The MIVILUDES Descends on the Moulin des Vallées, Accused of Being a "Cult"

This CICNS field report from December 2009 documents, through the voices of its residents, the MIVILUDES visit to the Moulin des Vallées, a small lay Buddhist monastery in the village of Saint-Malon-sur-Mel in Brittany, founded around the teaching of Frère Abel Touzet. The mission was led at the time by its president, the former magistrate Georges Fenech. In a series of first-person accounts, members of the community describe the visit of October 2009, the press and television coverage that followed, and their fears for the community’s social projects. All characterisations of officials and journalists in what follows are the speakers’ own.

CICNS report. (English translation of the report published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 23 December 2009. The French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation; passages the machine could not reliably hear are marked [inaudible].)

Interviewer: On 22 October, we received by e-mail a call for help, accompanied by a scan. The monastery of the Moulin des Vallées had been the scene of a raid by the MIVILUDES, the interministerial mission for vigilance and combat against dérives sectaires, attached to the Prime Minister. A strong-arm swoop of the kind the current president of this mission has made a habit of.

[Participant] (president of the MIVILUDES): I note that there are communities committing dérives sectaires which may be liable to cause harm. I go there, and I fully intend to go there, and I will go at the very least to every département.

Interviewer: This type of action is part of an increasingly repressive policy towards spiritual minorities, and these interventions must be questioned both on the legal level and as to the dangers they pose to our fundamental liberties. Those who were at the Moulin des Vallées that day testify to a brutal intrusion that left them shocked and bewildered.

[Voice]: All of a sudden I saw eight people arrive, a camera on one shoulder.

[Voice]: I experienced it a little like a raid — that is, Mr Fenech is quite incisive in his way of introducing himself, in his way of entering. He imposes a relationship a little like an examining magistrate’s, if I may put it that way, so that you are immediately caught somewhat off guard, emotionally shocked, because already there are ten of them, they arrive somewhat in force, I would simply say, without really asking permission.

[Voice]: I don’t even know whether I gave permission to film, because it was so brutal that I didn’t realise what was happening.

[Voice]: I remember, I was in my big room near the stove, and I was peeling apples.

[Voice]: I was present; I was working on iconography.

[Voice]: I was at the far end of the grounds; we were burning wood that had been cut in the park. A gentleman comes towards me and introduces himself. I didn’t really understand what he was saying to me. He quoted an acronym at me, I heard it. He said “ude” at the end — that’s all I remember.

[Voice]: We saw straight away that Mr Fenech was really the important person, with his entourage of people in attendance [inaudible ?].

[Voice]: I still had this idea that they really were people who had come to conduct an inquiry. So, well, I answered the questions.

[Voice]: So we did a tour of the property; questions were asked. Now, Mr Fenech in particular has stereotyped questions that come back cyclically.

[Voice]: There was a group of two or three people who came to see me on the side, saying: “But you know, we too are lesbians [inaudible ?], we are local people. Is everything going well for you as far as the family goes, your children? Do you have children?” Yes, I have children. “Are they in school?” Yes, they are in school, and in fact things are going very well for them.

[Voice]: I went to have a coffee. And then I saw straight away that there was something a little peculiar, that the questions were very slanted and that there was no openness.

[Voice]: It is always targeted.

[Voice]: The same thing — I think there are always the same reference points: whether the children are in school; the notion of health, and what is offered with regard to health — hence the notion of the illegal practice of medicine. And each time, Éric or Véronique would go onto that ground — that is, the people who actually live here — they would cut them off, they would ask another question, they would invite one of his collaborators to ask questions. And we felt there was an irritation, an impatience.

[Voice]: Mr Fenech is also very peremptory and systematically cuts off the answers.

[Voice]: Then it rotates — that is, it isn’t a single person asking the questions; Mr Fenech moves from one person to another. And meanwhile, as soon as he has changed interlocutor, it’s the other people who come and ask you questions. So it’s a permanent turnover.

[Voice]: His acolytes asked questions in turn, each in a quite specific field. And there I felt a malaise. I sensed that the answers mattered little to them.

[Voice]: The children don’t go to school: you’re a cult. Your children go to school: you’re a cult, and you’re trying to hide behind the fact that your children go to school; it’s a cover. So everything is interpreted so as to lead towards one very specific angle.

[Voice]: And then came the truly dishonest questions about the money Frère Abel was earning off our backs. Mr Fenech was insinuating that Frère Abel was dishonest, and that he was a member of the Order of the Solar Temple.

[Voice]: At the moment of leaving, Mr Fenech was a little irritated — well, you could feel there was a kind of irritation at not having got something that interested him. Well, there it is; one may think that.

[Voice]: Afterwards, we went through various states among ourselves, the three or four of us who were there. And we put down on paper all the questions they had asked. That seemed important to us. We made that assessment, just like that. And then I went back off to my fort, and I wasn’t well.

[Voice]: I thought they really were people who were there for a genuine meeting, in fact, who really wanted to meet us and really see what was happening in this place. And as the visit went on, I came to realise… There was a real bitterness, saying: but in fact, what we say doesn’t interest them at all. They already have their ideas about what they have come to see. And then… well, above all Mr Fenech. The other people were more respectful. We had interesting conversations with one or two people.

[Voice]: I really felt that they wanted to see what was going on. But then, I don’t know what can be done in a two-hour visit.

[Voice]: To have been, perhaps, so naive — and not to have been respected. I think that, above all, is what hurt us the most.

[Voice]: They come with a preconception. And whatever Éric may say, whatever Frère Abel may say, it doesn’t matter. The verdict has been reached. They want to destroy us. They want to stop us.

Interviewer: In the days and weeks that followed, the members of the small community would live in suspense and in fear of the media fallout, and would try to react despite the anxieties affecting each one of them.

[Voice]: The fear in each of us — it certainly got to me at one point. And we are only just beginning to come out of that pressure, which was indeed applied in the month of October.

[Voice]: I arrived here the next day, in a heavy atmosphere. At first I did not realise what might happen.

[Voice]: When we met this lawyer, he told us clearly that the MIVILUDES had no business entering our home the way it did. It was not empowered to do so. And that is why letters went out to the prefect.

[Voice]: Afterwards, reading the article — which upset me less, the article [inaudible ?]. It looks innocuous like that, but it is full of insinuations, with a presentation — the flying saucer in the mist. There is something of… like a fantasy film, there is something that introduces suspicion into this article from the outset.

[Voice]: After all that, I found myself in that atmosphere, troubled again. [inaudible] That we cannot express ourselves, that we cannot live a certain freedom in this country. That really gave me pause.

[Voice]: I was somewhat frightened and indignant at what that article showed of the work that is done here. It was so little… It seemed to us perfectly… not false, but worse than that: not fair. It does not correspond at all to the spirit of the place.

[Voice]: There, I have the impression of having been deceived a second time, because I had really trusted that person who was beside me, that journalist from Le Parisien.

[Voice]: I took the step of sending a fax to the journalist — in any case, to the paper’s general director — to ask that the article due to appear be submitted to us before publication. And the next day, the article appeared in Le Parisien / Aujourd’hui en France without the paper having sent us the article beforehand, on the pretext that this was not done, that journalists had an ethics, that there was nothing to fear.

Interviewer: Anecdotal, but revealing of journalistic manipulation on the theme of cults: this photo comes from a magazine published by Frère Abel. The journalist took it out of its humorous context to give a demeaning image of the monastery. The malicious equation “spiritual community equals suicide”, propagated for 30 years by anti-cult activists, is invoked once again in this affair. Florent, a young man suffering from depression, took his own life at home two and a half years ago. Some time before, he had made a brief stay at the Moulin des Vallées. No charge, therefore, had been brought against the community. The link between this tragic event and the community was nevertheless invoked once again by Mr Fenech to justify his intrusion.

Interviewer: The day after the MIVILUDES raid, the journalist from Aujourd’hui en France revealed to a member of the community that the cameraman and the person accompanying him were employees of France 2, filming for the programme “Prise directe” — something Mr Fenech took good care not to mention.

[Voice]: It is odd, all the same, that a mission, a ministerial group, should come with cameramen. There, I would still have been a little surprised. But that is not what he told us, in fact. He told us: there you are, this gentleman is here to give an account of the work I do.

[Voice]: We said to ourselves that there we could be in danger, because what we had been able to say could really be… The film could be cut — something we had not imagined at the moment it happened. We could really be used.

[Voice]: I called France 2 back to find out what exactly was going on, and what it related to, and where it was heading. She tried to reassure me by telling me that there was an ethics, that there was nothing to worry about, and so on. Only, the title of the programme was “Les gens emportés disparus” (“people carried off, disappeared”) [inaudible ?].

Interviewer: A few weeks later, the script of the programme appeared in the listings and described a segment entitled “Le trou noir des sectes” (“the black hole of cults”), devoted to disappearances under influence. A script that already showed through in the questions put on 13 October by the France 2 journalist to Philippe.

[Participant] (France 2 journalist): But aren’t you under influence here? Aren’t you… [inaudible]

[Philippe]: Well, I remember my answer. I would have said that I think we are all under the influence of something. I am under the influence of my family; I am under the influence of my friends. We are all under influence. I mean, what does “influence” mean?

[Participant] (France 2 journalist): But how often do you come?

[Philippe]: I say: I come about one day a week. I say: but, by that measure, I can [inaudible ?]. I mean, it is an invitation to come on that date. But really, the debate was indeed about whether we were forced to be here.

[Voice]: We decided, in agreement with our lawyer, to refuse the publication of these images — or the broadcasting of these images. This was done by registered letters to the general management of France 2. And so, following the sending of these registered letters, the journalist telephoned here, telephoned us in anger, saying: but why did you send registered letters? It isn’t necessary. So, taking up more or less the same line as the journalist from Le Parisien: we have an ethics.

Interviewer: The segments of the programme’s section devoted to cults, broadcast on 17 November, therefore did not mention the Moulin des Vallées. But by conveying all the usual anti-cult clichés, they will have demonstrated that ethics is not, in reality, the first concern within the team of “Prise directe”, and that the community’s fears were well founded.

Interviewer: Political power, media and anti-cult activists: complicity, collusion… If any doubt could still remain, the following piece of information might sweep it away. Mr Fenech’s wife was hired by Le Parisien a year and a half ago to bring the paper’s circulation from 500,000 copies to 700,000 copies. [inaudible ?], Mr Fenech’s wife, has indeed been, since April 2007, deputy director for supplements and spin-off products at Le Parisien / Aujourd’hui en France — the only media outlet to have covered the MIVILUDES visit.

Interviewer: The monastery of the Moulin des Vallées is an atypical place, founded around the teaching of Frère Abel Touzet — philosopher, therapist, writer, and for 30 years a lay Buddhist monk.

[Voice]: I am not a Buddhist monk like, for example, Matthieu Ricard. We both depend on the same monastery, at Shechen, in Nepal. In the Tibetan tradition this is called being a lay monk. It spares you having to renounce the faith of your ancestors.

[Participant] (lay monk of the community): I am married to Adrienne, and she too is a lay Buddhist nun. I took vows with Tulku Pema Wangyal Rinpoché, who is our Tibetan master, [inaudible ?] Frère Abel and to myself. In the years 1997–98, with the people around us, we therefore looked for a place in France. This place became a monastery with the accompaniment of André Chouraqui, and a centre for therapeutic support under the patronage of Doctor Patch [inaudible ?]. It receives many people in difficulty.

[Participant] (member of the community): A woman from the village here, who made two suicide attempts two years ago — she found help here. She was offered work to do. Today, two years later, her condition is stable, since, together with her doctor, she has reduced her anxiolytics and her antidepressants, and she no longer takes anything.

[Voice]: One day — I had a little Panda — I put myself in front of a 38-tonne lorry. I visited it [inaudible ?] at the last moment. If I had not known Frère Abel, or the friends of the Moulin here, I would not be here today to tell you about it.

[Voice]: I am blind in my left eye. My right eye is not much fun either. I shot myself in the head in 1980. I come to the Moulin for all the retreats. Now I am a little more serene about all that. I am here practically every week. And I am learning to taste life, to taste friendship. This is a bit like my family here.

[Participant] (member of the community): The meaning of our association is a little bit that: to give back — to allow these people in difficulty to recover an autonomy, to recover an activity, to recover a family setting. With good right, we could call ourselves an ADFI. That is to say, if there is an association for the defence of the family and the individual, it is indeed in places like this one. That is all we do: defend the family and the individual.

Interviewer: The Moulin team has many social-action projects, which sometimes run up against rumour.

[Participant] (social worker): I remember a colleague, a social worker, who said to me: “This afternoon, I am going to see two people, I don’t know what, I am going to offer them [inaudible ?]. When I see places like yours, it’s interesting.” We offered days of work, of remotivation, to women in difficulty from the rural area. And the answer that came back, orally, was: “In case you should be a cult, we cannot take the risk.” That means that suspicion becomes truth. And there, I find that serious.

Interviewer: Véronique, a clinical psychologist specialising in psychiatry, is worried today about the consequences of the MIVILUDES raid for an already well-advanced retirement-home project.

[Véronique]: What we are proposing was a genuinely communal life, with each person having their own private space. There would really be an education in ageing well. This visit will surely have consequences for the completion of this project, because what we wanted to do with this house of the elders is that there would really be education.

[Voice]: For years I have been saying: come and inspect what goes on, come and see what goes on. Where it bothers me is that raids like these may endanger people who are fragile.

[Voice]: They have taken steps with lawyers. Anyway, I am following this very, very closely. It is important to me because… [inaudible]

[inaudible]