judicial investigation, trial, appeals.)

48 hours of police custody: that means being taken to the gendarmerie, sleeping in a cell, being interrogated for hours upon hours, in a manner intentionally repetitive and directed towards a single goal — making the case at hand fit the standard criteria of a “dangerous cult”.

Olivier Manitara, considered the leader, is thus interrogated about his religious convictions for hours. “Are you a son of God? Are you a son of God?” the investigator hammers at him. The latter, seized by doubt, ends up confiding however that “he hadn’t been prepared for this, that he was expecting a real guru, and that he finds this affair fishy!”. He even shows Olivier, on his computer, a video montage that had served in the gendarmes’ preparation, in which Olivier is seen floating in the air on a flying carpet, to the background music of the Pied Piper of Hamelin leading the rats out of the town.

Police custody

The other people arrested are offered two roles — “victim of the guru” or “accomplice of a dangerous international cult” — and “you’d better answer properly, otherwise Madam the judge will not be pleased!” Some would later admit to having said just about anything under the pressure exerted.

During the search of the estate, on the morning of the attack, the specially briefed investigators had hunted for the telltale signs of the presence of a cult: prayer altar, candles, place of ritual ceremonies. They would be disappointed to find, in the ashes of a campfire, only the remains… of a feast of potatoes.

Madam the investigating judge of Millau receives Olivier and Magali at the end of their police custody to inform them that she is putting them both in prison. Olivier and Magali then witness a violent altercation between the investigating judge and the public prosecutor, who objects to putting in prison “people against whom there is nothing to reproach”… The prison is commuted to house arrest accompanied by a ban on speaking, on writing, and on having any professional activity. Olivier and Magali’s personal bank accounts are frozen, money confiscated, compulsory check-ins at the gendarmerie…

The prison outcome had been planned from the start of the operation, the committal warrants having been signed before the interrogations had even begun.

The judicial apparatus — whose official workings one even neglects to respect — is thus clearly reduced to the role of an instrument of repression.

One can easily imagine the distress, the feeling of powerlessness, that could seize the members of the little publishing house in the aftermath of these events.

“…8 months of imprisonment at home, pregnant, with my two children, without income, getting by as best I could, by post, trying to find resources.” “I was even refused the resto du cœur…”

Yet Olivier, Magali and the team around them would little by little lift their heads again. They equip the offices with computers once more and entrust the management to those not struck by the ban on working. They manage to climb back up the slope, at least as far as the viability of the business is concerned. To the great dismay of Madam the judge.

In the course of the judicial investigation, the gendarmes would criss-cross France, visiting the clients and partners of the publishing house, or sending them files — not to ask questions, but to assert that “Olivier Manitara is a crook, he has accounts in Switzerland, houses in Quebec and in America, he is the guru of a cult, people prostrate themselves at his feet at his lectures…”. All these “facts” being, of course, a pure product of the gendarmes’ imagination.

One could sink into paranoia for less, as Olivier testifies: “When I learned that, I was truly afraid… I felt in danger… these people wanted to neutralise me, by every means… Without my faith in God, I think I would have killed myself…”

Throughout the three years of judicial investigation, while the press and the gendarmerie continued their work of sapping, Olivier would never obtain from the investigating judge the answer to one simple question: “What facts do you reproach me with?”

Phase 5: The trial

In December 2003, the trial at last takes place. The defendants would learn the charges only a few days before the trial, leaving them barely time to gather documents and prepare their defence.

Despite this, most of the charges would evaporate in the course of the hearing, and the sentences would be reduced to the barest minimum (a classic situation, since the habit in the cult hunt is to descend on people with lists of 15 to 20 charges, heavily publicised, which are struck out one after another as the investigation proceeds. But the harm is done, and the rumor has already circulated widely). For Magali, for example, a fine of 40,000 euros and an 18-month suspended sentence had been sought; by the end of the day there would remain only 1,000 euros and 8 months suspended. Which is to say, once again, that there had been no search for truth in the course of the judicial investigation, most of the charges being dismissible after a few administrative checks.

The trial itself is a grotesque comedy in which the defendants find themselves insulted for 9 hours, standing at the bar, by a prosecutor who calls them beings harmful to society, a cult, a guru… Most of them cannot even answer the questions put to them, drowned by the flood of calumny pouring over them. No complaint, no complainant, would be presented to the court. All the remaining convictions — that is, one offence of misuse of company assets (without any associate having complained of anything whatsoever) and one fraud against the Assedic (one count of which concerned a person who had never either claimed or received money from those services) — are under appeal as of the writing of this article.

The procedure is transparent, and confirmed by the gendarmes and even the investigating judge. The goal was to “destroy the cult”, to raze Terranova. The judicial and police apparatus was only the means — and fortunately, at times, the brake — of this blind will, but certainly not an instrument of truth.

The financial cost of the operation is exorbitant in view of its epilogue. But the most shocking thing remains the psychological marks, the deep wounds left by all this.

“My son, who was three at the time, has remained deeply disturbed; he is terrified at the sight of a gendarme, has frequent nightmares, and underwent a brutal regression during the events of November 2000.” “My daughter, born shortly after the gendarmes’ attack, suffered the after-effects of my wife’s trauma, as the doctor explained to me, and that is what explains her convulsions.” “It took me four months to resurface after the police custody; I was on the edge of depression.” “My wife suffered an enormous shock; she remained prostrate for a week, without speaking”…

A complaint against the gendarmerie has been filed for acts of barbarity.

The operation failed; the “cult” is still there — it even happens at times that the “followers” laugh over their misadventures.

(1) In 1993, there was another memorable assault, on the community called “The Family”, in their residences in Lyon and Marseille, where more than 200 agents of the forces of order, armed with submachine guns, forced the doors with axe blows. The parents were arrested, handcuffed, in front of their children. The authorities were acting on accusations from the ADFI. For years, the ADFI had indeed accused this spiritual movement of prostitution, child abuse and other illegal activities. Six years after the assault, the court of Aix-en-Provence ruled that these allegations were without foundation, and the case was closed. All the people arrested were found not guilty and acquitted. The ADFI never offered any apology for the pain and the traumas caused to these families, and never published anything to correct the false information it had disseminated.

Read also: Police raids and custody: what you need to know Waco, the American model The Horus affair

A video excerpt (12 minutes) from the CICNS report on this exemplary affair:

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Right-click on the tortoise with the mouse to download this version (To download to your computer, right-click with the mouse and choose “download”. If you prefer to view the excerpt without downloading it, be patient: after clicking the link, playback is not immediate.)

The complete film on DVD (35 minutes) can be ordered by post: CICNS BP7 82270 Montpezat de Quercy