The Archives of Maître Paturel — Part 2: The 'Blunders' of the Gest-Guyard Report

The archives of Maître Paturel

Part 2 — The “blunders” of the Gest-Guyard report

Read the presentation of Maître Paturel and his archives in Part 1

Many documents in Maître Paturel’s archives concern the parliamentary inquiry report on cults of 22 December 1996.

Reading them inspired us to go back to the full text of the report and to write a new commentary on it.

“Cults and the right of persecution — the reasons for a controversy”, a text by Massimo Introvigne, recounts the shock produced by the publication on 10 January 1996 of the Gest-Guyard report among the international community of scholars studying new religious movements.

Massimo Introvigne, an Italian sociologist of international renown, retraces the various media events and publications that marked the beginning of 1996, in a controversy that pitted the deputies who signed the report against academics, jurists and representatives of the established churches.

One can read there that the very first line of the report already contains a dismaying imprecision, since it describes as “Davidsonians” the Davidians who were the victims of the Waco tragedy (both names exist but designate very different groups).

He also tells us that the term “Piaggio”, found on page 69 of the National Assembly’s parliamentary inquiry report, designates an Italian motorcycle brand which the report’s author confused with the term “Plagio”, the name of a law for the repression of mental manipulation.

This is what are commonly called “blunders” (bourdes), that is to say “gaffes”, or gross errors, generally unintentional.

The report also contains numerous inaccuracies as to the places, names, dates or doctrines of the accused movements. Some of these inaccuracies are detailed in Professor Introvigne’s text.

These errors are partly explained by the haste that seems to have presided over the assembly of the report, as witnessed by Patrick Rougelet, a former commissioner of the Renseignements Généraux, in his book “R.G., la Machine à Scandales” (“R.G., the Scandal Machine”), where he explains the conditions in which the report that served as the basis for the deputies’ work was drawn up:

“The R.G. did not have much on the question. In a rush, a ‘report’ had to be fabricated. One official took on the job of compiling work done by others, notably by the gendarmes… The R.G. report on cults then flooded every newsroom, as a reference document.”

We are now going to examine another type of “blunder” in the report, choosing the primary, etymological sense of the term, which comes from the Provençal “borda”, meaning a lie, a “fib”.

As a reminder, these blunders were intended to make people “swallow” the report’s conclusions, which can be summarised as follows:

The new forms of spirituality that have been emerging since the 1960s–70s in the West “amount to a veritable scourge” (1) against which everything possible should be deployed. (see the CICNS film)

These lies also served to justify listing under the defamatory term “dangerous cults” (and delivering up to public opprobrium) a list of 173 movements whose dangerousness is in no way proven, as we shall see.

A “blunder” of the kind the report contains by the dozen, taken from page 48.

“To analyse the dangers posed by a certain number of cults, the Commission relied principally on two sources of information which offer the greatest guarantees of objectivity, namely judicial decisions and the data collected by the Renseignements Généraux. It also used, to a lesser extent and with the requisite caution, the direct testimony of former members.”

These are peremptory and unfounded assertions which have the appearance of knowledge and rationality but do not withstand serious investigation and analysis:

We saw above what reliability could be granted to the data supplied by the RG. As for their objectivity, it appears quite hypothetical when one knows the past and the origin of this police force, created under Vichy, which is better described as a mercenary of the State than as a body for sociological or theological study.

In fact, the data contained in the report on this score are decried by all the academic specialists in these questions, whom the commission, moreover, omitted to hear.

Let us return to the third sentence of the paragraph:

“It also used, to a lesser extent and with the requisite caution, the direct testimony of former members.”

This is a lie on several counts: the calumnious and often insulting testimonies of former members are cited in the report at every turn, without the slightest circumspection. Moreover, the RG drank in their information at the well of the anti-cult associations, which have based their approach almost exclusively on the testimony of apostates.

Finally, the least of “precautions” would have been to cross-check these testimonies against those of members of these movements. The “investigators” never did so. The few quotations from spiritual teachers, or from adherents of the designated groups or associations, are presented only when dressed in derision.

A little further on in the report, one finds the chapter:

1.- Numerous and varied illegalities

From all the judicial decisions to which the Commission had access, notably those supplied by the Direction of Criminal Affairs and Pardons of the Ministry of Justice, it emerges that many cults have, over the past ten years, been guilty of illegalities.

This is a fresh piece of dishonesty, a lie by omission. It is obvious that the question that immediately comes to the mind of any minimally critical reader, on reading “numerous illegalities”, is: “How many?”

The answer is: “a derisory figure that would have refuted the report’s theses”.

Simple common sense is enough to be convinced of it.

If it had been established that these groups had been the object of significant convictions, duly recorded in the registers of the courts, demonstrative cases and figures would have been put forward in this report. Those figures would have been used well before its publication by the anti-cult activists or by the French government, which had been questioned by the UN since the 1990s about its coercive actions against certain spiritual minorities.

Yet nothing of the sort: no quantitative report of the offences committed by the said “dangerous cults” appeared in 96, neither in the annals of the anti-cult outfits, nor in the reports that preceded it, nor even to this day in any document of the MILS, MIVILUDES or any other organ of the administration in charge of the “fight against dérives sectaires”.

People content themselves with speaking of “many cases”, “numerous convictions”, “many offences” and particular cases…

For want of convincing figures, a few legal cases are therefore cited and detailed from page 48 to page 53 of the report.

We submit to you here, from among the fifteen cases cited, those concerning the most serious offences against persons.

We investigated certain cases that lacked precision (2). The information we gathered is added in blue; the report’s text is in green.

Unlike the Assembly’s report, we have made these cases anonymous, so as not to cause harm to the persons concerned.

Without wishing to minimise the real suffering that some of these cases may represent, we ask you to bear in mind that this is therefore the worst that the “investigators” could find over ten years of activity of 172 groups representing roughly 160,000 people (according to the report).

First case cited: (…) thus the Tribunal de grande instance of Versailles established, in a decision of 8 and 9 February 1995 (no. 234), that Mr and Mrs M., the leaders of the cult “X”, had been guilty, among other things, of violence against a minor under fifteen, of abduction and of unlawful confinement.

Convictions for “Deliberate violence against a minor under 15 having caused incapacity of eight days or less”.

• A conviction to 400,000 francs in damages for the director of a residential centre where a person died of an epileptic seizure.

Extract from the judgment: “The victim had taken the decision to reduce her medication, then to stop it at the risk of compromising her state of health; the defendants at no point advised her of the need for a medical admission examination, which would in all likelihood have contraindicated the withdrawal cure; it is inconceivable that the victim could have been accepted without that examination and without a serious interview, despite her statements about her state of health and her epilepsy.”

-: Illegal practice of medicine.

“‘The Good Shepherd’, claiming the title of bishop (he had been ordained as such by ecclesiastics no longer obeying Rome after the Second Vatican Council), claimed to heal or relieve his ‘faithful’ by words, prayers, layings-on of hands, the use of a pendulum, and practices of exorcism and curse-lifting.”

No. 4: Conviction for failure of care: The court held that the parents had “gravely compromised, by lack of necessary direction, the health and safety of [their] child Yoann” and thereby fell under Article 357.1 of the Penal Code, by sending him at the age of six and a half to India, to a school in Dharamsala run by the followers of this cult.”

The indictment followed a complaint by the child’s grandparents, who missed him and worried about him. The parents, sentenced to three months suspended, retained custody of the child.

No. 5: A divorce case: The mother is a Jehovah’s Witness; extract from the judgment:

” It is certainly not for the Court to pronounce on the benefits or harms of the cult (…) The education of the children cannot indeed consist of an indoctrination based on a particularly cataclysmic vision of the world from which only the cult’s followers would be spared, but on the contrary in an awakening of the mind, an opening to all fields of knowledge and all disciplines, as well as to relations with others without discrimination of race, religion or ideas. (…)” In the present state of affairs, in order to preserve both the present and the future of these two children (…), it appears necessary to fix their habitual residence with their father, who will exercise parental authority. (…) ”

• Conviction for defamation: (…) an article in this publication, titled “A thought militia” and devoted to the Association de Défense de la Famille et de l’Individu, reported abductions and unlawful confinements committed by members of that association, and notably the committal to a psychiatric hospital in 1991 of a Scientologist from Marseille, carried out with the complicity of J.M. Abgrall, psychiatrist, whereas these facts were never proven.

• A case of “public defamation, treated as insult”: ” (…), for having written, with reference to the ADFI: ’(…) It seems to me vital for freedom of religion and for freedom of opinion to denounce and to stop the actions of this fascistic group which fires on anything that moves that is new or different…”

• A case of deception: The Cour de cassation moreover held, in a ruling of 15 November 1995 (A. Pouteau), that the company SARL Wide, of which Alain Pouteau was the manager and which the investigation showed to be “under the obedience of the Church of Scientology”, “operated a training centre for sales professions and had advertisements placed in the press and circular letters sent to mayors in which it undertook to procure for candidates, at the end of their training, a position in a serious company”, was guilty of deception, because it “was not in a position to guarantee jobs to its trainees.”

• A case of “breach of trust”: The famous affair of the cult of F- illustrates perfectly, moreover, the breach of trust committed by cult leaders to the detriment of their followers. In this instance, they improperly claimed the title of priest, which had enabled them to extort from their faithful a significant amount of donations.”

Extract from the judgment: “the court finds that the accused cannot claim the title of ‘priests’ or ‘bishops’ of the Roman Catholic religion”. But on the other hand, the court, relying on the new statements of the defence witnesses, who affirm that they were perfectly aware of the fathers’ canonical situation, holds that they were not deceived. Consequently, the offence of fraud not being made out, the court acquitted the accused on the fraud charge.

You will have been able to observe that prejudice is present in several cases — that is to say, the magistrate speaks of a cult, which implies that he makes himself an accomplice of the pejorative judgement carried by the complainant; that religious beliefs are sometimes subjected to value judgements, in contempt of any principle of laïcité; and finally, that two of the cases are episodes of the war waged by anti-cult associations against certain groups and cannot objectively be taken as proof of the supposed intrinsic dangerousness of spiritual minorities. ( See also: Judges and cults )

Here are a few more of the report’s blunders. The foregoing underlines the calumnious and hypocritical character of these assertions.

(…) cases of dérives sectaires are multiplying. The damage caused to the victims is particularly serious (ruin, dementia, suicide…) because, in this type of cult, the techniques of mental manipulation are extremely sophisticated.

(…) The commission therefore took great care not to lump together all existing spiritual groups. It considered that it should confine itself to examining the harms caused by the dangerous cults alone. And this, the better to identify the means of combating them.

Everything is there — the Kafkaesque absurdity of an obstinate and peremptory illogic.

In other times it would have been said: “They are possessed by the demon”, torture producing the confessions that stood as proof of the assertion.

Today, justifications are supplied in the language of science and rationality, but they are just as empty of meaning and objective reality.

For example, the first case mentioned, of “violence against a minor”, or that of “failure of care”, should be set against the 2005 report of the Observatoire national de l’Action Sociale décentralisée on “child protection”, which records, for 2004, and for the whole French population, 19,000 children “victims of sexual abuse, physical or psychological violence, or serious neglect”.

That same report identified the “Factors at the origin of the danger” across all the “reports produced”. (3)

“Educational failings of the parents 47,500, i.e. 50% of children reported

Couple conflicts and separation 28,500, i.e. 30% of children reported

Psycho-pathological problems of the parents 12,350, i.e. 13% of children reported

Alcohol or drug dependency 11,400, i.e. 12% of children reported

Illness, death of a parent, emotional shocks 6,650, i.e. 7% of children reported

Unemployment, financial difficulties 12,350, i.e. 13% of children reported

Living environment, housing 7,600, i.e. 8% of children reported

Drifting, marginality 3,800, i.e. 4% of children reported

Other 11,400, i.e. 12% of children reported”

No trace of any observed correlation between “cults”, “dérives sectaires”, or even spirituality or religion, and the mistreatment of children. These words do not even appear anywhere in the entire ODAS report.

The pitiful Gest-Guyard report is still today, directly or indirectly, the “Bible” of anti-cult activists and journalists. The anti-cult associations subsidised by the ministries, and certain deputies who were already members of the 1996 commission of inquiry, were in 2006 still demanding funding and the attention of every organ of the State to fight the cults that “regiment children” — and they are followed in this absurd psychosis not only by the media but also by the public authorities and the greater part of the population.

It is likely that one day the whole of the French State’s so-called policy of “fighting dérives sectaires” will be described as a blunder, in the most common sense of the term — a gross error, in view of the vaster whole constituted by the history of mankind; an unintentional error, in the sense that those who perpetuate it are blind and deaf to the consequences of their acts for society as a whole.

(1) Page 89 of the report

(2) With the following corollary: any imprecision in the figures or in the description of the facts may conceal a datum that would harm the demonstration of the dangerousness of “cults”.

This corollary, as regards the Gest-Guyard report as a whole, proved very fruitful.

(3) These statistics correspond to the reports produced, that is to say to “situations at risk”, and not to established harm.

Other articles:

Part 3: caricatures and dark designs

Part 4: The Horus case and that of the conscientious objectors.