Interview with Maurice Duval: Full Transcript

Maurice Duval is a French ethnologist. He studied the Aumist religion, known in France as the “Mandarom cult”, going to the community regularly for four years and publishing the result as « Un ethnologue au Mandarom » (PUF). In this interview with CICNS he sets out what that work cost him: articles refused by national and regional dailies, publications cut from academic journals, a colloquium blocked by a university president, and a MILS that declined to fund the project and, he says, solicited almost no researchers working at that depth.

CICNS interview, March 2005. (English translation of the full written transcript published by CICNS on cicns.net; the original page is preserved via the Wayback Machine and linked in the citation below.)

Maurice Duval is an ethnologist. He is also, by his own account, a “miscreant”.

What led this researcher to study the Mandarom community therefore comes not from an affinity with spirituality or with religions, but from an “intellectual enthusiasm” and from the sense of being witness to a “scientifically unacceptable” situation in which the media judge and condemn groups they know nothing about and want to know nothing about.

We met Maurice Duval, who agreed to share with us his feelings about the situation in France with regard to beliefs and spiritual minorities, and his fear, given the pressures and censorship endured throughout his study, of seeing a “laïque fundamentalism, just as dangerous as the religious fundamentalisms” develop, and, finally, an increasingly repressive and totalitarian state.

Maurice Duval, hello. You are an ethnologist. Ethnology, in the eyes of the general public, is not necessarily a useful science. It would belong rather to the cultural domain, connected today with the concept of leisure. What has it brought you? What can it bring our society?

Yes, ethnology is sometimes badly perceived; indeed, people believe it is a discipline that studies faraway peoples, which is no longer true today. It is a human science that studies social realities, of our own society, whatever they may be — spiritual groups, immigrant groups, etc. At the moment I am studying prisoners, in prison.

It is a method of work. As for using it for leisure activities — yes, that is done; but the purpose of ethnology is to serve, very modestly, a very little bit, knowledge; and in that sense knowledge is always useful — it is what makes human beings advance. And this discipline contributes to that modestly.

From the ethnologist’s point of view, do the French who are listening to us have a particular relation to spirituality and its renewal?

For a long time it was believed that the collapse of the historic churches in France — notably the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches, which collapsed, let us say, from the beginning of the 1950s; we have seen a constant tumble, and it continues, since today we have 3 to 4% of regular believers in those churches; there were more than 50% in the 1950s, in the first half of the century — it was believed that this collapse was the collapse of beliefs; that there were no more beliefs; that beliefs were disappearing along with the historic churches. That was a grave error: today we know that the rejection of institutions is not concomitant with the rejection of beliefs.

On the other hand, beliefs renew themselves; they are no longer the same. That is to say, that half of France which believed within the Christian churches in the first half of the century, until around the 1950s, did not abandon its beliefs — but the beliefs were able to transform themselves. People believe in other things today.

And this renewal means that we have movements, described as cults, which adopt beliefs that are new for our country. When it is of Eastern inspiration, for example, it no longer has anything to do with the beliefs proper to Christianity. Which is why this novelty disturbs, unsettles: because people do not know it; it seems zany because it is new.

But of course there has been no abandonment of the stock of beliefs — there has been a transformation of beliefs. There has been some loss of belief; I think there are fewer believers today than there were in the first half of the century, but the gap is not enormous. Many people who left the historic churches needed to attach themselves to other beliefs, whatever their content: I am not a theologian, I am a researcher in the human sciences, so it is not for me to say what those beliefs are, whether they are good or bad — that is each person’s own affair.

You notably made an in-depth study of the Aumist religion, better known in France under the name of the “Mandarom cult”. What led you to undertake this somewhat unusual work?

It was not I who decided to study what the media call “the Mandarom cult”, which is in fact the Aumist religion. It was a colleague who had suggested it to me. I knew nothing of these groups; it was not a subject that particularly interested me. But a colleague had suggested I do it, and I was very reluctant at the start — because I was inside the media’s ideology; I thought these were not proper people, perhaps dangerous ones; indeed I remember telling my secretary on no account to give my telephone number to anyone, still less my address; I was afraid people might come and harm my daughter… Yet I watch rather little television, but I was marked all the same by the rumours. So, there it is — that is how I began to ask myself about the pertinence of studying this group. I carried out the study, and I do not regret it. I discovered people about whom I had known nothing, and it interested me — it was altogether interesting. And then I tried to write up the results of what I had discovered, so that those who wish to could inform themselves about what this so-called “Mandarom” group is.

What would you say about the context in which your study of the Mandarom took place?

Yes — that is rather amusing, because when I undertook this study, all my colleagues were very pleased that I was studying “a cult”. Everyone applauded. And when I began to give my first results, and what I was saying had nothing to do with what the media say — because I was not seeing the same thing at all, because the media do not go there; the journalists who have spent one hour there are the rarest of the rare among the quantity of journalists who have talked about the Mandarom — then things changed. Colleagues, institutions, tried to bring pressure to bear so that I would stop this research.

But of course I did not stop, because I think it would not have been ethical to stop: I had to tell the truth of what I was seeing.

For example, people said to me: “But do you not see locked-up children?” Obviously I saw no locked-up children, since there are none. So either I was going to invent them, or I told the truth: I see no locked-up children. And then the media, my colleagues, the institutions positioned themselves against this research: for example, the project of a colloquium, for which I already had the agreement of French and foreign sociologists of religion, was blocked by the president of the University of Aix-en-Provence. Several publications were censored from books or from academic journals of the highest level, quite simply because something other than the truth was expected of me. The truth disturbed.

Is your book on the Mandarom, « Un ethnologue au Mandarom », published by PUF, really objective — did you not defend certain interests?

When I began this research I knew nothing about the question of cults, because it did not interest me. And when I went there, I applied a method — the ethnologists’ method, the one I used when I studied merchant seamen, when I studied the Gurunsi, a population in Africa. That is to say, the most objective method possible. And I defy anyone to find in my book, or in my articles, any elements of subjectivity.

What interest could I have had in writing this book? I am far removed from that group; I did not know them. My colleagues battered me whenever I did not say what they expected me to say. In fact, I had only one interest in writing this book: that of being able to look at myself every morning in a mirror and say — you have done your work. My work, which consists in saying what I saw during years of observation.

Because I did not go there for a week or a fortnight — which would already be far more than the journalists, who go for an hour, when they go at all. I went there regularly for four years, and afterwards I went irregularly, and I continue to have contacts with them. So the result of my work is years of observation.

They could not hide children from me when I went there — it is not true; they could not put them in cupboards every time I came; I would turn up unannounced, at certain times, towards the end of my research. It is impossible. So I applied the ethnologists’ method, which is the most objective possible. When I went to the Mandarom, throughout those years, I was not the academic in a tie with a little notebook: I was in overalls, I planted trees with them, I did manual work with them. After a week of working with someone planting trees, or making cement, people forget you as an academic; little by little, they begin to talk to you. But that did not last a week, it did not last a month, nor several months, but several years. So after several years — and it is my profession — I claim to have really pierced through to elements of the truth of this group.

Now, to know everything about a group is impossible. A husband does not know everything about his wife, and vice versa. How would you expect me to know the truth of a whole group of people? No — of course, no one can claim that.

But in any case, I can say that I did a genuinely objective piece of research.

How did the media receive your work?

Before the book came out with the Presses Universitaires de France, twenty-seven journalists had said they were interested in the book. Some came to interview me, came to film me, to record me; some wrote pieces — and twenty-seven were censored by their editorial offices. That is our democracy. That is to say: as soon as you do not say the things they want you to say, well, they censor.

I was censored! Twenty-seven journalists were unable to do their work.

And when I say journalists, these were very small papers but also national magazines, television channels — small ones and very big ones, among the biggest; and not the ones people think of as the most intellectual, which did not censor; some of those ranked among the best censored as well; I was censored by big dailies and by regional dailies, by national dailies and by local dailies.

So this censorship exists; it has existed also in the scientific literature since, as I said earlier, a sociologists’ journal censored me, university presses censored me.

Clumsily, the head of one university press wrote to me, literally: “Scientifically, I have nothing to reproach you with.” Well then — if my text has nothing reproachable about it on the scientific level, what am I being reproached with? It is with telling the truth — a truth that does not concord with what the media say.

The media are the sinews of war; it is they who make the rain and the fine weather, who can launch rumours, true or false. That is the real power in our society. If the media have an interest — because it makes for ratings, because it works, etc. — in manufacturing fear with the groups called cults as its object, well, they will do it, and it will work; people will go along. I could develop heaps of examples that demonstrate it. From the moment the media say it, people think it is true; even if, in the abstract, they know these media deceive them, concretely, when they watch, they acquiesce; they say yes. And that is the problem.

Do you still pursue ethnological studies today of the kind you made of the Mandarom?

No. I have stopped doing studies like the one I did on the Mandarom. I tried to do another one, on the electoral choices of the followers of several spiritual groups, but I had very few responses. Very few groups replied — only two answered my request — so I dropped it; it is a study I shall not do. And besides, I no longer want to do any, because I consider I have paid a great deal, I have given a great deal; this research cost me very dear. I paid for this research out of my salary — you know, an academic does not earn a fortune. So I paid for my research on the Mandarom out of my own pocket, because I received nothing to do it. You really have to want to, to do it. So today I say to myself: I have done my duty; I wrote that book on the Mandarom, I wrote plenty of articles, I took enormous blows because I told the truth. I defy anyone to tell me I did not tell the truth. Today I consider I have done my duty; I am moving on to other things.

And I prevent young researchers from doing work on spiritual groups, because I know they will never make a career and they will be prevented from working. They will not be able to make a career. So as long as the situation is what it is, I discourage them from doing it. I think it is for people who are well anchored in the profession, like me, to do it. But nobody wants to, because it is too risky.

Since the publication of your book on the Mandarom, you have been led to speak about the subject of cults to many people. What is the attitude of academic circles on this subject? How do the audiences at your lectures, or your students, react — and why, in your view?

There is a different reception of my work depending on the audience. When I speak to the general public at lectures, as I sometimes do, if there are no anti-cult militants in the room, things go well. People are reticent — that is normal, and it is desirable that they should have a critical mind. They question themselves, they ask me questions, they try to corner me. And then, after a while, in the majority of cases, they realize that they have been “stuffed”, as the vulgar phrase goes, and that they were wrong to believe the media, once again.

If, on the other hand, there is someone from ADFI in the room, or someone from an anti-cult association, then in general they know how to sow disorder, in such a way as to try to destabilize the lecturer and in any case to disrupt the lecture — because it is easy to assert things.

When I am with my students, things are equally simple: there is trust and mutual respect between us, and the students ask me questions, wonder, are rightly astonished at what I say, since I go against the dominant opinion, against the dominant rumour. But over time they do some reading, and they begin to understand, after a while, that there has been cheating and that they were not in the truth. And they question themselves; they try to learn more.

As for my colleagues — there was not one attitude among my colleagues; there were several. But let us say the majority attitude was a fairly strong rejection at the time my book came out, because there were articles in the press that ran against me: my colleagues read the press, and I am thinking in particular of the newspaper Le Monde, which had really dragged me through the mud — while contriving, moreover, to prevent me from exercising a right of reply. Let us say my colleagues were very reticent, at the least. Some sent me congratulations on my work, but they were a minority.

And then things changed; I was able to explain myself, and some who were hostile to my work when the book came out in 2002 have since completely changed their attitude, have invited me to come and speak in seminars, and have understood that there was something there different from what they had initially believed — and that I had remained the person I have always been: someone who is absolutely unbelieving, a total miscreant, but respectful of the various systems of thought from the moment they respect the dignity of women and men.

Has your work been drawn upon by the various parliamentary bodies and State organisms that have examined the question of cults?

It is rather enigmatic that the MILS — the Interministerial Mission for the Fight against Cults, or the MIVILUDES today — solicit extremely few colleagues. Except for a few colleagues whose work goes in the direction of the media. But otherwise, the researchers who move away from the media — as is the very nature of researchers: we work with different methods, we are not in a hurry, our work lasts years, we go deep, we go to people’s homes, we live with them, for a very long time; a journalist does not do that — those researchers were not solicited by the MILS, and one may be astonished at it.

Just as one may be astonished that there are substantial State funds for fighting the cults: if what are called cults are a danger, how do you explain that the State does not finance research on those groups? Never has the State said: “We are going to issue a call for proposals” — as there are calls for proposals for understanding the problems of immigration, of delinquency, of violence, etc. There are calls for proposals. Money is put up, and academics or researchers are sought who would undertake scientific studies of those questions. How to explain that on the question of cults there has never been a penny? It is interesting. It means the State does not want to know.

When I had a colloquium project on the question of cults, I asked the MILS whether they would be willing to finance a colloquium like that, because it was a work of objective reflection on the question. The MILS said: “No, we do not finance that kind of thing.” That is interesting, all the same. It raises a question. People ought to wonder about that.

It would seem that the MIVILUDES has a somewhat more open attitude towards ethnological and sociological studies. Do you think this openness translates into a change on the problem of cults?

The MILS fought against “the cults”. The MIVILUDES fights against “dérives sectaires” or groups “of a cultish character”.

If someone in France is capable of telling me what a cult is, that would be good — because there is no sociological definition of what a cult is. I have written on this; I have demonstrated that the word cult means nothing. It meant something at a certain period, and certain sociologists — renowned sociologists of the last century — wrote on the question. But today, given the sociological context, it no longer means anything.

But then — a cultish group, what is that? Is it the UMP? Is it a group of footballers who refuse to integrate a new player? Really, I do not know — a cultish group is anything and everything. Whence the extremely grave danger of this qualification, of this way of putting things: “cultish group”. It can never be defined rigorously and sociologically; it is unthinkable. By definition, it means nothing. And since it means nothing, anyone at all can be put into it. So any group, of any kind whatsoever, can become a “cultish group” if one wants to make trouble for it.

Whence the difficulty of pinning down this formulation, and its dangerousness — for anyone at all may be taxed tomorrow with being a cult. Whence the imperative necessity of questioning this matter of the cults — for everyone, even those who are very far from spirituality, far from those groups; one must question it, because it is truly a political tool of repression, an extremely grave one.

I once put a question to an official of ADFI, the Association for the Defence of the Family and the Individual. I asked him: “If I gathered students together every week, telling you that every week we dance around a book by Lévi-Strauss, what would you think of it?” Well, believe me, that gentleman did not say to me: “You should see a psychiatrist”; he did not say to me: “Why do you do that?” No. He said to me: “You would be on the point of becoming a cult.” Which means that because I am not within the normal, within the norm, within correct thinking, I am stigmatized as a cult. So one may say: Mr Duval, if he does that — supposing it were true, obviously — is a cult, or is a cultish group. Because it is even vaguer, one will say: “cultish group”.

Anyone at all can be catalogued as a “cultish group”. And indeed, political groups of the radical left have been catalogued as cultish groups — I am thinking of Lutte Ouvrière; I am thinking of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, which had militants carted off by the police while they were handing out leaflets, because anti-cult orders were used —; people involved in hazing at Arts et Métiers have been described as a cult; a hard-rock band has been described as a cult, etc. Anyone at all can enter this category, and I say: there — careful; we are in the situation of a political repression, of a possible political repression, which is grave for all citizens. That is why I call on all citizens to reflect on this question.

What message would you give to the actors of the fight against dérives sectaires, and notably the MIVILUDES?

If I could be heard by the MIVILUDES, or if there could be public debates — because you will have noticed that there has never been a televised debate between the MIVILUDES and social-science researchers whose attitudes are hostile to the MIVILUDES; that has never been seen, nor with the MILS. There is no will for debate in the public arena, obviously. Indeed, I was refused a public debate with the head of an anti-cult association, not long ago.

I think I would say to them — to those people of the MIVILUDES — that their fight is a fight for a State moving towards a totalitarian mode of functioning. That is to say, they are fighting for the control of thoughts. Thoughts that are religious in appearance — but it is not only religious thoughts. There is an ever greater normalization of our society. It is true in the religious domain, it is true in other domains, and this normalization seems to me extremely dangerous: diversity is being prevented from existing, and the MIVILUDES — its fight is exactly that: to prevent the diversity of beliefs. I think it is extremely dangerous, and it is something that goes in the direction of non-democracy, of the advent of a totalitarianism towards which we are moving at an increasing pace. Because to say that spiritual groups are dangerous is to prompt the installation of ever greater controls. We now have cameras in public squares, as Orwell wrote in 1984. Twenty years ago people would have laughed if you had said that; they would have said you were paranoid. Yet today we are at that period, where there are greater and greater controls. And now, like Big Brother, there is an attempt to control thoughts, to control people’s belief systems.

That is why I fight against this; I think it is extremely dangerous socially.

When you look at how many people, cults, groups have been caught out by the courts for misdeeds, for offences, you see that it is derisory in relation to the number of groups. Indeed, that annoys them, at the MIVILUDES — because they can see there is no object. There is no object.

Could you draw a comparison between the reception given in France to new religious movements and what you have been able to see, similar or different, in other countries?

The cult-hunt is fairly typically French; it is different in other countries, and it does not exist in a certain number of countries. So one may wonder — “why is that”, obviously. I have looked for the causes; I had trouble finding them. And in the end, one may say that in France it is our axis of evil. In the United States they do not need the cults; the movements called cults — because for me, “cult”, once again, means nothing — in the United States are free to believe what they wish. They do not need that, since they have another axis of evil, which is terrorism, with everything Bush developed. We do not have that axis of evil, so our axis of evil à la française is the cults. And if you speak of the cults in the street, people will tell you: “oh yes, that is evil.” So it is a catch-all into which everything is put. Into it go: drugs, brainwashing, child abduction, children locked away, sexual orgies, what else? — economic and financial extraction, etc. It is our axis of evil.

Why is it in the interest of the politicians of this country, men and women, to continue the fight against what they call the cults? Since we can see there is no object — since the offences are insignificant in number and in kind, there is no object.

It is because the fight against the cults manufactures collective fear. People are afraid of the cults. “They have very likeable faces, but they are going to brainwash people — above all the weakest, the children, etc.; the danger is terrible.” The manufacture of collective fear is a political ingredient of the first order, insofar as, when there is a collective fear, the masses can be manipulated in an unequalled way. Look at what was done in the United States by stirring fear with terrorism — putting everyone in the same bag, moreover, since it went beyond reason. It was no longer a fight against terrorism that was at stake; it was a fight to make a political point of view prevail which justified repression in every direction.

Well, in France it is the same thing. We did not start the Iraq war, of course, because we do not fight with fear founded on terrorism, but with fear founded on the cults. And this fear means that people agree, from the moment they are afraid, to accept retreats of democracy — in their own interest, they believe, since it will make it possible to protect them. So, since it makes it possible to protect them, well, people will go as far as to say: the doctor’s professional secrecy — perhaps it should be set in parentheses, because that might make it possible to fight cults, etc. etc.

Collective fear makes it possible to roll back democracy with a conjuring trick — that is, by managing to obtain the assent of a majority of our fellow citizens. And that is the great victory of the anti-democrats: managing to have the approval of the majority of our country’s population for rolling back democracy in order the better to fight the cults. Without anyone asking the question: “But what is a cult? What are these people?” There are only ever partisan debates in the media, which do not open our minds but close them.

That card has been played in France because it works well, it sells well, there are relay associations — even if they cost the State dearly, because they receive substantial budgets, of course, which serve no research purpose at all, as I have already told you. In France there is a need to provoke fears in order to reinforce the political system at work. Whether it is of the right or of the left is not the question; the springs of policy are more or less the same, and we have seen that it was more or less the same thing with the socialist government as with the current Raffarin government.

What do you think of the public authorities, which at the same time promote the HALDE (High Authority for the Fight against Discrimination) and continue to rely on a body like the MIVILUDES? Are you optimistic about the action of a body like the HALDE?

No, I am not at all optimistic about what the State is putting in place — none of these bodies seems to me worthy of trust — and I think the only optimism one can have is the awakening of people’s consciences, so that they say: “No — stop.” If people say nothing, the State will continue, as it has been doing for a good while, to be more and more repressive, and that is something that worries me greatly. It is something over which one must be vigilant. What is happening is extremely grave, and I am not at all confident — because from the moment this system serves political interests, there is no reason for it to stop. There are people whose interest it is, at once economic — because they receive subsidies from the State to fight those groups — and, besides, they also gain credit, because they become almost heroes doing battle against Evil, with a capital E. So I do not believe there is anything to be expected from those bodies.

I believe rather in the ant’s work that consists in awakening consciences, in saying: careful — we are on a path that is taking us into a domain where we shall be more and more deprived of democracy, as exists today. There are pockets of totalitarianism in our society, and if we do not take care, if consciences are not awakened, it will go ever further.

It is the duty of every citizen who has become aware of this to share that awareness around them. It is a duty.

I think one cannot look at oneself in a mirror if, from the moment one has become aware of the danger, one does not do what one can do to move things forward in this domain.