Freedom of Religion or Belief · Spiritual Minorities · Global Advocacy
62 stories
CICNS annotates the full text of Prime Minister Raffarin's 27 May 2005 circular, reading its abandonment of cult lists as a change of form that leaves the policy's intentions and intensity untouched.
CICNS's December 2009 letters to the Interior and Health ministers over Maître Picotin's Aquitaine exit counseling cell, tying it to the banned deprogramming lineage and asking what legal framework covers it. Unanswered as of April 2011.
CICNS contrasts the Amour et Miséricorde community, dissolved under media pressure after a Fenech visit, with France 24's respectful coverage of a Buddhist three-year retreat that would tick the same criteria.
The MIVILUDES secretary general tells trainee magistrates the word 'cult' is stigmatising, that membership of a minority of conviction is no dérive sectaire, and that most of Europe handles the matter with ordinary law.
CICNS reviews Lionel Mariani's IEP thesis on French political responses to the cult question, saluting its balance while contesting its acceptance of the intrinsic-dangerousness frame and its refusal of the word 'hardening'.
Éric Bouzou reads the MIVILUDES guide for local authorities as a paranoid manual that treats the 'cult movement' as an omnipresent enemy and legal protections as pitfalls, quoting the guide against itself.
CICNS documents the October 2009 MIVILUDES visit to an ecumenical monastery in Ille-et-Vilaine, reproducing the residents' letter to their prefect describing an intrusion conducted with journalists in tow.
CICNS's 2009 assessment turns Roulet's own exit balance sheet against the mission: no credible victim inquiry ever done, discriminations institutionalised, the secular pact breached by doctrine evaluation, and a groundswell misread.
CICNS's 28,000-word annotated dossier on the 2006 French parliamentary commission on cults and minors, covering eleven hearings from MIVILUDES president Jean-Michel Roulet to the Machelon report.
CICNS's twelve-part commentary on Serge Blisko's November 2012 Senate hearing: the MIVILUDES's rhetoric, the About-Picard Act's record of convictions, and the child-victim figures its president could not substantiate.
CICNS fact-check of Georges Fenech's 30 October 2012 Senate hearing: 13 million claimed victims against the Justice Ministry's own count of 192 reports over three years.
Éric Bouzou's section-by-section commentary on the MIVILUDES president's 2008 report to the Prime Minister, from its opening word "teratology" to its unfounded child-victim figures.
CICNS walks through the 2004 MIVILUDES guide for civil servants: criteria of dangerousness with no legal basis, and 192 of 54,000 child-welfare files.
CICNS takes apart the 2010 MIVILUDES guide on minors: the unfounded 50,000 child victims, "mental hold" as pseudo-science, and criteria that fit any family.
CICNS reads the 2010 MIVILUDES guide on protecting minors and finds a doctrine that asks officials to detect a dérive sectaire before it exists: risk in place of established harm.
CICNS on the MIVILUDES 2010 annual report: the "2012" apocalypse threat, resettlement in the countryside as a new cult indicator, and alternative medicine as danger.
CICNS presents extracts from the MIVILUDES university seminar: Danièle Hervieu-Léger on three lines of dérive, and Jean Baubérot on the rhetoric of the Republic under threat.
Patrick Le Berre turns the nine "cult mechanisms" back on MIVILUDES itself, counting the 2005 report's conflations, defamations and abuses of dominant position.
André Tarassi on the MIVILUDES 2005 report, which abandoned the pledge not to name groups and became an inventory of spiritual minorities and their "dangers".
André Tarassi on the MIVILUDES 2004 report: professional secrecy urged towards denunciation, the About-Picard law's nil record, and doctrine equated with danger.
Two CICNS commentaries on the MIVILUDES 2006 annual report: André Tarassi on the mission's academic screen, Éric Bouzou on its psychology of "mental hold".
Michel de Courtelle's long reading of the MIVILUDES 2006 report, with the Leschi and Dupuis hearings that put 8 cult-linked cases against 19,000 child reports.
André Tarassi's line-by-line CICNS commentary on the first MIVILUDES annual report, from the "consensus" not to be broken to the criteria of dangerousness.
Denis Mathieu's chapter-by-chapter digest of the 234-page MIVILUDES 2007 report: 41 referrals since 2005, the OSCE chapter, and a tour of central Europe.
Éric Bouzou on the MIVILUDES 2007 report: the mission cast as martyr, preterition as method, mental hold as an argument, and the missing figures.
CICNS commentary on the MIVILUDES 2009 annual report: Fenech's claim of "effectiveness", a long study of shamanism, and the mission's attack on judges.
Michel de Courtelle measures the MIVILUDES 2007 report against its predecessors and takes apart at length its chapter on "induced false memories".
CICNS on the MIVILUDES 2008 report: figures Fenech gave the press that the report never printed, and the Interior Ministry's circular against lists.
CICNS's 2012 follow-up on the Robert Lé Dinh appeal trial: UNADFI as civil party, the About-Picard law, psychological subjection, and the media's treatment of the case.
The full text of the 2010 criminal complaint filed by the Moulin des Vallées community against MIVILUDES president Georges Fenech over an unannounced 2009 raid conducted with undisclosed journalists.
CICNS's case file on Dr Gérard Guéniot: the 2006 Lille conviction, the full 2009 Douai appeal acquittal, and how the media, ADFI/UNADFI and the MIVILUDES treated the 'Grail' cult affair.
CICNS's chronology of the Beatitudes community affair: the complaints and judicial proceedings, MIVILUDES's cautious handling, and the media's role in building the group's negative image.
A guide to the four-part 2013 CICNS interview with sociologist Raphaël Liogier: the struggle inside the French State, why dissent on the cult question costs, why television forbids nuance, and his individuo-globalism thesis.
17 July 2026
Part 2 of the CICNS documentary: the 2006 'Enfance volée' report tested against its own hearings, and testimony from people accused of being in cults.
16 August 2014
Éric Bouzou argues the state's own dérive sectaire category is incoherent: applied evenhandedly it would indict the family, the workplace and the school first.
1 August 2013
Part 1 of the 2013 CICNS interview with sociologist Raphaël Liogier, in English: the struggle inside the French State between the field ministries and the laïcité ideologues at Matignon, and the proposal of an independent observatory of spiritual minorities.
1 July 2013
English translation of the 2012 CICNS health interview with journalist Sylvie Simon on the "cult" label, non-conventional medicine, and the media in France.
22 January 2013
English translation of the CICNS interview with French journalist Ivan Rioufol on France's anti-cult campaign, MIVILUDES figures and media conformism.
21 January 2013
English translation of the CICNS interview with Robert Ménard, co-founder of Reporters sans frontières, on French newsrooms, press freedom and the treatment of "cults".
19 December 2012
Denis Mathieu dissects the 2011 MIVILUDES/IPSOS poll and Georges Fenech's use of it, arguing that thirty years of state and media anti-cult propaganda have installed a suspicion no study, statistic or court record supports.
1 October 2012
CICNS reviews Fenech's 2012 apocalypse book and walks through his Figaro interview question by question, noting the unquantified victim count and the journalist's silence at each unproven claim.
1 September 2012
CICNS sets Fenech's cordial account of his 2011 meeting with Bishop Konstantin Bendas against the bishop's own published verdict: armed guards, gold watches, undefined menaces, and a translator's parting line.
1 July 2012
CICNS reads the January 2012 bulletin of France's medical council: a yoga-class cover captioned as danger, the Solar Temple invoked for a health dossier, and 258,000 copies met with silence.
1 April 2012
André Tarassi's Reflets article: an exclusive laïcité, a mission run like a militant grouplet, figures that swing from 8 children a year to 80,000 in danger, and the case for a neutral observatory instead.
1 April 2012
CICNS prices a day of 'new spirituality' training against approved providers and the MIVILUDES's own 150 € course, finding the accused groups charge a fraction of what State-approved training bodies do.
1 February 2012
CICNS reconstructs the arithmetic behind Fenech's claim that 1,200 to 1,500 training bodies are cult-linked, and sets it against the DGEFP's own controls: almost 800 checks, one body assimilable to a cult.
1 February 2012
CICNS's year-by-year chronicle of the anti-cult struggle in France: laws, parliamentary reports, court cases and media campaigns from 1893 to the 2010s.
21 December 2011
CICNS reads the Interior Minister's 2011 compendium of laïcité law: ten pages on dérives sectaires, an undefined 'cult movement' at their centre, and questions Guéant is never asked about the About-Picard law and the MIVILUDES list.
1 November 2011
English translation of Raphaël Liogier's round-table extract at the CICNS colloquium: the arbitrary versus the authoritarian, unenforceable-yet-enforced parliamentary reports, and his first-hand account of testifying as an expert in a Soka Gakkai discrimination case.
29 October 2011
English translation of the short version of the 2011 CICNS documentary on France's anti-cult apparatus, the 2006 parliamentary inquiry and its unheard victims.
29 April 2011
English translation of part 3 of the CICNS documentary « La France antisectes »: TV talk shows, staged testimony and the 2008 Mignon controversy.
1 April 2010
CICNS documents the January 2010 police search of the Terre du Ciel centre in Saône-et-Loire, its letter campaign to the authorities, Janine Tavernier's statement of support, and the abandonment of the cult line of inquiry.
1 January 2010
Residents of the Moulin des Vallées monastery recount a 2009 MIVILUDES raid led by its president and the media coverage that followed. Translated CICNS report.
23 December 2009
Full transcript of the CICNS interview with journalist Jean-Luc Martin-Lagardette on France's anti-cult policy, the MIVILUDES, and the role of the media.
1 October 2009
English translation of the CICNS interview with Susan Palmer, Canadian sociologist, on her fieldwork among France's listed "cults" and the About-Picard law.
3 July 2009
English translation of the CICNS interview with naturopath Philippe Dargère on administrative pressure, the anti-cult climate and alternative health in France.
9 January 2009
English translation of the CICNS interview with sociologist Régis Dericquebourg on fieldwork among healing churches and France's anti-cult climate.
10 November 2006
English translation of the CICNS interview with Jean Baubérot on the 1905 law, the MILS, the MIVILUDES, and religious minorities in France.
9 November 2006
English translation of the CICNS interview with lawyer Jean-Marc Florand on the legal void around "cults", the About-Picard law and France's anti-cult bodies.
9 November 2006
CICNS reproduces and annotates the social-action circular that wires every welfare directorate into the anti-cult watch: reinforced vigilance on accreditations, monthly correspondent meetings, and a dedicated reporting mailbox.
1 June 2006
Full transcript of the CICNS interview with sociologist Raphaël Liogier on French laïcité, state neutrality as intervention, and how 'good' and 'bad' religions are classified.
1 May 2006
Full transcript of the CICNS interview with ethnologist Maurice Duval, in English: his four-year field study of the Mandarom, the censorship that followed, why the word 'cult' has no sociological meaning, and the manufacture of collective fear.
1 March 2005