The situation of minority religions and alternative medicine practitioners in France currently gives cause for grave concern. Although France has ratified the international texts on human rights, the reality in that country is quite different: freedom of thought is often denied.
As a Christian missionary for La Famille, we have been led to travel a lot and we have sometimes experienced difficulties in countries which were more or less welcoming. But I have to say, as a French citizen, that it is on French soil that I have had my most traumatizing experience.
Claude is a Protestant. The freedoms of his Evangelical Association are being more and more restricted due to the growing climate of fear of “cults” that is spreading in France today and affecting many religious groups. I represent the CLEF Association [Lyons Evangelization and Training Circle], which is affiliated with the French Evangelical Alliance. This Alliance is part of the Protestant Federation. There are about 5,000 of us in and around Lyon.
I founded Horus, an agrarian community in Ardèche. Our specialty is a particular form of organic farming. We grow giant vegetables without fertilizers. It is an ancient method, which has been used and proven over 6,000 years. The trouble started as soon as we, naively, spoke out publicly about this method of farming, saying, “In the end, if one applies our method, all French agriculture can forego the use of fertilizers and pesticides.”
