Hello, Delphine Chaume.
You're a producer for the programme
"UnLivreUnJour", for France Télévisions,
you are also a producer
for France Culture,
and you have written
a thesis about rumours:
Rumour Discourse in the Republic of Congo.
I have invited you here today
to talk about a book,
a book which is already quite old,
as it deals with a rumour
that circulated in 1969:
"Rumour in Orleans" by Edgar Morin.
But before going any further, could you
tell us what this rumour was about?
- In May 1969, a rumour was spread
that a women's clothing store,
then two, three, four stores
were drugging young girls
in the fitting rooms
as part of the white slave trade,
sending them off to exotic countries
to become prostitutes.
Moreover, these stores
were being run by Jews.
- This rumour will certainly sound familiar
to some of our students,
as it is reminiscent of other
urban rumours or myths.
What is very interesting when Edgar Morin
and his team arrived on location,
shortly after the start of this rumour,
is that they were never able to ascertain
the source of the rumour.
However, Morin did observe that during
the month the rumour was circulating,
there were in fact propagation circles.
Could you tell us what
these circles were?
How was this rumour propagated?
- Yes. Edgar Morin and his team
went on location,
and started to investigate
while the rumour was still being spread,
or just a little afterwards.
They tried to determine when and where
the rumour had first started.
They actually determined
several stages of propagation:
the first was between May 10th & May 20th,
which Morin called the incubation phase,
where the rumour was being spread
in six-form colleges for girls,
i.e. there was white slave trafficking
in stores in the town centre.
Within these colleges for young girls,
which were closed environments,
and which acted as sounding-boards,
the rumour even gained credibility
among mothers and staff,
which shows how credible the rumour was
as it was also propagated by adults.
So that is the first stage.
The second stage is the propagation phase:
between May 20th & 27th,
the rumour left the colleges
for young girls,
and started to spread in locations
around the town centre: markets, etc.
Maids, for example, would
repeat this rumour
to their mistresses
and in the neighbouring communes.
And the story became
increasingly exaggerated,
i.e. there were now even
60 or so young girls
who had disappeared from clothing stores.
At this point, the urban myth
became anti-Semitic in nature,
as Jews were said to be
behind these disappearances.
Edgar Morin explains that the next stage
is the phase of metastasis,
where on May 28th, 29th & 30th,
the proliferation of the rumour
was at its maximum.
There were rumoured
to be underground tunnels,
i.e. the shops were interconnected
via underground tunnels,
the young girls were being abducted
by cargo ships and even submarines
to take them off to far-off lands
to become prostitutes.
And since no disappearances
had been reported,
and no-one had been arrested,
a rumour within the rumour emerged,
i.e. that the police had been bought off.
This reached such proportions that
by May 31st, it had entered an active phase,
i.e. people did more than just talk,
they started to form crowds
in front of the stores concerned.
The claims were refuted by the press,
i.e. the press became
involved on June 2nd,
and refuted this anti-Semitic rumour.
- It could have led to protests that
could have easily got out of hand,
but fortunately they didn't.
What's interesting is that
Edgar Morin goes on location,
he practices sociology 
focusing on the actual moment.
He places himself in the heart of the
action while it is still happening,
which is extremely difficult.
What he does manage to identify,
which is perhaps one of 
the unique features of his work,
is society's inherent need
to constantly create rumours.
It is even an emotional need,
a kind of reaction.
Just before, in the introduction,
I made a slip of the tongue,
I nearly said 'tumour' instead of 'rumour',
but as we have just seen, rumours
are very much like tumours.
They are like concentric circles
that slowly grow outwards.
What is interesting is that
they relate to the same age-old fears.
And at the same time, they involve
a long-established, myth-based
collective psyche and imagination,
two aspects which you brought out:
white slave trafficking and the Jew.
- Yes, the rumour in Orleans
was based on those two aspects:
white slave trafficking
and the image of the Jew.
What's important to note is that
rumours often have the same structure,
but the main features or leitmotivs
are adapted to fit the times,
and changed slightly over time,
but we find exactly the same structure
in different rumours.
Moreover, the rumour in Orleans
can be seen later in many other towns,
for instance, in Amiens in 1970,
just shortly afterwards.
White slave trafficking is an age-old,
medieval urban myth,
which contains both 'Eros'
and the underworld,
since the trafficking of white slaves
usually occurred on
the outskirts of cities.
- Let me just clarify by 'Eros'
you mean erotic impulses.
- Yes, exactly.
So we find these two drives,
i.e. aggression and sexuality.
The difference lies in the way the rumour
in Orleans was adapted to fit the times,
The new feature being that
the young girls were drugged.
They are drugged using a syringe,
i.e. they are injected with something,
or they are made to swallow a sweet.
These two aspects are interesting:
firstly, because the injection and the sweet
obviously have an erotic allusion,
as they constitute an intrusion
into the woman's body.
At the same time, there is freedom
from any blame or guilt,
because these young women
are not to blame,
they were drugged, they are innocent.
There is also a new theme,
i.e. the changing room,
which obviously alludes
to women getting dressed,
and to seduction, and women
as an object of seduction,
and also to metamorphosis.
This is interesting because in 1969,
there was also a metamorphosis
in terms of female appearance,
and in terms of the underpinning
female sexuality,
but we will perhaps talk
about this last point later.
The second feature
is the image of the Jew.
The rumour in Orleans was the first time
the image of the Jew
was associated with a sexual danger
and with the trafficking of white slaves.
So why did the rumour
include the image of the Jew?
Because there has to be someone
who orchestrates
the trafficking of white slaves,
it has to be someone who has two faces,
i.e. someone who is familiar,
yet somewhat foreign and sinister.
And in Orleans in 1969,
there were Jews, who despite being
well integrated into society,
- well, there were no problems -
they were still seen as being
an occult power
that corroded the world, etc.
The rumour truly became
the embodiment of the image of the Jew.
- A scapegoat was needed,
and this was to be the Jew.
What is also very interesting
is that Edgar Morin explains
that the Jew of 1969
is not the Jew of the 1930s,
and is obviously not the Jew of WWII.
The Jew of 1969 is well-integrated,
and has the same physical
traits as anyone else.
Therefore, the Jew's 'otherness'
or strangeness is even worse,
because he is not recognisable
at a quick glance.
It is therefore the threat
of the 'other', of the stranger,
who has become integrated into society,
and who has rendered himself invisible,
and the book is fascinating
in this respect.
- Yes, exactly. The sinister individual
moves around wearing a mask,
and people can no longer recognise
his true identity hidden behind the mask.
- We mentioned drives
and age-old or medieval fears:
Eros, erotic impulses, sexual awareness,
and the fear of sexuality, since we
are talking about adolescent girls.
The rumour incubates
among adolescent girls,
and the Jew has also fuelled
all kinds of fantasies
in the West and elsewhere since millennia.
These are age-old fears.
I am sure our students
will certainly be wondering
why these fears continue to persist today.
Moreover, in addition to being very old,
there are also other aspects
such as modernity that come into play,
and which ultimately fuel new concerns.
Before talking about these concerns
related to modernity,
I suggest we now listen to Boris Begard,
who will read for us an excerpt
from "Rumour in Orleans".
Modernity does not merely promote the myth,
it is also one of its fundamental themes.
Modern fashion is not something
that can be kept separate from
a woman's mores and life in general.
These miniskirts and seductive undies
and trendy party dresses
symbolise not merely
the desire to please,
but also the cult of novelty,
the triumphant self-assertion of youth
or the wish to remain young,
the aspiration to live in the Parisian manner
(that is - or so people believe -
freely and happily),
the emancipation of the adolescent
from her family
and the slightly older girl
from tradition,
a special type of personality,
and individual life-style.
Orleans is a city which has
undergone rapid change,
accelerated by the solar proximity
of the capital.
In this metamorphosis,
it is the girls and young women
who form the advance guard
of the new modernity
when it comes to transforming
manners and morals.
The Dorphée Boutique
right in the heart of town,
was a part of this metamorphosis;
it still remains a fascinating and active
centre for the new feminine modernity.
It is not only a place
where novelties are sold,
but one from which novelty radiates.
It is a place of initiation
in modern femininity,
not only for the girl or young woman
who wants to keep abreast of the times,
but for an adolescent
taking her first header
into the erotic potentialities
of dressing up.
It is a, perhaps the, symbolic centre
of feminine emancipation.
This emancipation, which has developed faster
as regards outward appearances
than it has in people's hearts,
stands in a cultural no-man's land,
between the abandonment of,
or the wish to reject, an old way of life,
and the aspiration to,
or the search for, a new life-style.
From the adolescent to
the fully-fledged young woman,
every girl is busy conquering,
absorbing or enlarging
her own area of independence;
but each would like to go further,
longs to travel (a reasonable substitute
for adventure), dreams of adventures.
The satisfactions gained
are still inadequate,
ambitions remained unfulfilled,
and yet already latent fears
have begun to multiply.
For the adolescent, these fears
centre on initiation;
the rest are made anxious by the thought
of breaking with traditional norms.
Both find an easiness
in what most attracts them.
Their erotic impulses,
still half-attached to traditional morality,
now aspire to such pleasures as would result from
a general enhancement of the erotic principle in life.
Dress constitutes the simulacrum of such a change
rather than any guarantee that it will happen.
They feel, confusedly,
that it symbolises both
danger and sinfulness;
they are aware, that is, of
its more unpleasant side.
This produces a climate
favourable to fantasy,
in which there would be, at one
and the same time, total emancipation
and total freedom from guilt.
Here we see what the Orleans myth had
to offer those adolescents and teenagers.
- As we just heard, in Edgar Morin's book,
there are two new modern myths:
the issue of the emancipation of women
and the changes that affect modern life.
- Yes, that's right.
According to Edgar Morin,
modernity does not merely
help promote the myth,
it is also an essential theme of the rumour.
So there are indeed two new aspects:
emancipation of women,
especially young women,
since it is the decade of
1960s pop music, and the miniskirt.
Mothers and older women
no longer have the same authority
over young women as they used to.
So the question they needed to address
was not only how they could
protect these young women,
but also how they could
protect their authority,
and they had absolutely
no idea how to do this.
So the rumour about white slavery
was actually very timely,
because it would allow them to re-establish
their authority over young girls,
and to keep an eye on their sexuality,
over which they no longer had any control.
This was coupled with concerns over
a potentially perverted liberated sexuality,
a new-found sexual licentiousness,
and included the themes of white slavery,
injections and sweets,
which exonerated any blame or guilt,
and which would end in rape
or forced prostitution.
So this fast social emancipation,
which ultimately was only a facade,
created a kind of discrepancy or hiatus
in the unconscious collective
between the outward appearances
and a desire for real emancipation.
It certainly wasn't real
in 1969 in Orleans.
So that is the first aspect.
The second aspect is
the transformation of the town.
Orleans remained a provincial town,
but one which was not very far from Paris,
and which had undergone
brutal and rapid change.
It is not by accident that the stores concerned
were located in the town centre,
it meant that the hitherto
safe town centre
had now become something sinister.
In fact, the population
no longer recognised the city.
It no longer seemed familiar,
and was therefore disquieting.
And the other aspect is that, unlike Paris,
where people supposedly didn't get bored
or restless, they did in Orleans.
So there was a desire to imagine stories,
and to create fiction,
as a means to filling the vacuum and dullness
of this small provincial town.
- There are a lot of aspects
to what you are saying.
When I read the book,
and on hearing you talk about it,
it makes me think of a modern-day
version of Little Red Riding Hood:
the mother who warns her young
daughter to stay on the path,
because if she deviates,
there is the nasty wolf.
So this makes her aware of her sexuality,
and of all the dangers in the world.
And it is the same with the fitting rooms.
If you go alone, you might be abducted
and sold as a slave, etc.
We see the ambivalence of sexuality
in aspects of the girls' appearance,
you mentioned miniskirts, for example,
but I'm not sure that we
necessarily understand
the significance of this
awakening sexuality.
Outward appearances were changing
more quickly than the moral standards.
And there is also the effect
of the large city.
Orleans, a medium-sized city,
with its demographic pressure,
with the breakdown of social bonds
associated with rapid change,
incites people to create fiction, notably
relating to the underground passages.
- Absolutely. Moreover, it should
be noted that during this period,
where the cities lacked all structure,
and were restructuring themselves
so as to be able to expand
in the 19th century,
the great popular novels also included
all these underground tunnels, cellars,
and systems of networks
running under the city,
implying there was something
hidden and occult going on,
exactly as we see
in the Rumour in Orleans.
- It's rather funny. On the one
hand, there is the underworld,
with its associated anguish, and
networks of gangsters and outlaws, etc.
and on the other, there are the
Superheroes like Superman, Spiderman,
who have a view of the whole city from
above, and which no-one else can enjoy
because the city has become too large;
it has sprawled out in all directions.
We see that times may change,
but rumours persist.
We cannot just consider them an archaism,
even today rumours flourish.
I think that our students
will have recognised
common features, themes
and leitmotivs, as you said.
Social networks are now everywhere,
so the proliferation of rumours
is perhaps happening even faster today.
But would we be right in thinking that
there are certain social contexts
that are more favourable to the
emergence of rumours than others,
and in particular, contexts where
there is rapid change?
- Yes, that is indeed
the question Edgar Morin
asked himself with respect
to the rumour in Orleans,
since this rumour circulated
between the referendum on April 27th,
and the presidential election.
- Yes, the French Senate referendum,
where de Gaulle risked his presidency.
Yes, exactly, so it was
a period of instability.
Nonetheless, Morin did not think
this was the trigger of the rumour.
He believed it rather acted
as an amplifier,
without which the rumour
would have remained atrophied.
What we know for certain
is that periods of instability,
upheavals and changes
are also periods of popular distrust
of institutions and official discourse.
People believe there is political
manoeuvring going on,
which they are not told about,
that there are secret
high-level negotiations,
that the press and the police
have been bought off.
Thus, the people can only trust itself
and its own word.
So that is the first aspect.
The second aspect is that,
in trying to cope
with increasingly worrying
and unknown everyday situations,
where people are afraid of the future,
people look to familiar things
for reassurance.
So they tend to delve into
the collective unconsciousness,
which includes all the old stories
and urban legends,
tales and popular literature,
which contain a subject material
that is frightening,
but it is the familiar that
is predominant at such times.
There is a desire to find the familiar.
The fiction that people look to
has to then be embodied in reality,
so for example, in modern-day stores,
in the image of the Jew, etc.
And then this reality,
when it is disseminated
in the form of a rumour,
will incorporate elements
of fiction and fantasy, etc.
This is certainly true
for the rumour in Orleans,
where there are a good number
of such elements,
i.e. the voyage to exotic countries,
the underground tunnels, the cellars, etc.,
and then obviously, the sexual
dimension and the Jew.
- So to sum up what you have just said,
there is a re-appropriation
of official discourse by the people,
which mirrors what social networks
allow us to do today,
i.e. there is a distrust
of the official discourse,
and a re-appropriation of
this discourse by individuals,
which can have emancipatory effects.
For example, there are movements
like 'balance ton porc' and 'Metoo'
which can even have tangible effects
on the organisation
of decision and power-making
in Hollywood or elsewhere.
It can clearly have reactionary effects.
It can lead to a scapegoat rationale
and even to acts of violence.
And all this is drawn from
the collective psyche,
which is slowly built up
over the centuries.
- Absolutely. This is especially because
one of the cornerstones of rumours
is a desire to return cohesion to society.
- I suggest we stop there.
I urge our students to pursue
this reflection by themselves,
since they now have all the tools
they need to try to identify rumours
and to understand their fundamental elements.
Thank you, Delphine Chaume.
- Thank you.
