The Anti-Cult Discourse as a Support of Neoliberal Ideology

Collective fears:

The Anti-Cult Discourse as a Support of Neoliberal Ideology

by Maurice Duval,

ethnologist, senior lecturer at the University Paul Valéry of Montpellier

published in L’Homme et la Société: Revue internationale de recherches et de synthèses en sciences sociales, no. 155, January/March 2005: Sécurisation et Globalisation, publisher: L’Harmattan

On 9 May 2004 in Montpellier, on the edge of a market, the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire was the object of a form of repression: while a militant was distributing leaflets and selling the newspaper Rouge, as the LCR has done since the end of the sixties, the police intervened to ask him to put his material away and leave, “otherwise, I’ll fold it in two for you”, a police officer is said to have told him, according to the militant. This material consisted of a board on which were stuck posters denouncing the war in Iraq and the policy of George W. Bush. In fact, very ordinary ideas when one knows the political thought of this group. The police took this militant to their premises, searched him by patting him down, and his personal effects, his bag in particular, were attentively examined. The officers noted his personal details, address and telephone number, and checked the central file, on which they discovered that he was already registered. Is it because he is engaged in a protest movement that he is on file, even if his movement of belonging is perfectly legal? There would be matter for investigation on this point, but that is not our purpose here. Propaganda boards, posters and leaflets were confiscated by the forces of order. At the end of this arrest, an officer warned the militant that if he were caught again on the public highway with his newspaper and his leaflets in the same conditions, “things would go differently”(1).

The week that followed this incident, the LCR came back with ten of its militants. The police intervened again, but a negotiation meant that only two of them were taken to the station. There, they obtained a sight of the municipal order on the functioning of the municipal markets that justified the officers’ attitude. This order of 9 May 2003, updated on 1 April 2004, forbids the sale of political newspapers and any distribution of leaflets on the public highway. Article 1 stipulates that “it is forbidden to carry out any action of proselytism whatsoever”. The purpose, it was explained, is to counter the cults. The LCR asked the municipality of Montpellier by letter to explain itself; it never received a reply. Let us recall that the municipality of Montpellier is of socialist tendency (PS), but a right-wing municipality could have taken an entirely similar measure. Following this, the LCR launched a unitary appeal and several movements joined it a few weeks later, and it was twenty-five militants who came back without the police troubling them this time.

Elsewhere, it is the political party “Lutte Ouvrière” which, in an article in the newspaper Le Monde, was directly qualified as a “cult”. Now, to say that this movement of the radical left is “a cult” is not to argue legitimately against its ideas, but to suggest that it is malevolent, unhealthy and that its disappearance would be desirable.

Let us take a third example, the group “Longo Mai”, installed in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence since Huguette Bouchardeau’s son and his friends created this community on the basis of alternative and anti-capitalist ideas in the seventies. There, the fact of living their ideas collectively led a few deputies to class this group in the category “cult” in the parliamentary report of 1996(2). Now, this group, whether one shares its ideas or not — that is not the question — has the right to live and to think differently from the majority of the population as long as it respects the dignity of women and men, which, manifestly, is the case. This parliamentary report classes the “cults”(3) by elaborating a typology that is questionable to say the least, and questioned by certain researchers, alas too few in number. And in this classification, several categories are elaborated, among which figure “the alternative groups”(4)! The introductory paragraph specifies: “They [the alternative groups] generally propose a different organisation of the economic circuits, of the mode of production, of world trade, of human relations.”(5)

It would be high time to underline it forcefully: this text is an infringement of freedom of thought and notably of the freedom to think in the mode of contestation. To advocate an economic system other than the one in which we live, according to this very official report — which moreover commanded an almost general consensus — is to expose oneself to being catalogued as belonging to a “cult”, with all that this implies: stigmatisation as a member of a group considered as the place of elaboration of “Evil”, with the underlying idea that it would be salutary to make it disappear as such. In these conditions, no political thought advocating another mode of production, that is to say which would not belong to dominant thinking, is any longer possible. Indeed, to propose to change society radically is indeed to propose to change the mode of production first and foremost, in order to leave the capitalist mode of production; in other words, to change social relations, the relations between the men and women who live in society. In the same way, within the framework of world trade, to think the relations between our countries and those of the South differently from what they currently are — such as the question of the debt of poor countries, for example — is not yet becoming an offence but suggests that those who go in this direction have a “cultic thinking”, indeed that they belong to groups qualified as “cults”.

Let us return to the Longo Mai group. To my knowledge, it operates within the framework of the law and in no way contravenes it. The assimilation between “cults” and alternative groups is an advance of single-track thinking, since the signifier “cult” implies “Evil” to be destroyed, without moreover anyone really questioning the real content of these groups, considered by certain sociologists as being dangerous in 3 or 4% of cases. “These groupings are not necessarily dangerous and I would add that they rarely become so”(6), writes Roland J. Campiche. Moreover, even the government and those in charge of the ideological question of the fight against the “cults” say explicitly that they do not know what they are talking about. Renewing the admission of ignorance that figures in the parliamentary report of 1996, the annual report of the Interministerial Observatory on the cults says: “Consequently, the Observatory considers that there is no cause to define the notion of cult”(7) [sic]! But this admission of ignorance as to the definition of what the report deals with does not prevent it from asserting a little further on: “the cults represent a veritable menace for the State, society and individuals; it is the task of the Observatory to fight against this menace”(8). The authors of the report are caught red-handed lacking elementary logic. To assert that one does not know how to define the object one is dealing with but to speak of it all the same would be severely sanctioned by any philosophy teacher in the final year of school.

Let there be no mistake: if the president of the United States, George W. Bush, decreed an “axis of Evil” which raises a smile in France by reason of its eminently ideologico-religious rather than stricto sensu political character, we too, in France, have our “axis of Evil”, even if it is not formulated in the same manner: it is the set of groups qualified as “cults”. Anyone, moreover, is in a position to objectify this: it is enough to say to those around one that one has joined a group qualified as a “cult”, while specifying that it is inoffensive. Everyone will be able to verify the result. I myself amused myself by doing an exercise with the representative of an association for the fight against the cults, the ADFI(9). I asked this man how he would react if I told him that I frequently gathered students to dance around a book by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. This gentleman’s answer was not to tell me that I should consult a psychiatrist, still less to ask me my reasons — astonishing to say the least — for acting in this way; no, his reaction was to tell me that we were going to become a cult. The provocation was nevertheless crude. The problem in his eyes was that we were departing from the norm, from correct thinking.

The organisers of the hazing at the École des arts et métiers would also be, according to the newspaper Le Monde, a “cult”, but this time an “unavowed” one. North Korea has also been qualified as a “cult”, even if that one may seem a little much, and likewise Al Qaeda.

Let us remember that the question of belonging to a cult had been put to the accused during the “Dutroux trial” in Belgium. Under this label of “cult”, whose content is not defined — and for good reason — what heterogeneity! Indeed, what do all these groups have in common? Even if it is not exclusively French, this procedure that consists in using the discourse on the “cults” to create fear and consensus is very French. Great Britain recently gave an example contrary to what is done in France by agreeing to employ a sailor in the Royal Navy while authorising him to practise “his religion”: Satanism. That country’s Ministry of Defence justified its decision by the will “to practise no discrimination founded on the beliefs of its recruits”(10).

The groups considered as “cults” in France are often perceived in other countries as marginal religions, or at the very least minority ones but, as we have seen, the process of stigmatisation can sometimes exist elsewhere(11). So it is in Morocco, where a hard rock group was qualified by a judge as a “very dangerous satanic cult” (in 2003). We have demonstrated it: the repression that relies on anti-cult ideology does not stop at the groups initially qualified as “cults”, nor at those of the radical left; and as for what the ideology of the correct — of the right and of the left — wishes to eradicate, that is to say everything that does not enter the norm and could hamper the control of practices and systems of thought, that ideology intends to root out the non-standard well beyond these fields. And it has begun to do so, besides the examples we have already seen, through the will to bring the psychoanalysts to heel. For anti-cult ideology is a very effective tool of repression, generalisable to many other groups than those qualified as “cults”. We have here a powerful tool of normalisation.

One of the new objects of this normalising will has been the therapists: psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, etc. The idea of the bill presented by the UMP deputy Bernard Accoyer in September 2004 is fundamentally that “shrinks”(12) of every kind are liable to belong to “groups of a cultic character” and that, in order to fight this, it is fitting to legislate in order to weed out the bad “shrinks” and the swindlers. Without entering into the details of this bill, let us look at a few aspects of the law of 9 August 2004 relating to health policy that issued from it, a lightened formula in relation to the Accoyer bill by reason of a contestation by the professionals of psychology and psychoanalysis. One of the passages of the law, article 57, specifies that the title of psychotherapist will be reserved to professionals inscribed on a national register, but also that “holders of a doctorate in medicine will figure on this list as of right”. In fact, we find here, transferred to the shrinks, the same process as the one at work between the historic churches of our country, and notably the Catholic Church, and the “cults”. The former, very structured, religiously correct, is much easier to control than the multitude of groups called “cults”, as varied in substance as in geography. The faithful and the lower clergy of the Catholic Church must obey their hierarchy, which, in France and in our day, is generally conciliatory with the power in place. Things are already a little more complicated with the Protestants, non-hierarchised and plural. Did we not recently see a deputy interrupt a West Indian Protestant service in Montreuil (on 6 February 2005), on the pretext that he had come to check the conformity of the premises with safety standards? This preference of the State for a structured group, rather than for a multitude of associations more difficult to control, could also be observed with the will to gather the different components of Islam, numerous and varied, under the aegis of the Conseil français du culte musulman, created at the instigation of the Minister of the Interior and of Religions. In the same way, doctors registered with the ordre des médecins are far more structured than therapists who might fly on their own wings outside the ordre des médecins. For after all, can one repress a laugh when one reads that those who have obtained a university diploma, and because they have obtained it, would be better psychoanalysts than the others, and that this diploma would be a guarantee against swindling? That any general practitioner, independently of his knowledge or his ignorance of the bases of psychoanalysis, could practise this discipline while being better at it by virtue of his diploma, could not be taken seriously. Since when would passing through university immunise against abuses and charlatanism? Psychoanalysis is not a science but a discipline that acts subjectively on the subjective. As such, the diplomas that attest to technical or scientific competences in medical matters could not therefore have any efficacy here. The use of “anti-cult” repression is clear and aims at a social and political function: the extension of the field of what is considered as potentially “cultic” with a view to an ever broader normalisation which reinforces the advent of a single-track thinking, and this with the assent of a considerable fraction of the population, including among the intellectuals. And even if, where the shrinks are concerned, there were indeed some protesting reactions, as we have seen, sometimes even virulent ones, they came mostly from the shrinks themselves, as if the problem were that of a corporation rather than a serious political question. Without entering into the substance of a debate that is not the object here, it is not a matter of denying that there can be charlatans among the psychoanalysts, but to the same extent as among doctors or in any profession, neither more nor less.

We have said that the last parliamentary report, that of the MIVILUDES(13), created under the Raffarin government, no longer classes the cults as was done previously under the socialist government. Moreover, it is no longer the cults that are the object of this interministerial mission but “groups of a cultic character”. Now, if the notion of “cult” is in no way a sociological concept but a catch-all notion whose contours are totally vague — I shall come back to this — the notion of “group of a cultic character”, or of “dérive sectaire”, is still more so. A real danger lies there because, if one does not know what a “group of a cultic character” is, nothing prevents anyone from being put into it. What could be easier? The logic of lists is over; henceforth one prefers to retain “the cluster of indicators”. This blurring of the report’s key notions cannot have been unintentionally laid down.

The repressive process common to all these examples takes root where one did not expect it, and that is perhaps the reason for the general aphasia of the intellectuals on this ideology, with a few rare exceptions: that is to say, in neoliberal policy and in its ideological tools.

It is a truism to recall that every society has norms and constraints, whatever its political and social system. Indeed, in order to live in society, rules are needed to oblige each to a minimum respect for others, to a respect for life in a group, which does not go without saying since it would render happiness impossible in society(14). However, the relation to norms, that is to say behaviours conforming to the expectations of global society, and the construction of those norms, vary according to political regimes and historical periods. Certain political systems, such as totalitarianisms or authoritarian governments, have a greater requirement that everyone enter the framework of a narrow and rigid norm. Some governments thus forbid political opinions different from their own. In our society, in the 1970s, plural norms coexisted. Several ways of thinking, of speaking, of appearing, etc., rubbed shoulders. Numerous currents of thought debated among themselves (the Marxisms, structuralism, existentialism, etc.). The workers, clad in their overalls, crisscrossed the streets while the liberal professions favoured the bow tie. Each had a specific manner of speaking, thus signifying their social origins. Another difference in language arose from cultural differences: one spoke differently in the North and the South, in the East and the West, not only by reason of a different accent but also of lexical variations.

Then there was a progressive rejection of this normative plurality and of the egalitarian ideology of that period which sought to abolish the frontiers between social groups. Intellectuals and students willingly dressed in a worker’s or peasant’s jacket, preferably smoked gauloises — workers’ cigarettes — and preferably drank a glass of red wine at the counter. These behaviours expressed at once the social difference of the social groups (peasants, workers, intellectuals) but also their connivance. Progressively, these plural norms were partially effaced to give way to unidimensionality(15). Debates of ideas were partly lost (even if there seems to be a resurgence at present); there is no longer any great current of thought. The great intellectuals have been replaced by philosopher-journalists, the workers henceforth hide their overalls; in short, clothing and languages have become uniform, taking as their model the middle classes, imposed on the population through the intermediary of television presenters. Indeed, by their presence on the television sets of millions of viewers, they impose, sometimes without knowing it, their ways of being and, worse, their ways of thinking or, to be more precise, the ways of thinking of their editorial offices. The 8 o’clock news has modified even the times at which the French eat dinner, instituting, there again, new englobing norms right down to the details of daily life. Systems of thought have therefore undergone this same movement “of shrinking”, to end in an ever more singular and ever more restrictive norm, whose ideal is to exclude everything foreign to it and to stigmatise those who do not submit to it. Such is the case, for example, of those whom, by amalgam, one names the people of the “difficult suburbs” rather than of the “socially disadvantaged zones”, there where young and less young, unemployed or workers, immigrants or not, have created a norm on the margins with a language of their own, a specific dress and gestural repertoire that power has some difficulty in bringing into the central norm. The tendency is therefore towards the reduction of norms (to put it crudely, the dominant norm and the norm “of the suburbs”); one sees fewer and fewer differences in the domains of language, of clothing, of food, even if some obviously remain, thus erasing the visibility of the different social classes, which moreover facilitates the negation of their existence. This process is also observed in the political field, where dissimilarities tend to diminish (hence the crisis of the political), and I could take yet other examples. Now, paradoxically, the religious field escapes this rule of reinforced normalisation since, if the great religious institutions are in constant decline, one has seen multiple new religious movements flourish, called “cults” by the media. In other words, there where the norm restricts differences, the religious tends to differentiate itself by segmenting, which creates a contradiction in society between this field and the others.

The double question arises of knowing what the meaning of this repression with a normalising aim is — even if I have already given part of the answer — and whom it serves. That supposes first of all interrogating the words that apparently designate our object, in order to know what we are talking about when using the word “cult” or the expression “group of a cultic character”.

Sociologically, what is a “sect”? At the beginning of the twentieth century, Max Weber opposed the “sect” to the church. Without entering into the details of his definition, let us examine a few important points of it. The members of a “sect” become followers by voluntary adherence, whereas the members of a church are so at birth: one is most often born within the framework of a family already a member of a church, whereas one becomes a member of a sect by voluntary adherence. Now, this point is not without posing problems, because the Christian churches — but one could add Islam — have converted numerous Africans, from colonisation to our own day. Does that mean that the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches would be sects for those they convert, who, by definition, were not born into these religions but adhered to them? If one applied Max Weber’s definition to the letter, these religions would indeed be churches in Europe, where they no longer convert anyone, and where one is generally Catholic or Protestant by family tradition, whereas in Africa they would be sects. Moreover, let us take the concrete example of what the media name the “cult of the Mandarom”(16), which has had followers since 1969, the date of its creation. Because of this, a certain number of today’s followers were born of aumist parents (as the followers of the Mandarom are called); they were therefore born, too, within the framework of a family already a member. The Mandarom would therefore be, for those at least, a church. Weberian theory asserts that a sect cannot remain one: after a few generations it inevitably becomes a church; which would be the case of the Mandarom.

Churches have a clergy, Max Weber tells us further, but the Mandarom is provided with a clergy (priests and bishops) and would therefore answer there too to the definition of the church more than of the sect. There would be in the sect an equality of members, as opposed to the church within which one distinguishes the laity from the clergy. At the Mandarom, there is indeed an inequality of status between the clergy, the ordinary members, or the faithful (called “knights”), and the collegial leadership. Moreover, the members among themselves are hierarchised according to the degrees of initiation they have reached (there are 22 in all). The sanctity of the founder would be attested for the churches, but Mr Gilbert Bourdin, or “the Lord” Hamsah Manarah as the followers designate him, is of divine nature for the latter, since he is, for them, the “Cosmo-planetary Messiah”. One could not be more divinised! The churches would have a conservative logic whereas the sects would be protesting. The churches would establish a compromise with society whereas the sects would be in rupture with it; the sects would refuse the social world. The Mandarom has, in a certain manner, a conservative logic since it intends to take up the traditions of the different religions, even if it is in order to make a “synthesis” of them. Moreover, it is in no way in rupture with the world: its members (between 200 and 300 to date), apart from the permanent residents of the monastery (11 members), are married for the most part, have children, form part of various associations, some of them charitable, practise sports, work for the majority of them, read the press, send their children to public or private schools, etc.

According to Weber’s typology, the Mandarom would therefore be more a church than a sect. However, even if the definition of sect were adapted to the reality of this group, it would not be possible to designate it thus, insofar as the term “cult” has evolved a great deal since the beginning of the century, and to say today of a group that it is a cult is to stigmatise it, indeed to criminalise it a priori. The Mandarom has put in place a clergy, rites, a corpus of beliefs, a dogma; it has a relation to the divine — so many elements that make it necessary to speak of a religious group, and more precisely of a marginal religious group.

So why still speak of “cult”? One of the reasons is economic, because the State, which lays claim to laïcité, is quite willing to exempt the historic churches from taxes (even when they engage in commerce) but not the whole set of new religious groups that emerge concomitantly with the collapse of the former. But this cause is not the only one. There is another, this one ideological: everything happens as if, in France, one could not imagine that a group could be at once religious and criminal, or, in a general way, as if the religious were antinomic with the delictual. As if the religious character of a group were incompatible with any form of infringement of morality and of the law, and as if its so-called “cultic” character, on the contrary, systematically implied infringement of the law and immorality, and consequently earned it a constant presumption of guilt. Now, the news of these last years shows how false this equivalence is, as is indicated by the considerable number of paedophile Catholic priests whom their church no longer covers. It must be specified that the Mandarom has never been convicted to this day (except for the statue, which was destroyed by the public authorities in 2001), nor its guru, on the question of rape notably, and this despite the intense work of the justice system. No proof has ever been found. Contrary to widespread opinion, the tribunal de grande instance of Nanterre ordered the authors of a work accusing the guru of rape — written by a former follower designating herself as being the victim, and above all by her journalist friend at TF1 — to pay 10,000 francs in damages to the guru for non-respect of the presumption of innocence (order of 17 November 1995). Following this judgment, a statement was published on the back of the book(17).

Rigour therefore implies designating religious groups, or the new religions, as such, without prejudging their delictual character. But it is self-evident that every group, or individual, whoever they may be, must be judged if they commit delictual acts. The law must apply from the bottom of the social ladder up to the highest level of the State. It goes without saying that the fight against criminal and delictual cults is salutary, just as much as the combat against the crimes and offences of the historic churches.

The first social function of the discourse on “the cults” is to create a collective fear. Indeed, they are supposed to represent a great danger at the same time as they are barely visible but omnipresent. Their hidden practices would be rape, if not paedophilia or sexual orgies, the appropriation of the followers’ money, “brainwashing” rebaptised “mental manipulation” to burnish a worn notion formerly decried by the intellectuals, the abuse of the weak; they would be places of drug consumption, indeed of laundering the money that comes from its sale, from arms trafficking, from organ trafficking, etc. In fact, the “cult” incarnates everything that society considers as “Evil”. One understands that they can arouse fear, all the more so as they would attack the weak and children as a priority(18). The result is convincing: global society is afraid of these groups and, consequently, of what is more or less outside the norm, all the more so as the anti-cult associations (amply endowed with funds and with credit(19)), most often considered as salutary, stimulate the media to practise a constant denigration, often very violent and which does not tolerate controversy. Any discourse that goes against single-track thinking is here censored in part or in whole(20).

Collective fears always more or less run through societies, and a rapid look at their evolution in France is interesting, because it is one of the essential ideological instruments of the normalising will. Indeed, by creating fear, one simultaneously creates the need to protect oneself: that is the bedrock of security ideology. Now, in order to protect, at a certain stage, one must accept a few infringements of democracy. One observes this phenomenon also in the USA where, in the name of the anti-terrorist fight, a certain number of liberties that prevailed hitherto have been hampered, such as the freedom to oppose the president of the United States publicly, as singers and artists experienced, notably at the beginning of the Iraq war. The president of Russia, too, quickly understood the advantage he could draw from this fear. With it, an ever increased control of a police type imposes itself, control being there to guard against risks that, to be brief, one may call risks of aggression. But the more this ideology founded on fear takes root in society, the more police control is not only accepted, but demanded by ever more numerous fringes of the population. Fear sells well. Who has never enjoyed frightening themselves with a film or a detective novel? What would adolescents not do to frighten themselves? Fairground rides, horror films, stories — anything goes. The ideal then becomes the fantasy of a society without any risk at all, at the same time as the public is deluged with often confused information about terrible risks, ever more numerous and omnipresent. The slightest playground scuffle is the object of a television news item, as Laurent Mucchielli quite rightly recalls(21). This security ideal is forged at the same time as social insecurity rages, depriving the most destitute of the guarantee of a decent life (pensions, unemployment, the de-reimbursement of medical costs, etc.)(22). Now, this myth of a society without any risk is one of the most dangerous there is because, besides being in reality unattainable, in order to tend towards a society without risk one would have to establish an absolute totalitarianism, in which every thought, every behaviour, would be known and mastered by the power in place. That is what the novelist Ira Levin called, after the name of his novel, Un bonheur insoutenable(23). Let us make a rapid analysis of collective fears to try to understand the process that is currently developing in our society, because what has been happening for some years is not an event but indeed a process. About thirty or thirty-five years ago, there were two major collective fears: the one whose object was the nuclear and the one whose object was food colourings. What did they signify? The first (the fear of the nuclear) indicated an opposition to the State, sole party responsible for the nuclear. The second (the fear of food colourings) was an opposition and a fear directed against the agri-food industry. This fear had moreover had a certain effect, since manufacturers were obliged to write the nature of the colourings on food packaging. Now, their presence dissuaded potential buyers in such a way that the manufacturers limited their use for as long as the contestation lasted. The latter, like the mistrust regarding the nuclear, was moreover entirely legitimate. Fear was then an objective instrument of contestation. Then, ten or fifteen years later, fears took as their object the distant Other, the métèques, the Arabs, the Blacks, etc. One then witnessed an inversion, because, from the fear of the State and of the industrialists, society was now rejecting its foreigners(24). Then there was the fear of the cults, which continues still today. Fear has changed object: from the State and industry, symbol of its economic and social system, it has focused on the distant Other, the foreigner, the near Other, then the religious Other (into this category enter the followers of “cults” and Muslims(25)) and finally on the political Other and the alternative Other. Fear has therefore passed from an objective instrument of contestation to an instrument of structuring single-track thinking by denouncing new “internal enemies”, but within the framework of a very broad consensus: indeed, what can pride itself on uniting in common agreement the whole of the right and the whole of the left, the secular and the religious? Apart from the discourse on terrorism and paedophilia, no other discourse attains this consensual performance. In the ideal of this normative society, all would have to be alike and enter the same mould(26). The neoliberalism we are currently living is characterised by two fundamental traits. On the one hand, the growing withdrawal of the State as guarantor of social solidarity, and notably of social policies and, on the other hand, the reinforcement of the presence of the State in the domains of repression: increase in the number and the powers of the forces of order, development of penal policy(27), filing, retreat of social rights, etc. Now, in order to make this neoliberal policy accepted, security ideology, by founding itself in large part on “the cults”, produces a collective fear which of itself calls forth in return a demand for increased protection and the stigmatisation of what is outside the norm as being potentially dangerous.

Centre d’études et de recherches comparatives en ethnologie (CERCE), Université Montpellier III. CERCE website

1. La gazette de Montpellier, no. 833, 4 to 10 June 2004, p. 10, and Motivé(e)s, Montpellier, bimonthly bulletin of the LCR 34, June 2004, p. 8.

2. Les sectes en France, Parliamentary report, Paris, éd. Patrick Banon, 1996, p. 43.

3. The last parliamentary report has adopted another method and no longer classes the groups; I shall come back to this.

4. Les sectes en France, op. cit., p. 64.

5. Ibidem.

6. Roland J. Campiche, Quand les sectes affolent, Geneva, Labor et Fides, 1995, p. 103.

7. …interministerial on the cults, Rapport annuel, Paris, La Documentation française, 1998, p. 43.

8. Ibidem, p. 47.

9. Association de défense de la famille et de l’individu. This association is of Catholic origin.

10. Le Monde, 27 October 2004.

11. The logic of this anti-cult policy, which is also strongly found in Germany, remains enigmatic. It does not arise from religious traditions (Catholics/Protestants), nor from the proclaimed attachment to laïcité, nor from a particular political system.

12. We group under this abbreviated appellation the whole set of psychological and psychoanalytic disciplines with the exception of psychiatry, which is not directly concerned.

13. Mission interministérielle de vigilance et de lutte contre les dérives sectaires.

14. Sigmund Freud, Malaise dans la civilisation, Paris, PUF, [1929] trans. 1981.

15. On this aspect, one should reread and update the thought of Herbert Marcuse, doubtless too quickly abandoned, notably that of L’Homme unidimensionnel. Essai sur l’idéologie de la société industrielle avancée, Paris, éd. de Minuit, coll. Arguments, 1964.

16. I favour the example of what, for convenience, I shall henceforth call here “the Mandarom”, first because I studied this movement for several years and therefore know it well, but also because it is somewhat the stereotype of the “cult”. When one speaks of cults, it is often this one that is put forward, for several reasons, among them its visibility. Cf. Maurice Duval, Un ethnologue au Mandarom. Enquête à l’intérieur d’une « secte », Paris, PUF, 2002.

17. Florence Roncaolia and Bernard Nicolas, Mandarom : une victime témoigne, Paris, éd. TF1, 1995.

18. On the other hand, what is astonishing is that no research on these “cults”, which are said to represent a menace for the Republic according to the official discourse, has ever been requested by the State. How is one to explain that?

19. The subsidies of the public authorities more than doubled from 1996 to 2000. The UNADFI alone obtained €202,624.52 in 1996 and €414,031.53 in 2000.

20. I myself experienced this, since the press officers of the PUF contacted a number of journalists on the publication of my work on the Mandarom, who said they were very interested in the text. Some wrote a review of it or made a report by coming to interview me: twenty-seven were censored by their editorial management. These were magazines, national and regional newspapers, local and national radio stations, and televisions, from the largest to the smallest.

21. Laurent Mucchielli, Violences et insécurité. Fantasmes et réalités dans le débat français, Paris, La Découverte, 2002.

22. Cf. Robert Castel, L’insécurité sociale. Qu’est-ce qu’être protégé ?, Paris, éd. du Seuil, coll. La République des idées, 2004.

23. Ira Levin, Un bonheur insoutenable, Paris, J’ai lu, 1984.

24. Or supposed to be such, because this category does not go without saying.

25. One might be astonished that the Buddhists do not enter the category, since they are relatively new arrivals in France and do not emanate from our historic churches. The reason is twofold: on the one hand, in their countries of origin, they practise the correct religion and, on the other hand, they are opposed to the Chinese communists and that has given them legitimacy; that is why Tibetan Buddhism is the religiously correct in France and Japanese Buddhism is classed there as a cult.

26. This opposition between collective fears is in reality more complex, because dioxin and GMOs, etc., also arouse fears today for which the State and industry are responsible. However, they do not yet engender a contestation movement of any scale, as was formerly the case with the struggles against the nuclear and against agri-food.

27. Loïc Wacquant, Les prisons de la misère, Paris, éd. Raisons d’agir, 1999.