The Uncertain Fruits of a Historical Journey through France after 1789

The Uncertain Fruits of a Historical Journey through France after 1789

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http://www.miviludes.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/Intervention_de_Airiau_seminaire_Sectes_et_laicite.pdf MIVILUDES/Research Seminar - 2003-2004 - Psychosociological and historical aspects Positions of the historians M. Paul Airiau To approach as a historian the question of “cults and laïcité” is not obvious at first sight. In the first place because the association of these two themes is in itself problematic. A simple rapid journey through the literature devoted to the cults shows in effect that laïcité is far from being the dominant angle of approach to the “cults” phenomenon. Next, because historical studies, while not negligible as concerns laïcité, are on the contrary cruelly lacking when one broaches the “cults” in the period opening in 1789. (…) The first operation, then: establish the chronology of the current questions of “cults” and “laïcité”. To avoid an extensive exploration of two extremely vast subjects, it was chosen to use the lens of the catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. There were thus systematically recorded the books whose title contained the words “sectes”, “secte”, “sectaire”, “sectaires”, “sectarisme” from 1900 to 2002, and “laïcité” from 1945 to 2002, excluding electronic editions and certain works in which the words appeared only as a key or as the title of a collection (that is notably the case for a collection of the Free University of Belgium, “Laïcité”). If the catalogue may not contain all the books published in France with the selected words (for that, the Bibliographie annuelle de la France would have had to be used), if it may contain duplicates or data-entry errors, it nevertheless returns data exploitable in a sufficiently rigorous manner. One thus obtains 376 titles, whose chronological distribution is not without interest. (…) The finding is simple: before 1945, the question of the “cults” is almost non-existent. The subject makes a first appearance in the 1950s, reappears after 1965, and enters a new period from 1976 (89.92% of the titles, or 223). Production from that moment is always equal or superior to the maximum of the 1950s, and unfolds in two cycles: 1976-1989, 1990-2002, with the apogees of 1985 and 1996-1997 - one will even note that the period 1994-2002 alone concentrates 49.6% of the production. The discriminated corpus makes it possible to bring out better the rupture of the 1970s. The production of the 1950s appears very weak, and the explosion after 1976 is much clearer. One then enters a new period during which the “cults” become a social question. Let us however partially relativise the results. Book production in France has grown since 1900, and the increase in the number of titles devoted to the cults might simply reflect this growth of book production. However, even if this factor may play a role (one thinks in particular of the development of the testimony book, which opens a space for the testimonies of former members of the “cults”), the growth recorded from 1976 cannot simply be imputed to it. Something really happened in the 1970s as regards the “cults”, which grew more pronounced after 1995. The publication in 1997 and 1998 of a series of ten detective novels by Didier de Saint-Aubin on the “cults”, in a series entitled “L’Empire des sectes”, amply manifests it. A rapid analysis of the books on the sects and the “cults” allows one to appreciate it. Let us take first the titles with the words “sectaires” and “sectaire”. Before 1914, these words refer exclusively to the polemic between Catholics and radical republicans, notably around the law of Separation of the Churches and the State (1905). “Sectaires” or “sectaire” is then synonymous with intolerant. At the end of the period, the terms are exclusively used to speak of the “cults”. “Sectarisme”, in its occurrences between 1970 and 1980, has a purely political connotation, the refusal of the split and exclusivism between socialist or communist organisations. After 2000, the term refers to the “cults”. The mutation is seen also with “secte” and “sectes”. In the years before 1945, these words evoke dissident religious groups, essentially non-Western (Orthodox, Japanese or Buddhist ones). In the 1950s, besides the sociological and descriptive use, one sees appear the Catholic polemic against the non-Catholic religious groups expanding in France: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists, Baptists, Mormons, essentially. Two authors distinguish themselves here, Fr Chéry and Maurice Colinon, both concerned to distinguish between truth and error. The polemic is in effect essentially doctrinal. The titles from the 1970s onward testify to a mutation, symbolised by Alain Woodrow’s book in 1977, Les nouvelles sectes. One then passes to the presentation of minority religious groups, soon accompanied by their denunciation as totalitarian associations in a religious mask, while Catholic discernment progressively dawns (beginning of the 1980s) and sociological analysis unfolds (essentially after 1995). Several affairs punctuate the growth: the Amadeo affair in January 1976 (kidnapping of a young Moonist by her parents, in front of the television cameras), which brings an FR3 report in April; the suicide of a young Moonist, Patrick Esnault, in 1977; in 1978, the self-destruction of Jim Jones’s group in Guyana, the conviction for fraud of Lafayette Ron Hubbard and the Château affair (kidnapping of a young Moonist by her parents); in 1982, the Turpin affair (kidnapping by his parents of a young adherent of the Universal Association of Krishna Consciousness). It is above all the affairs of the 1990s that mark the media: in 1993, the FBI assault on the Davidians at Waco (Texas); in 1994 and 1995, the self-destruction of the Order of the Solar Temple in Switzerland, France and Canada; in 1997, the self-destruction of Heaven’s Gate in California. In parallel, the associations hostile to the “cults” structure themselves. In 1974 is born the Association de Défense de la Famille et de l’Individu at Rennes, founded by parents whose children had become Moonists. It ramifies until the beginning of the 1980s and obtains at the same time recognition from the public authorities: a subsidy from the Ministry of Health in 1977 and then in 1978 which allows it to open a reception centre and a permanent secretariat, to hire permanent staff, a subsidy from the DASS, from the Fondation de France, from the Ministry of Youth and Sports, accreditation from the Ministry of Free Time. In 1982, the ADFIs federate into UNADFI. If UNADFI situates itself in the perspective of the defence of the family and human rights, the Centre Contre les Manipulations Mentales has a more secular optic. It was founded in 1981 by Roger Ikor (Goncourt prize 1955), who had in 1979 denounced the cults in Je porte plainte, following the death of his son, a member of a zen-macrobiotic group. Finally, desiring to be at the interface of the associations fighting the “cults” and the academics working on the subject, two former members of the CCMM, Michel Onfroy and Anne Fournier, found the Group for analysis and research on the cult phenomenon (GRAPHES) and publish La dérive sectaire in 1999. The action of these associations is relayed and supported by the parliamentarians. In 1974 and 1975, two projects for a parliamentary information mission are launched, but do not succeed, and it is within the framework of the laws commission that an information action is launched in 1978. Alain Vivien, deputy of Seine-et-Marne, is the parliamentarian most involved in the subject. But the dissolution of the National Assembly in 1981 interrupts the work begun. However, as early as 1982, Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy commissions a report from Alain Vivien, completed in 1983 but made public only in 1985. The media repercussion is strong in 1986 - even Michel Polac devotes an issue of “Droit de réponse” to the “cults”. In 1988, the partial banning by the courts of the broadcast of two reports on the “cults” that were to be shown by Antenne 2 arouses a small agitation. But one must in fact await the great affairs of the 1990s for the public authorities to launch an organised action: the interministerial Observatory on the Cults in 1996 following the report of the parliamentary commission of inquiry on the cults in 1995; the founding of the interministerial Mission for the fight against the cults in 1998, which delivers two reports in 2000 and 2001; the parliamentary commission of inquiry into the finances of the cults, which publishes a report in 1999; the so-called “Royal” law of 1999, further controlling the content of teaching given outside the structures of National Education; the so-called “About-Picard” law intended to reinforce public control in 2001; the transformation of the MILS into the Mission of vigilance and combat against dérives sectaires (Miviludes) in 2002. This historical approach to the debate on the “cults” makes it possible to bring out the progressive construction of the debate, and the mutations that have occurred. The French society that debates the cults in 2003 is no longer the same as that of 1960, when the Catholics were the principal denouncers, and no longer that of 1980-1990 either. Within the very debate on the cults a change has occurred, which the late introduction of the theme of laïcité, from 1999 (as will be seen below), allows one to perceive. (…) The chronology of laïcité is therefore not that of the debate on the cults. The convergence really appears only in the 1990s. But, it must be noted, no book title to this day associates a word of the “secte” family with “laïcité”, whereas other fundamental themes of the fight against the “cults” are present from the first affairs: fraud, alienation and political aims under a religious mask. The reformulations that take place in the 1980s aim to “scientificise” the discourse in the psychological domain (“mental manipulation” replaces “brainwashing” or “psychic rape”) or to broaden the social field (rupture with the environment and society succeeds the accusation of capturing young adults and destroying the family), without however bringing in laïcité. As for the explanations for the development of the cults, they are present from the outset in R. Ikor, and know little later evolution: crisis of civilisation, loss of meaning and bearings, search for communal warmth. (…) As for the means of facing the “cults”, it is not laïcité but the regime of religions, characterised by freedom of conscience, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, within the framework of respect for public order, the liberty and rights of others and respect for the principle of laïcité3. The 1997 report of the interministerial Observatory on the cults includes no allusion to laïcité4. As for the ministerial circulars that pass on the 1995 report, they are situated on an essentially legal plane and do not make laïcité the touchstone of the action advocated, whether those of the Ministry of Justice (29 February 1996, which inscribes the fight against the cults “in respect of the founding principles of the Republic” - freedom of opinion, freedom of conscience, freedom of worship, non-recognition of any religion, equality) or of the Interior (7 November 1997, which, after an introduction insisting on laïcité as a legal framework preventing the definition of “religion” and “cult”, presents principles of action which are simply information and the strict application of existing law)5. (…) Laïcité thus does not function until then as a principle of action or reflection, but essentially as a legal framework. It is from 1998-1999 that the public power puts it forward in the denunciation of the “cults”. The Royal law, on the protection of childhood, in 1998, intends to control the schooling of children belonging to establishments that have not established a contract with the State. Notably, the necessary conformity of the programmes to education in citizenship and to scientific knowledge is put forward. The theme is however practically absent from the report on the money of the cults of the parliamentary commission in 1999, which evokes the 1905 law only in the framework of the analysis of the practices of the “cults” for obtaining financial advantages, as well as in its recommendations for better controlling cult activities10. A rupture seems to occur at the beginning of 1999. In the preface he gives to the book by the magistrate Georges Fenech, Face aux sectes : politique, justice, État (published in May 1999, but whose drafting was thus doubtless completed at the beginning of the year), A. Vivien, president of the MILS, does not mention laïcité but the imprescriptible rights of the human person, social equilibrium, and the fundamental role of the law in bounding the liberty which consists in being able to do what does not harm others. On the other hand, at the European colloquium on the cults piloted by the MILS in April 1999, A. Vivien puts forward laïcité as the framework of State action, the law of Separation making “official ideological totalitarianism impossible” and conferring tax advantages on worship associations on condition that a transparency “imposed by democratic institutions” be respected11. He had already insisted on the subject in an article in Regards sur, the bulletin of the CCMM, the previous March: “in the name of [the] equality of all confessions, the secular law has the duty of stigmatising every civil deviation”, “the true combat against the cults […] is that of the preservation of laïcité and democracy”, “The law of 1905 […] puts each individual on the same level in the matter of religion and belief […] preserves from the possible fundamentalist persecutions of a majority confession […] recalls to a citizen’s attitude”12. The opposition to the policy of the USA towards what is qualified in France as “cults” is very clear. The United States is indeed called into question for its too extensive conception of religious liberty. Its policy is thus infiltrated by “cults”, notably Scientology, which can put both France and Germany on trial for their anti-”cult” activity13. In 2001, in the ample dossier devoted to laïcité by the review of the League of Human Rights, Hommes et libertés, he again develops comparable positions, which are found partially in the MILS report of 2000, laïcité being present through the reference to 1905 and to the republican tradition of fighting the obscurantism menacing human rights, being equally cited as needing to be presented to future secondary-school teachers in the framework of their training14. UNADFI partially relays this discourse in Bulles, which publishes an article on “Sectes et laïcité” in its issue of the third quarter of 1999. It denounces the instrumentalisation of laïcité by the cults and insists on the incompatibility of the cults with laïcité: violation of “the liberty of the individual”, “rejection of society”, “project of hegemony and conquest”, “elitism […] antinomic to equality”, “asocial behaviours [excluding] from the field of citizenship”15. The 2001 law “tending to reinforce the prevention and repression of cult movements infringing human rights and fundamental liberties” intends for its part, if its rapporteur Catherine Picard is to be believed, to place itself under the sign of the Republic, following the bill adopted by the Senate in 1999 on the initiative of Nicolas About, wanting to apply to the “cults” the 1936 law against combat groups and private militias. C. Picard underlines that the Republic is more than a legal order, that it is a project: “The Enlightenment, education, progress, emancipation and citizenship”16. If the word laïcité is absent, the idea is present, and intends de facto to organise the bill. Yet the MILS report of 2001 evokes laïcité only a little, distinguishing among the “cults” according to their relation to democratic principles and human rights. The most developed passage is in fact drawn from the publication of the French government’s answer to the special rapporteur of the United Nations on religious liberty or belief17. 2002 can be considered the moment when laïcité becomes the strongly foregrounded grid of approach, with the participation of Anne Fournier, as an expert of the Miviludes, in the FECRIS colloquium in Barcelona on children and the cults. Her intervention, like that of Hayat El Mountacir, research officer at the CCMM, is placed entirely under the sign of laïcité18. As for the current study seminar of the Miviludes, which replaced the MILS in 2002, it is explicitly placed in the optic of laïcité. And the ambitions displayed both by Jean-Louis Langlais, president of the Miviludes, and by Marie-Françoise Courel, president of the EPHE, manifest how much laïcité is henceforth considered by the public authorities as one of the priority angles of attack on the question of the “cults”. Laïcité is here presented by J.-L. Langlais as the only possible legitimation of a “vigilance against cult groups”, and by M.-F. Courel as “a common morality that can be shared whatever one’s affiliation, and beyond that, whatever one’s sexual preferences or the colour of one’s skin”, an “attempt to break individualism, and its corollary, communitarianism” which preserves one from having to “run after an identity that […] fanaticism would give” or to “belong to a group that makes itself a pressure group”19. Thus laïcité erupted into the debate on the “cults”, promoted first by the political and social actors opposed to these associations. But the role of the sociologists cannot be neglected. As early as 1996, in the collective volume Pour en finir avec les sectes, directed by Massimo Introvigne (director and founder of CESNUR, the Centre for Studies on New Religious Movements) and John Gordon Melton, and highly critical of the 1995 parliamentary report, Régis Dericquebourg puts “cults” and laïcité in relation, situating himself in the perspective of Jean-Paul Willaime and Jean Baubérot, so that the new, partially pulverulent religious landscape may be managed within the framework of a cultural laïcité assuming deliberation. He here partially echoes a jurist, Philippe Gast, who underlines that laïcité does not prevent defining a cult or a religion, but imposes equality of their treatment20. The 1999 collective directed by Martine Cohen and Françoise Champion, Sectes et démocratie, thus sees laïcité very present, notably through the intermediary of Jean Baubérot, a specialist on the subject21. Danièle Hervieu-Léger, for her part, in 2001, in La religion en miettes ou la question des sectes, concludes on the necessary renovation of laïcité, a theme already very present throughout her reflection, placing herself in the lineage of Jean Baubérot and his Vers un nouveau pacte laïque? of 199022. This involvement of the sociologists in the social debate, in order to help produce a social contract valid for a not negligible duration, proceeds in part from a reaction of academics who on the whole took rather badly being marginalised by the public authorities in favour of the associations hostile to the “cults” or of intellectuals assuming, both judicially and in the media, the role of experts on cults. The question goes back at least to 1994, and to the publication of the Guyard report, which was reproached for its absence of scientific rigour by a number of sociologists or specialists in religions, notably by way of the collective piloted by M. Introvigne and J. Gordon Melton. But besides this desire for social recognition and status - after all, these academics are indeed paid by the State for the work they do and are yet not solicited by that same State when it would be necessary -, one must take into account the tradition of French sociology of religions. It suffices to refer here to Émile Durkheim, whose sociological activity is inseparable from his republican and secular commitment, or to the EPHE, whose section of religious sciences was founded after the suppression of the State theology Faculties in 1885, within the framework of republican secularisation. One will only note that this tradition is today reactivated by sociologists (J. Baubérot, D. Hervieu-Léger) belonging to a religious tradition that benefited from this secularisation, or within which they defend, against the dominant logic, a secular positioning. The understanding with the public authorities remains however problematic, as the debate organised in June 2001 by the Protestant weekly Réforme and Le Monde shows: the positions of A. Vivien and of D. Hervieu-Léger and Jean-Paul Willaime are not the same23. Thus, the “cults and laïcité” debate is a historically situated, relatively recent debate. If one wanted to be provocative, it would even be possible to consider that the foregrounding of laïcité in the contestation of the cults is a form of anti-Americanism. In effect, laïcité is only really invoked from the moment when the USA very strongly calls into question the French policy of fighting the cults, in the name of religious liberty. The French tradition of laïcité then comes as the first and obvious answer, having a foundation as assured as the United States tradition. Another element supports this perspective: the insistence placed on the transnational dimension of the “cults”, on their participation in liberal globalisation, on their strong anchorage in the USA, on their alignment with the model of the capitalist enterprise. It is possible to refer here both to the book by C. Picard and A. Fournier, Sectes, démocratie et mondialisation (2002), and to an article in the Monde diplomatique of 2001 entitled “Les sectes, cheval de Troie des USA en Europe”24. Thus, to broach the cults by way of laïcité is, within the framework of recurrent interrogations on laïcité and of the contestation of globalisation, to propose an alternative, a French way towards liberty. It is also to refuse evolutions, French and worldwide, whether social or economic, which disturb the habitual frameworks, or at least those considered stable and which one discovers are henceforth less pertinent and less able to guarantee daily existence. (…) It was inevitable, for structural reasons, that laïcité should be summoned against the cults, once the school was concerned. Likewise, the deep logic of Franco-American relations, characterised by a fascination-repulsion linked to the difference of historical rooting, to the national mythologies, and to the differences between two paths of access to liberal democracy, makes the opposition between the French Republic and the American Republic surge up - and therefore the difference between laïcité and absolute religious liberty. Laïcité is therefore not only the expression of an anti-Americanism; it is also, deeply, the manner in which France thinks the religious. (…) The debate on the “cults” was progressively constructed - the word is here taken in the sociological sense, not the normative sense. As such, it refers to a social reality which did not appear brutally, which developed progressively, and which has known inflections. The appearance of the theme of laïcité is part of it, just as much as the affirmations of individual and family suffering put forward by the opponents of the cults since the 1970s - while knowing that the relation of these same facts results from a formulation through the ideology (in the neutral sense of the term) of these same opponents - and just as much as those social groups one tries to delimit by the word “cult” - it remains however to be known whether these groups are new, or whether it is the mutations of the social environment that make them be perceived as new, or that bring out dimensions until then not perceived. Finally, this assessment makes it possible to put forward one point: the various actors all intend to restore a particular state of society or to propose an organisation of French society to come - republican laïcité for A. Vivien, laïcité for the 21st century for M.-F. Courel, the proposal of a High Council of laïcité for D. Hervieu-Léger. The question is therefore political, in the very precise sense of the term. It is thus the future that is at stake. (…)

Paul AIRIAU, Graduate of the IEP of Paris, Doctor in History - Former resident of the Fondation Thiers