On the Refusal of Difference: Nostalgia for the Inquisition and Vichy?

On the Refusal of Difference

Nostalgia for the Inquisition and the Vichy Government?

by Claude-Gérard Sarrazin, writer, trainer and lecturer

http://www.editions-theia.com

Our civilised century declares itself “freed from superstitions and archaic thought”; it is not agnostic; it displays itself as atheist. It wages a discreet or muscular fight against the “laggards”.

It therefore seems difficult, if not dangerous, today, in our country, at the beginning of this millennium, to think of joining ideological groupings not linked to accepted traditions; it seems even more difficult to affirm a thought not conforming to the socially correct model, that is to say materialist, atheist. The tolerated anticonformists must conform strictly to the model of a slapdash counter-culture, negator of hierarchy, enemy of aesthetics… and harmless.

It is even difficult to publish reflections casting doubt on atheist thought, unless one keeps to purely theological works, provisionally tolerated by a society more and more weary of making the effort of self-mastery or self-forgetting.

Everything happens as if a tentacular authority had fixed the social norms, as in a tribe managed by the elders, enemies of all change. Our “elders”, our listened-to sages, appeared well after the Second World War, perhaps even a little later. In a few decades, they crystallised what had been in preparation for a century or two: the eviction of religious or spiritual thought, indeed of thought simply open to realities other than material ones.

Let a group, however small, claim to cast doubt on the holy laws, and there is talk of a cult, of dérive sectaire, of manipulation, of danger to society. It is understood that adults (from the Latin: having finished growing) do not let themselves be manipulated; they are therefore atheists and conforming (the possible indoctrination that made them what they are is not considered manipulation); adolescents (from the Latin: in the process of growing), whatever their physical age, “are prey for the manipulators”. The press, and more spectacular media, seize the windfall and make of it a subject of revelation: a new cult in formation, a cult at last discovered, a cult dismantled…

One might have believed that the Declaration of the Rights of Man was taken seriously. It must now be understood thus: man is free to do what is permitted to him; what is permitted is fixed by a consensus obtained by… By whom?

Respect for difference is a rare value, taught everywhere, strictly reserved for those who are forced to bend. Those who are above that weakness are not bound to practise that theoretical virtue.

One may then wonder whether our society, which reads the newspapers and watches television, is not preparing a return to tyranny, to the Inquisition, to the Vichy regime.

Our society is perhaps still at cujus regio, ejus religio (as the religion of the prince, so that of the kingdom).

One must face the evidence: inertia is a social fact; every deviance threatens the beatitude of that inertia. The status quo is wished for, imposed if need be.

So: is the refusal of difference natural, or is it conditioned?

We shall doubtless not answer this fundamental question directly. Each person will draw the conclusions that seem logical to them.

I will therefore treat the respect of difference in two parts: the first will be personal, necessarily limited; the second will be historical (from generally accepted data), necessarily vaster. We will then be able to understand better the current situation aiming at the control (muscular if need be) of deviances through the witch-hunt.

I will treat neither racism nor antisemitism: others than I apply themselves to that; the racists and antisemites will continue to think they are right and must act accordingly, but they can no longer (at last!) hope for the support of the official bodies or the forces of order. The partisans of a different thought are not in the same situation (for the moment at least).

Let us begin with my personal experiences (facts of which I can be certain), the first part of the attempted philosophical demonstration. My experience is not universal, but it can help understanding.

I settled in Canada in 1962 (in Montreal for a few years, then in the Laurentians). I returned to France in 1995.

The old hegemony (by consensus)

I had been living in Montreal for a few years; I lived near the Université de Montréal. I had become friends with the manager (a Belgian emigrant) of a large bookshop located almost at the foot of the University. He told me one day what had happened to him: he had placed signs to mark the sections, to make the customer’s choice easier. The great classification systems were not yet much spoken of. He had written on one label: “religions”. The superior of the community (in Quebec, nothing could then exist without the approval of a community or of a secular priest) called the manager to point out a spelling mistake that had to be corrected so as not to let people think the bookshop was ignorant of grammar. The manager looked in vain at his labels. The superior finally showed him the offending one: “You have put an s on religion”.

The cults were not yet spoken of, above all in the Quebec of the early 60s. But difference was already denied. There was only one religion, the Catholic religion. The rest was only deviance or folklore. Cujus regio…

The School transmitted, explicitly and above all implicitly, the Christian values. Atheists and agnostics kept a low profile. It was only much later that I understood that the School bore a share of responsibility for the refusal of difference: it is the School that transmits values, it is the School that can change the mentality of a people.

Before the First World War, the School taught little French children hatred of the Germans; after their defeat, the Germans taught hatred of the French to little Germans.

I had just discovered, without drawing conclusions, the refusal of difference, at one remove. I was going to discover it directly for myself.

First deviants

It was 1966. I believed I could discover a new group, in which an elite would be prepared in the service of humanity’s progress; society, grateful in return, supporting the pioneers’ efforts… I thought that man had come out of the caves thanks to courageous visionaries.

So I underwent the required tests with a psychologist of the Université de Montréal and was able to take part in my first meeting within the Mensa society on 8 November 1966.

At that period it was the North American Mensa: Canada did not yet have an autonomous section. We managed to create an autonomous Canadian section. Nobody prevented us: it was a structure, a mere structure.

A year later, a project was born: to create a school for mentally gifted children and adolescents. I was elected head of the project.

So I drafted memoranda, theses, requests, reports, chaired all the meetings of the little committee, knocked on doors. Two years later, I handed in my apron: society did not want gifted pupils; it agreed to help the handicapped (no possible rivals) but not the gifted, whose potential it envied and whose intelligence it feared. No non-manipulable deviants without visible coercion.

With a psychologist friend and a colleague who taught mathematics, we tried again in 1972, to arrive at the same result. The project had been studied in high places. I had once again presented a file (at that period personal computers did not exist; everything had to be typed, with the obligation of starting everything again for a new presentation). The academic authorities of the region answered me: all my demonstrations were accepted, but “this project does not correspond to our policies”.

The Mensa adventure ended for me: I left the group on tiptoe and was forgotten. I had learned a great deal and I regret nothing. Society refuses difference, whatever it may be.

Yet it was not a matter of creating a religious or “demonic” or anarchising sect; it was only a matter of creating a place propitious to the flourishing of gifted children and adolescents. To accept that project would have been to recognise a fundamental difference. Only the bed of Procrustes was known (and I fear is still known).

If it is unthinkable (and decades later, that school is still in gestation) to live education and schooling differently, how is one to live one’s spirituality differently, if society imposes atheism and philosophical materialism?

A utopian grouping

In 1970, I was approached by the president of the Cosmos Foundation (Jonquière, a few hundred kilometres north of Montreal) to collaborate on the review and on future projects. The project filled me with enthusiasm. It was a matter of putting into practice the highest spiritual data and of giving birth to a village in the manner of Auroville (in India). The cults were not yet spoken of; brows were merely furrowed; sufficiently for the president, finally, five years later, to find himself alone and have to dissolve the body before having been able to see the birth of the city of the future, Cosmopolis, which remained a beautiful dream.

A small sample will suffice: everything is well tied up, at a certain level.

The president published several issues of a fine review and three works. The distributor (a big name) distributed. My book pleased. Television granted me several programmes, including one of a whole hour, alone with the presenter. But the distributor refused to pay. Lawsuit. After three years, the president won his case. Too late: he had filed for bankruptcy. My book died out; those of the others as well.

At the same time as my work was appearing at Jonquière, a big Montreal publisher was publishing my first treatise on morphopsychology, which aroused no opposition. QED, I believe.

Psi faculties at the University

I was asked to be part of the board of directors of an institute in gestation, the Institut Canadien de Recherches en Parapsychologie (Canadian Institute of Psychic and Parapsychology Research, a non-profit body). The board meetings began. The Université du Québec supplied us with premises. It must be said that we had elected as president the dean of the psychology faculty of a celebrated university. Throughout the summer, the founder organised weekly lectures (a full auditorium). He asked me to introduce all the lecturers and to give three lectures myself. It was fascinating, heroic, enriching. It was the period of the discovery of the Filipino healers. I had to arbitrate a debate between a journalist, a patient of Agpaoa and a representative of the Order of Physicians; all had been to the Philippines. Our project touched forbidden spheres.

The great evening arrived: it was 24 August 1973, after a fine summer in public. It was the general meeting of all the members and sympathisers. All the prospective committees were there, except the president, detained in Quebec City. I had to chair in his place and present the Institute’s organisation chart, a chart that a friend (a member of the Mensa society, as it happens) and I had developed over very many hours.

A delegate of the Ministry of Education was present, uninvited but inevitable. He obstructed so much, delayed the proceedings so much, criticised so many points, that the tension rose in the room (still at the Université du Québec). The audience clenched its teeth. The representative let doubts hover over the qualifications of certain members of the selection committee (three doctors), then he attacked me personally and demolished all my work. My replies only deepened the ditch.

Exasperated, I rose and announced my resignation, offering my place to the government delegate. I gave my notes and documents to the founder and went to sit in the room. After a moment of heavy silence, a colleague rose and, in his stentorian voice (he was, incidentally, an opera baritone in his free time), trumpeted:

• Sir, you are ignorant of all good manners. You bring only discord. Your turn now to tell us how we should organise ourselves, since you have taken us for children.

The delegate took the blow, but he knew how to swim; he replied:

• From discussion springs light! I wanted above all to make the best ideas spring forth!

A hubbub covered his voice and the assembly broke up into small groups. All the members of the Institute were academics and many were doctors in some discipline.

I reached the president by telephone; he approved me and added his resignation to mine. The adventure stopped there. One had to understand: our project was inadmissible, however serious it might be.

The detractors did not hesitate, in the past, to attack the eminent: how many “scientific” scribblers have not deplored the fact that the great Pascal was so drawn to religion and mysticism? How many have never forgiven Alexis Carrel for having written Le voyage à Lourdes? One feigns modesty by insisting on the scientific merits of the geniuses in question (Pascal, Carrel and the others) and one speaks of their extreme naivety, indeed of their terminal madness.

The Order of the Temple was indeed brought down…

So attacking simple citizens…

The disturbing teacher

I taught for many years in Quebec. Until 1998, the public School was confessional. A Catholic, I had to teach in a Catholic school. I had forgotten to remain discreet about my intimate convictions, I had not yet understood the rules of the game. I had the gospels read in class… and the pupils discovered important differences between what they learned there and what was habitually conveyed. I disturbed the habits. Halloween (the festival of witch and wizard costumes) was celebrated, for example, in the Catholic school; I recalled that witches had once been burned. Chocolate rabbits and eggs were passed around for Easter; I asked what the connection was between the Passion of Jesus and these traditions issuing from the fertility festivals of the pagans, who had been eliminated in a manner not always Christian.

I added to my misdeeds the leading of a charismatic group.

The charismatics

From 1971 to 1974, I led a group of young charismatics. No pope had yet pronounced on the question (one had to wait until 1975).

My group worked in small teams to establish a biography of a saint according to a grid I had supplied. I obviously gave a large place to mystical experiences.

I was seated in the middle of a team of four working on Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. The group had reached the moment when the saint is about to die.

“What sorrow we shall have after your death!

”- Oh! no, she replied joyfully: you will see, it will be like a shower of roses.

“It is the promise of that shower of roses, a promise fulfilled, that made Thérèse’s renown in the world.”

(Laudet, F., Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux, Mame, Tours, 1949, p. 82)

A scent of roses made itself felt, at first discreet, then more and more distinct. The smell went beyond the small group to spread through the whole room, with such intensity that two girls opened a window to breathe. As a precaution, I asked whether someone had spilled a bottle of perfume, and I went round all the teams, all well-behaved and talking in low voices until my verifying intervention. In an impressive silence, they watched me visit each team. The scent was perceived for five whole minutes.

The event became known throughout the region and was much mocked. Two months later, in the same group, I recalled the event… which reproduced itself with the same intensity and for even longer.

With the group of charismatic boys, we went to visit a neighbouring abbey. The Trappists received us very amicably. The prior guided my group in the visit of the monastery. I told him the story of the roses of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. While the defenders of the holy faith spoke of diabolical manifestation and sorcery, the prior said to me, in a fraternal tone:

• I shall speak of it this evening at chapter. It is beautiful to know that children receive such graces so close to us.

The account of these manifestations (there were not only the roses) had gone round the village and then the region. At the end of 1972, I was summoned by everything the region counted in the way of priests, parish priests and chaplains, in an annexe of the central church: was I a sorcerer? I managed to prove my good faith, but my reputation as a magician-sorcerer endured, and the troubles were reborn each year, thanks to the defenders of the true faith.

We disturbed, we were deviants.

They attacked otherwise; an attempt was made to build against me a file of corruption of minors and paedophilia (the classic accusations). They did not manage to find the slightest witness (even the pupils I had had to punish in class refused the idea of my hypothetical perversions) and certain parents assured me of their support.

A fundamentalist teacher fed the local press, which published two articles ridiculing my lessons and my person. The school management refused to get involved; the union (more atheist than agnostic, anticlerical) begged me “not to make unnecessary waves”. A colleague (a Parisian emigrant) advised me to call on a lawyer and sue for defamation. I was wrong not to follow that advice.

In 1978, I was summoned by the academic authorities; and the president gave way to a representative of the bishopric, who led the combat. That literature was brought out again, and taken seriously. The union took my defence: if they managed to bring me down (motive: bad Catholic), almost the whole teaching body was in danger (the expression “religious lukewarmness” is a euphemism).

They were quite willing for me to speak of religion, since the School was confessional, but according to the norms; a very secular religion, made of rites, obligations and prohibitions (spiritual experience being reserved for recognised saints, dead if possible).

I had just said that my pupils had reached the philosophical age; I therefore owed it to them to teach them to reflect for themselves. The reply of Mgr*** stupefied my assistants:

• You do not have to teach them HOW to think, but WHAT to think.

One Monday morning, I found in my mail pigeonhole an immediate summons with a prohibition on entering my classroom. The personnel director received me. It had been “discovered that I was directing a cult” into which I was bringing minors. The surprise past, I asked where my cult was located, where my limousine was parked, where such information came from. The union again took my defence. I remained banned from teaching for a month. They agreed, however, to pay me a salary. The teachers’ union demanded written and precise accusations; if the answer did not come, measures would be taken. The authorities backed down: they sensed the scandal of a legal action brought to the knowledge of the general public. Everything was erased and I resumed my lessons, applauded on my return by my colleagues (we were a hundred and fifty teachers; the fundamentalists did not show themselves that day).

The administrative harassments were multiplied until I left teaching.

In France, the School is secular, is it not? I would not have been troubled. For that.

I had understood certain laws of the exclusion of politically incorrect deviances.

Rods for one’s own back

While being a teacher, I held other functions. Vice-president of the Order of Naturotherapists of Quebec from 1973 to 1977, vice-president of the international congress of alternative medicines in Montreal in 1976, Director of Studies and co-founder of the National Academy of Hygiene and Natural Medicine (alternative medicines) of Quebec, I was part in 1976 of the delegation (of five leaders) received by a parliamentary commission with a view to having the alternative medicines recognised. Our programme (which I had developed in consultation with the other therapists) was accepted. A single condition was required: that all the Schools and Institutes of alternative medicines unite around us to form a single federation with a common core. The Order of physicians (called the College of physicians in Canada) did not even have to intervene: each wanted to remain sole master in his own house, and the federation died before being born. I resigned in 1978 and withdrew from all public activity for several years.

Minority groups often refuse to unite (union makes strength) and remain without weight against well-organised and well-united adversaries. Unfortunately, many persecuted groups, or groups thinking themselves persecuted, are intimately convinced of possessing the truth - pardon, THE Truth, with a capital T; to associate with other groups would mean relativising that unique truth. Others, more naive, think they live in countries that have signed their adhesion to the Charter of the Rights of Man.

Let us pass now to the second part of the study and ask ourselves whether certain officials might not have a nostalgia for the Inquisition and the Vichy government.

Let us start from far back in time.

The Inquisition

The Inquisition was created by Pope Innocent III in order to fight the Cathars; the decision was approved by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215; 1,200 members). Besides the heretics (judged as such), many people were burned alive for magic, sorcery, “diabolical” illness, without forgetting the “apostate Jews” (converted Jews who returned to Judaism).

The “good Christian” did not read the Scriptures (he reads them no more today); the new Inquisition - secular, atheist - can act in broad daylight to “drive out the enemy”… of whom?

The “good Christian” might have asked himself why the religious authorities did not respect the fundamental principles willed by the Founder of Christianity:

“You have heard that it was said to the ancients: You shall not commit murder; whoever commits murder shall answer for it before the tribunal.

“And I say to you: whoever is angry with his brother shall answer for it before the tribunal; whoever says to his brother: Imbecile shall be answerable to the Sanhedrin; whoever says: Fool shall be liable to the gehenna of fire.” (Mt V, 21-22).

“Stop judging by appearances, but judge according to what is just!” (Jn VII, 24).

“for it is by the way you judge that you will be judged, and it is the measure you use that will serve as measure for you.” (Mt VII, 2).

People were of course made to swear “on the holy gospels”, princes as much as peasants, religious as much as laymen, despite the formal prohibition, still ignored in our day for that matter (in the United States, a country nevertheless “faithful to the Scriptures”, the oath on the Bible is statutory); which suggests that accommodations are always possible, since “the good people” never reads the legislative texts, religious or profane:

“You have also heard that it was said to the ancients: You shall not perjure yourself, but you shall discharge your oaths to the Lord.

“And I say to you not to swear at all: neither by heaven, for it is the throne of God,

“nor by the earth, for it is the footstool of his feet, nor by Jerusalem, for it is the City of the great King.

“When you speak, say yes or no: all the rest comes from the Evil One.” (Mt V, 33-37).

Why did the clergy not drive out the demons that had taken hold of the suspects, instead of burning them? Had they forgotten (or were they far from the spiritual realisation required to officiate):

“And these are the signs that will accompany those who have believed: in my name they will drive out demons…” (Mk XVI, 17).

Times have changed, the Middle Ages are forgotten. Today that attitude is unthinkable. Which does not prevent the fundamentalisms of every side, the active and murderous fanaticisms, today and sometimes among us. If everyone agreed to read the Scriptures with which they are conditioned…

The anticlericals ceaselessly remind the Church of its past errors and pass over in silence the changes that have appeared over the centuries; they forget the contemporary fundamentalisms, not necessarily religious ones.

The secular Inquisition

The refusal of difference and the witch-hunt are part of thoroughly human traditions. Our era has invented nothing, it merely uses the recipes that have demonstrated their effectiveness.

Revolutionaries free the people from royal tyranny. “In the name of the people”, they install liberty.

On 26 August 1789, the representatives of the French people, constituted as a National Assembly, sign the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: “the National Assembly recognises and declares, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and of the citizen.”

This Declaration is so fundamental that it was taken up in the 20th century under the name of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the general assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948 in Paris). We shall return to it.

Let us stay with the great liberation of 1789.

On 10 March 1793, less than four years after the solemn Declaration, the Convention created the revolutionary tribunal intended to judge “crimes committed against the Republic”. After the promulgation of the law on suspects (of 17 September 1793), everything accelerated. “Let us place Terror on the order of the day,” proposed Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac (responsible for the death sentence of Louis XVI) in the name of the Committee of Public Safety. Blood was needed to consolidate the Revolution. In that year 1793, Paris saw the guillotining of Marie-Antoinette, the Girondins, Bailly, Barnave, Philippe Égalité (on 6 April 1793), etc. Sent pell-mell to the scaffold were quantities of people foreign to politics, like the sixteen Carmelites of Compiègne (17 July 1794), Madame Élisabeth, the Comtesse du Barry, etc. About 17,000 death sentences according to the official documents; in fact nearly 40,000 victims, if one counts the people assassinated without judgment. Because he was a noble, Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier, founder of modern chemistry and a farmer-general, was guillotined in Paris on the Place de la Concorde on 8 May 1794. He was told that “The Republic has no need of scientists”.

Certain historians draw up a heavier toll: 40,000 people guillotined; 200,000 people killed; 500,000 imprisoned. In the name of the sovereign people (not consulted).

Religion had nothing to do with the installation of the Terror.

Nevertheless, it had to suffer from it.

Talleyrand (Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, 1754-1838), bishop of Autun in 1788, elected for the clergy to the Estates-General of 1789, appointed a member of the Constitution committee, proposes, on 4 November 1789, to place the clergy’s goods at the disposal of the nation to improve the state of the finances.

From 12 July 1790, all the ecclesiastics of France had to swear an oath of fidelity to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. In 1792, the refractory priests are all banished from France. Those caught on national territory would be punished with death on simple verification of their identity.

Atheist fundamentalism insists on the religious Inquisition but never speaks of the Terror.

Let us skip a few centuries. Let us find the good tradition again.

Vichy

No use returning to the statute of the Jews; everything has been said, everything specified, and it would be indecent to add to it. Let us see another aspect of the refusal of “social deviation”.

The law of 13 August 1940, decreed by Marshal Pétain, prohibited “secret associations”. The masonic obediences were dissolved, while their dignitaries were subjected to the statute of the Jews. (On 15 December 1943, an ordinance of the French Committee of National Liberation, signed at Algiers by General de Gaulle, annulled the law of 13 August 1940.)

The law of 11 August 1941 prohibited Freemasons from exercising public functions, functions enumerated in article 2 of the statute of the Jews of 2 June 1941.

Freemasonry was not the only target. All the employers’ pressure groups, for example, were in mind.

On 30 August 1942, at Gergovie, Pétain expresses himself clearly (and his words could be current today): “A sect, flouting the noblest feelings, pursues, under cover of patriotism, its work of treason and revolt.”

In those times of war, the prohibitions were not merely formal; the deportation of the Jews was not a simple working hypothesis.

Hitler

Hitler closed all the masonic obediences in 1935. Persecutions and the concentration camps were the lot of the Freemasons. Göring said that “the fight against the Jews, the freemasons and other ideological powers opposed to Germany is an ever urgent task of the party and the army.”

No use, here again, insisting on the fate of the Jews. Everything has been said, and well said.

As for Christianity, official contempt. Let us retain only one celebrated example. Rajmund Kolbe, in religion Maximilian Maria Kolbe, died in the concentration camp of Auschwitz on 14 August 1941.

And the Jews?

Everyone thinks immediately of the wearing of the yellow star. It is difficult to imagine that this is only a reminiscence. The origin of the discriminatory practice goes back to 1259, and it was the “good king Saint Louis” (Louis IX) who took the decision: every Jew would have to wear, sewn on his garment, a circular piece of yellow cloth (the rouelle). In France, on 3 October 1940, most professions are forbidden to Jews. All Jews over six would have to wear the yellow star from 7 June 1942.

And Russia?

The revolutionaries had freed the people from “the odious tyranny of the tsars” and the people was sovereign. The refusal of difference (of thought) was carried to its height.

• 1922-1953: continuous deportation of hundreds of thousands of real or supposed opponents, arbitrary imprisonments, prohibition of any contestation of the person of Stalin.

• 1930-1932: deportation of two million kulaks (well-off peasants) to the gulags.

• 1932-1933: Stalin deliberately drives the Ukrainians to famine: between 4 and 7 million dead.

• 1937-1938: the Great Purge eliminates 690,000 people.

• spring 1940: the Katyn massacre (elimination of nearly 22,000 Polish prisoners of war).

Let us add the number of detainees (according to QUID):

1930: one and a half million.

1941: thirteen and a half million.

Religion is totally banned.

Hitler thus had a twin, whom certain French intellectuals venerated because he was a communist model, friend of the people.

The dissidents who attempted, in Germany, in Russia or elsewhere, to awaken “the good people” were not heard. “They” were dealt with.

The formula has proved itself: a “liberator” breaks the yoke of a “heavy and tyrannical hierarchy”. The good people applauds, takes part in the lynching, and everything returns to order. The new “representatives”, in the name of the sovereign people (never consulted), install a new dictatorship.

Let us leave those troubled times and come to the great world peace (officially, we are not at war).

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

“Article 19.

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, which implies the right not to be troubled for one’s opinions and the right to seek, receive and impart, without consideration of frontiers, information and ideas through any means of expression whatsoever.

“Article 20.

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

2. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.”

Need the situation be analysed? Others than I have done it. Their studies and conclusions can be found on the CICNS site. Without forgetting all the reviews and all the sites that devote themselves to these updates.

Let us content ourselves with a few landmarks.

When a group of people threatens the hegemony of an industry (agri-food, pharmaceuticals, oil, official medicine, etc.) by its attempts or its achievements (alternative medicines, renewable energies, “organic” farming, etc.), “they” at once wave the guaranteed scarecrow: a new cult, or the resurgence of an old conspiracy (an ancient chivalric or magical Order, for example); “they” will shrink from no sacrifice to blacken, to poison life, to multiply the administrative problems and legal requirements, in order to bring the group down. If it is an isolated individual, a link with a cult will be sought; failing that, his private life will be attacked and “embellished”. The media, always avid for scoops, will seize on the thing, and the trick will be done. Deviants are accepted only if they feed the mechanisms ensuring a certain supranational or local cohesion.

Why do the publications, though numerous and documented, awaken no echo?

First, because they are not relayed by the popular press and the mass media in general. Everyone prefers to close their eyes and ears so as not to worry. It is human, it is normal. The popular press speaks rather of sporting encounters, of stars and idols, of the speeches of public men; it leaves in the shadows the harassments of the “cults” unless there is a catastrophe or a juicy scandal. We have the press we deserve and demand.

And each person shelters under his little umbrella of anonymity: it only happens to others; I risk nothing, since I am part of the silent majority. That silent majority risked nothing, indeed, at the beginning of the French Revolution, at the beginning of the Russian Revolution, at the beginning of the Chinese Revolution. The good citizen trusts the elected. Then the wind turns, the first elected change or are replaced. The anarchists build nothing: they oppose.

And the School?

It ought precisely to prepare the citizen to reflect, since he has the right to vote, that is to say to choose those who will govern.

It is found normal that an average baccalaureate holder has never received any steeping in Western civilisation. He has received thousands of hours of lessons on subjects he will forget as soon as he enters his professional life, but he is incapable of appreciating (still less distinguishing) Raphael, Rembrandt and Renoir; any more than he listens to (still less distinguishes and appreciates) Bach, Beethoven and Brahms; he has vaguely heard of the Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals, never of the Baroque churches; he is ignorant of Greek sculpture and that of the Renaissance; the great classics of the cinema are unknown to him. Of religion he knows only the official anticlericalism, or the little his family has transmitted to him; no reflection in depth. A pure savage, he is delivered without landmarks to the ambient vulgarity. The School has no time…

It is found normal that the School draws the attention of the child, then of the adolescent, to the infinitely great and the infinitely small, to the politicians of the past and the present, to the wars and the empires, but never, ever, teaches him to know HIMSELF, to reflect on himself, to discover his strengths and his weaknesses, his capacities and his limits. How could he then pass judgements (he does not, moreover, know how to distinguish a value judgement from a judgement of reality) on a cultural or worship difference, a philosophical difference (who would have taught him philosophical discussion?) or a religious one?

A very small example of unreflectiveness? Why should an unvaccinated child be refused at school or another public place? Suppose he is the victim of a grave illness against which the others have been vaccinated: in what way does his presence endanger the health of his peers?

• If the vaccinated are immunised by virtue of their preventive vaccination, the presence of a disease-carrying child cannot touch them, since they are protected.

• If the presence of a sick child contaminates the other children, vaccinated and immunised according to the law in force, then immunisation is only a decoy. Why, then, vaccinate?

Vaccination seems a State religion. Cujus regio… What does non-aligned Science think?

The situation expresses the expectations of the majority. We are in a democracy. If we do not want to relive the Inquisitions and the dictatorships, no use weeping and cursing. One must act for oneself, not by taking up arms or burning buildings or officials, but by making conscious, considered gestures.

If nothing moves, atheist fundamentalism will nibble away, little by little, at all the liberties linked to spiritual thought and life; not only the small communities of thought but also the great religions will one day be prohibited (as in Russia under Stalin).

I am neither bitter nor disappointed. I have not always known how to play chess, and I will not change humanity all by myself. Despite my errors, I have done my small part.

It is not because fundamentalist and backward priests annoyed me that I reject Christianity, which built Europe (the cathedrals still answer one another from one end of the continent to the other, and Europe already existed in the Middle Ages), whatever certain current fundamentalists, much listened to it must be acknowledged, may say.

Everything is possible. It is for each of us to will it. There is still time.