Sociology of the Cults in France: A France Culture Discussion with Esquerre, Iacub and Favret-Saada

Sociology of the Cults in France

France Culture programme – La suite dans les idées, by Sylvain Bourmeau – Tuesday 7 July 2009 – 11 a.m. to 12 noon (extracts from the programme)

Guests

Arnaud Esquerre.

Sociologist, attached to the group of political and moral sociology (GSPM) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales; he taught at Sciences Po Paris from 2005 to 2008. Author of La manipulation mentale : sociologie des sectes en France (Fayard, May 09)

Marcela Iacub.

Jurist and researcher at the CNRS. Author of numerous works, including Le crime était presque sexuel et autres essais de casuistique juridique (reissued by Flammarion, March 2009) and Par le trou de la serrure : histoire de la pudeur publique, XIXe - XXIe siècle (Fayard, 2008)

Jeanne Favret-Saada.

Ethnologist, director of studies at the École pratique des Hautes études, section of religious sciences. She has notably published Les Mots, la Mort, les Sorts (Gallimard, 1977), with Josée Contreras Le Christianisme et ses juifs (Le Seuil, 2004), and most recently Désorceler (Ed. de l’Olivier, 16 April 2009)

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La suite dans les idées today concerns a book by Arnaud Esquerre, La manipulation mentale, sociologie des sectes en France, which appears in the Histoire de la pensée collection at Fayard.

Arnaud Esquerre: Faced with an object like this one, the great question is obviously always to know who names this object and from what position.

I put “cult” in quotation marks because one of the problems of this question of the “cults”, in sociology, is that it was long treated by the sociology of religions, and therefore always attached to religion. We missed, in the analysis of the “cults” by sociology and the human sciences, a very important evolution that takes place in the 1970s, at a time when the expression “new cults” began to appear. What was changing was the manner in which they were designated and who designated them. Before the 1970s, the people who principally designated the “cults” were, in France, from the Catholic Church. One formulated what a “cult” was in relation to the Catholic Church and, to simplify, a “cult” was a false Church. The point of support was the practices of the Catholic Church or the texts to which it referred. One could say that the “cults” were groups that read the Bible badly.

In the mid-1970s, associations of victims of “cults” are set up and, at the beginning of the 1980s, the State takes over from the victims’ associations. From the moment when it is victims’ associations and when the State engages in the fight against the “cults”, the points of support change, because the State cannot say that a “cult” is people who read the Bible badly. That is more complicated to say, from the State’s point of view.

The point of support that is found is mental manipulation. A “cult” becomes, to simplify, people mentally manipulated by a guru.

It is thus that a new fight against the “cults” is set up. It designates “new cults” but, in reality, we find the expression “new cults” as early as the 19th century. The idea that one denounces “new cults” and proliferating “cults” is an absolutely recurrent discourse. Already the abbé Grégoire at the beginning of the 19th century, in his great Histoire des sectes, denounced a proliferation of “cults”.

That is the great rupture. From the moment when you change the conceptual point of support for designating the groups, you no longer designate the same groups either. By taking as a point of support a psychological concept, which is mental manipulation, you introduce two things:

On the one hand, people to give expert assessments of it. In relation to Scripture, you had theologians and priests. Here, mental manipulation will have to be assessed, so these will be professionals of the psyche, that is to say psychiatrists or psychologists. As a result, you also introduce the idea that the groups in which there is mental manipulation may be groups more linked to psychotherapy or, since it is a matter of mental manipulation, to politics or to a philosophical reflection. You draw into it combats that would seem quite strange if we placed ourselves before the 1970s, and which are in reality combats between professionals of the psyche — notably the idea that psychotherapy must be regulated.

Jeanne Favret-Saada: (…) I found it altogether interesting that a sociologist should be placed in exactly the situation I had been in with witchcraft, where it is a public, accusatory discourse that constituted the phenomenon. In witchcraft, a bewitched person never speaks of it and would never pronounce the word witchcraft. In the case of the “cults”, only the accusers of the “cults” speak of them. The people who are in a “cult” do not say: “I am a member of a cult”. They say: “I am a member of a community, of a group; I am the pupil of Mr So-and-so”.

I found very interesting the entirely original way (…) in which he constituted this phenomenon. His book consists in (…) dismantling entirely the public discourse and the discourse of authority, the discourse of accusation. He chose, which as an ethnologist I like very much, field situations, cases extremely well found in relation to the different elements of his deconstruction. Then we realise that not only is the official concept of “cult” totally deconstructed, but we see very well who the people are who seek to be in this type of group. They are very diverse and have very different objectives; some fall into extremely dangerous traps, for which laws exist that do not need to be the law on mental manipulation in order to get them out; and we see how the State manages in an extremely crude fashion, with services fighting one against the other, bills that never work quite well and that result in inapplicable texts. We see, which an ethnologist cannot do but which I read for the first time from a sociologist, a vision of the State at once as an enormous power but endowed with an indefinite capacity for entropy.

His analysis of the State seems to me absolutely essential and bound to found a school, in particular in sociology; but also, when one thinks of power, it is enough to say that there is power everywhere and that there is none anywhere. The way in which he shows it, perfectly localised and contradictory everywhere, is for me altogether fascinating.

Arnaud Esquerre: The important starting point was that one had to reflect on who designates the “cults”, and therefore to take seriously what the actors say. If people say that a “cult” has nothing to do with a Church, one must take that seriously. One must not tell oneself and absolutely connect, as is done in the sociology of religions, the “cults” to the Church, by saying that people are mistaken in speaking of “cults” where there are none. I start from exactly the inverse postulate, that is to say: we take seriously what people say.

The second difficulty was that the debate is extremely polarised. If you are not against the “cults”, that means you are for them, from the point of view of those who are against. I could not go into a “cult” and present only that point of view. That would mean that I would then place myself in a posture of strong denunciation, which did not correspond to what I wanted to do, or in something for which I would have been accused of naivety or of too great empathy. In order to be able to deconstruct what is happening, I had to hold all the points of view together. The sociological method I had to use was to take those who have relatives entering “cults”, those who fight the “cults” from within the State, and those who are in “cults”.

I took three types of group, in order to show the variations: a group that everyone agrees in calling a “cult”, the Church of Scientology; a group over which there is a conflict of interpretation, the Rose-Cross; and a group that nobody calls a “cult”, Narcotics Anonymous. I worked by holding all these points of view together, focusing on very precise elements, through cases which, indeed, are not much used in sociology but are much used in Law (…), in psychoanalysis, in ethnology and in anthropology. (…)

The other point was to pay great attention to language, (…) given that language has an enormous importance in designation through the question of the “cults”, and to reflect on how statements are formulated and who utters them. I was working in the line of an article by Luc Boltanski on denunciation, based on letters of denunciation to the newspaper Le Monde. The idea was: how does one succeed in an accusation of manipulation, for example; or: how are relations of force engaged through language? The relations of force are obviously very different according to whether one has with one, or mobilises, categories legally supported by the State, or whether you are all alone and are going against those types of category.

Marcela Iacub: Among its other qualities, I think this book can be very useful for making a history of that period of the revolution in mores of the 60s and 70s, in which there is indeed the setting in place of a new schema for organising life. (…) Perhaps that allows us to think about something rather curious: this society that was set in place in the 1970s — that is to say the family revolution, with all the new family and sexual rules, (…) — had begun in a way to be very anxious about something which, in my view, appears in this book: will one be able to organise society on the basis of new forms of life? For example, concerning the family, it is not simply the fact of being able to choose to be married, cohabiting or homosexual, but could one live several together? In my view, these questions of the revolution in mores, of multiplying forms of life, are a sort of unthinkable.

This book in any case gives matter for reflection on this question, because I think that it is in the end the legitimate forms of life, the family, that set about accusing the other forms of existence.

(…) I have followed the newspapers a little lately with the stories of the “cult” trials and, unfortunately, the journalists have not read Arnaud Esquerre’s book; it would have been very useful because the whole discourse around mental manipulation goes far beyond the question of the “cults”. There is a sort of calling into question of consent in numerous domains. The State considers that individuals are not capable of making choices. I quite agree that human liberty is always an extremely relative notion, but I think that a State that sets about protecting us against our own stupidity — that is to say the fact that we may have chosen things that are perhaps not good — and that then lets us go back on it, that really creates a very considerable arbitrariness. I think there is a sort of transfer of the theory of domination into the legal world, and people think that all that goes without saying, that it is normal, that someone said yes and in the end it is no… I am thinking of that story of the Scientology trial. That it should be abnormal, for example, for someone to spend money on a “cult” and not on a Vuitton bag or on going away on holiday, and for people to get into debt, etc. I say that these are self-evident things. At the same stroke, since it is bad, the person was not free.

These are two questions — domination and consent, and forms of life — on which this book allows us to reflect.

Sylvain Bourmeau: Marcela Iacub has spoken of the family. (…) There is certainly the Catholic Church, certainly the State, but between the two, chronologically too in a way, even if all these actors continue to be present, there is the family — the families of victims of “cults” — who played an important role in the way the debate was articulated.

Another thing is that historical moment, since she was speaking of that revolution in mores. You explain well how the way in which we supposedly tipped into “new cults” is always related back to May 68. Founding popularising books appeared on this, one notably signed by a journalist who long covered the religion beat at Le Monde, Alain Woodrow, but also personalities such as Roger Ikor, who were at the origin of the creation of associations for the defence of victims of “cults”. Fundamentally, each of these actors, in the 1980s, related this cult phenomenon back to what had happened around the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s. It is indeed in this historical sequence that we can situate the way the debate took shape.

Arnaud Esquerre: What is very striking, and I think we forget it, is that, when one rereads the writings on the “new cults” — the books of Woodrow or of Roger Ikor, who was at the time a well-known novelist, he had the Prix Goncourt — it is an extremely strong reaction against May 68.

The new fight against the “cults”, which takes mental manipulation as its point of support, calls May 68 into question and deplores the absence of authority. In the book by Roger Ikor, who created the Centre against mental manipulations, an anti-cult association that still exists, his whole discourse is a revalorisation of authority within the family. When one rereads the book he wrote at the beginning of the 1980s, because his son had died and had been in a cult, what he contests is the lowering of the age of majority to 18. That seems incredible, but that is what it is.

This movement against the “cults”, as Marcela rightly said, is a movement against other possible forms of life, ones that would not be supervised. It aims at revalorising authority, and notably authority within the family. Fundamentally, authority is a reassuring relation of power. As soon as these are no longer relations of power organised around authority, that is where mental manipulation, which is a sort of default category, can appear. One no longer quite knows what it is, so one will say: it is mental manipulation.

Marcela Iacub: We had thought that after the revolution in mores there were no longer any illegitimate loves. It is the ways of inventing forms of illegitimate love that are persecuted, I believe.

Arnaud Esquerre: What is very astonishing, in the manner in which the discourse is set in place, is that it is against May 68 but while reusing part of its argumentation. In critical theory, there exists a denunciation of mental manipulation, with the idea that we live in societies that are like totalitarianisms. Except that here, all at once, that is going to be diverted and applied to the “cult”, which is going to be the “cult” conceived as a totalitarianism in which people are mentally manipulated.

In the definitions given of the “cults” at the beginning of the 1980s, one says that it is a totalitarian movement.

Jeanne Favret-Saada: It is a matter of giving oneself the good authority, that is to say the family. All the other authorities are totalitarian — as if the family were not totalitarian, as if the Church had not been a totalitarian authority. It is implied that any new form of authority we give ourselves, to which we freely consent, can only be bad since we consent to it freely. Authority — we must adhere to it.

Sylvain Bourmeau: (…) You took three groups in order to try to see what united them, what they might share and, on the contrary, perhaps also the differences there might be between them. What does this approach yield, which makes it possible to call into question the very mechanism of designation, of labelling as one says in sociological theory, of these groups as cultic or non-cultic?

Arnaud Esquerre: It makes it possible to think the groups in terms of organisation. By taking one pole, Scientology, and at the other pole, Narcotics Anonymous, we see differences appear very clearly. For example, in one case a founder organised the group, whereas at Narcotics Anonymous, precisely, people are anonymous. Someone was a founder but we do not know who he is, so that remains a little mysterious. At Narcotics Anonymous, one can come in and go out, whereas in Scientology people are held back when they want to leave — at least that is what emerges from the 1996 trial against the Church of Scientology.

Then there is the question of financial cost. In the Church of Scientology, it is put forward, during the trials of 1996 and recently, that it costs extremely dear, that the Scientology products have a very high cost, and we see people getting into debt to pay for the products they consume — the books, the sessions with a therapeutic aim or allegedly therapeutic. At Narcotics Anonymous, the financial cost is reduced to a minimum: you have free access to the literature on the Internet, which you can download; you pay nothing except the cost of hiring the room, but with a collection, that is very little. So in one case, access to the literature is free and in the other it is paying, it is controlled. And then you can, again at Narcotics Anonymous, freely choose your sponsor, the person you can have as a reference, and you can change if you do not get on with them, whereas that is not the case in Scientology.

If we take these two types of organisation, we see two models appear very clearly and we see very well what can pose a problem in the case of the Church of Scientology; and, at Narcotics Anonymous, the reasons why this group — which is a group in which one finds a certain number of principles one could imagine in a cult, that is to say a group with a therapeutic aim (to stop being dependent on drugs), in which one can go to meetings regularly, with a system of stages, texts, rules one can follow, etc. — and at the same time, despite that, how it absolutely escapes the accusation of being a cult. One sees clearly why: by that flexibility, by the fact that one is anonymous, that one does not give one’s name, etc.

Marcela Iacub: It is perhaps also the fact that it is not a matter of loving a particular authority. It is not conceived as a group with a longer vocation. It does not present that form of love or of authority that one does not want.

Arnaud Esquerre: It does, because one can go to Narcotics Anonymous even when one has stopped consuming drugs. For years, one can continue to go regularly to a group, because it creates an equilibrium and one is happy to see the people. We see the distinctions clearly in terms of organisation.

At the same time, one must be conscious that, insofar as the point of support for designating a “cult” is mental manipulation, in ordinary discourse and also in the discourse of the people who fight the “cults”, these things can always be a little fragile, in reality. I am thinking of the latest report of the interministerial mission for the fight against the “cults”, which points to Satanism. When one reads the part of the report on Satanism, one has difficulty understanding what would gravely threaten society, since the principal reproach is desecrations of places of worship; but when one looks precisely at the figures, one realises that out of 266 cemeteries, places of worship and calvaries affected, only 22 present a proven satanic character. One wonders what the others are and why one does not fight them with the same force.

(…) One concludes with a precautionary principle that consists in saying that minors must be protected from everything concerning gothic culture. So we see clearly how these types of thing can extend in a very large and very fragile manner.

Sylvain Bourmeau: The question, Jeanne Favret-Saada, Marcela Iacub, is that of exceptional legislation, that is to say: are the “cults” a social fact that necessitates creating particular laws, or can they be places in which a certain number of delictual things happen (…) but for which there exist texts of law that ought to make it possible to settle the question?

Jeanne Favret-Saada: There is no need for any law or any new concept. (…) The articles of law we had before were entirely sufficient. Besides, we cannot apply the new ones. That is what Arnaud’s book shows very well, and those responsible for applying these articles in the ministries say that we cannot prosecute on that basis.

Sylvain Bourmeau: So they are not effective.

Jeanne Favret-Saada: Family associations pushed for a public debate and parliamentarians wanted to make a good impression. That is why there were these laws, which are inapplicable.

Sylvain Bourmeau: We would be entirely in symbolic politics? Marcela Iacub?

Marcela Iacub: There is also the fact that at the present time we do not manage to understand that, if we had to make illegal everything that displeases us, we could hardly do anything at all any more. Today, (…) there is a process of confusing Law with morality and sometimes even with aesthetics. (…) It is not the only form of social norms for regulating society, and the Law. There is morality, etiquette — there exist numerous other forms of regulation, and I think one ought to allow society to have several levels of regulation and not have everything we consider bad be illegal.

Today, however, I have the impression that we do not manage it. We are so afraid of a pluralist society. A pluralist society, of which one speaks so much in a democratic society, is a society in which people with different moral and aesthetic values and different codes of politeness can coexist, with minimal rules to organise them. In short, we are completely at the opposite of what we can call a pluralist society.

Arnaud Esquerre: The texts of law were voted in response to a demand (…). In fact, it is above all a matter of one text, which was in the law of 2001. The initial idea was to create an offence of mental manipulation, which would have been something quite incredible. That posed many legal problems and problems about the consequences of knowing what one was going to do with this offence of mental manipulation. Finally, we modified an article of the Penal Code that already existed, on the fraudulent abuse of a state of ignorance or of weakness, into which we introduced the notion of psychological subjection. This notion did not exist in the Penal Code.

First, this article is little applied and, when it is, it is applied in cases that are not “cult” cases. It may be a matter of an elderly person, of whom a couple will take such good care that they will in fact sequester her and take her savings. At that moment, this article will be invoked by saying that this person was placed in a state of psychological subjection. This notion, which had been introduced in order to fight the “cults”, is used in other types of situation. It is a sort of diversion and a story very different from what it was supposed to be.

Sylvain Bourmeau: On the other hand, we can make use of other texts of law to condemn the “cults”, such as on fraud, as we saw recently.

Arnaud Esquerre: Of course, and besides, in any case, we understand why the Church of Scientology was convicted in 1996 for fraud. When acts are committed, there exists a whole panoply and we do not lack articles in the Penal Code for convicting people.

Jeanne Favret-Saada: It is above all that, if we set about speaking of mental manipulation, one has to see where the limits are of propaganda, of advertising, of teaching, of the direction of souls in the Church, of psychotherapy. At that moment, it opens a highway for controlling everyone.

Arnaud Esquerre: We forget — and the sociology of religions has completely occulted it because it refers principally to Weber in speaking of the “cults” — that at the end of the 19th century, another sociologist, Gabriel Tarde, was also reflecting on the “cults” and used the notion of suggestion. At that time, in the 1890s, the great menace was the anarchists, who were designated, by those who fought them, as a “cult”.

We see clearly what happens from the moment when we take notions such as suggestion or mental manipulation to designate groups. If political action turns towards this type of group, we can designate political groups and other types of group, in order to fight in another manner and for combats that are political, in reality. It is always the question of knowing where it stops and how it balances out.