The small and ancient village of Saint-Pierre-de-Colombier is situated within the Monts d’Ardèche natural park in southern France, built on the flanks of the rugged gorges of the Bourges valley which rise to a height of more than 1,000 metres.
But behind the picture-postcard setting, tensions are running high among its population of around 440. The reason is a controversial construction project launched by a traditionalist Catholic community, the Famille Missionnaire de Notre-Dame (Missionary Family of Our Lady), which has been present in the village since 1946.
Looking over the valley, high up above Saint-Pierre-de-Colombier, is a large white statue of the Virgin Mary, called Notre-Dame des Neiges (Our Lady of the Snows), and it was following its benediction that a local bishop authorised the creation of the Famille Missionnaire de Notre-Dame FMND), led by the then village priest who was responsible for the statue’s erection.
The statue has ever since become a place of pilgrimage, with processions organised by the FMND, which wants to significantly expand the activity. Five years ago it set about building a vast complex with a built-up surface area of 15,652 square metres – on which will stand a building variously described as a basilica or spiritual centre – capable of welcoming 3,500 pilgrims, situated on seven hectares of rural land it owns. The complex is to include an accommodation centre and a large coach park. When the project was launched in 2018, its cost was estimated at around 18 million euros.
The building permit was granted without any public debate, nor any study of its impact on the local environment. The heavy machinery to build the complex has begun work on the site, situated in an area which hosts dozens of protected species of plants, including the Mignonette of Jacquin, and creatures, such as the lesser grey shrike bird and the yellow-bellied toad,.
The project has met with opposition from local environmental groups, and a number of local inhabitants, which have tried to disrupt the construction work. They organised an occupation of the site last October, after a group of ecologists occupied the site, members of the Famille missionnaire de Notre-Dame (FMND) began trying to dislodge them, by force and whispered verses in Latin. A video of the clashes, showing a stout, diving nun tackle one of the protesters to the ground went viral on social media.
Mediapart visited Saint-Pierre-de-Colombier during an animal-themed carnival in the village on February 18th. Among the villagers gathered in the garden of the village hall were members of Les Ami.es de la Bourges (Friends of the Bourges), an environmental association founded in opposition to the project. Dressed in animal costumes, they were there to promote the protection of biodiversity in the local landscape. Close by, around ten members of the religious community, bearing a large wooden cross, looked on. The unease was palpable. “They’re trying to intimidate us,” said one of the carnival-goers. “It’s ridiculous.”
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“Certain people look at me as if they wanted to kill me,” said Sylvain Herenguel, co-chairman of the Ami·es de la Bourges. “There is a very bad atmosphere, it’s sometimes heavy.”He said that when, from time to time, the nuns pass by the home of his fellow co-chaiman of the association, Daniel Calichon, they pause to make a sign of the cross. “For them, Daniel is the devil.”
Calichon has become something of a black sheep in the village since he erected two large panels on the stone façade of his home bearing the words “Stop béton” (Stop concrete). “Either one accepts the project knowing that you can benefit from it, or you’re frightened and you bend and close the shutters when there’s a procession, or you try to defend values and become a scapegoat,” he commented.
He said he has received threats. Some of his fellow militants have found the paintwork of their cars scratched, and been openly insulted. A few months ago, a local councillor warned members of the association, before witnesses, that “This business will end with a gun”.
The tensions in Saint-Pierre-de-Colombier have broken-up longstanding friendships and brought a rotten atmosphere not just in the village, but also in the neighbouring region. “For us, it has been very complicated,” said Gaëlle Berge, from the Maison de Vallée social centre in Burzet, a nearby village. The social centre, run by an association which organises events and activities for various sections of the population, young and old, including the inhabitants of Saint-Pierre-de-Colombier. “Our members are sometimes militant, and we had both currents on our governing board. Some even left because of that.”
Since the Famille Missionnaire de Notre-Dame was founded in Saint-Pierre-de-Colombier 78 years ago, it has grown to include 14 other sites around France, and one in Italy with another in Germany. It reportedly numbers around 150 “sisters” and “brothers”. For more than 20 years it has in effect had a presence on the Saint-Pierre-de-Colombier municipal council, where seven out of the 11 councillors are linked to it. Some of these are devoted visitors of the community, including Gérard Fargier, mayor of the village since 2001.
Gérard Fargier did not respond to Mediapart’s request for comment.
In preparation for the construction of its mega-project, local councillor Jacques Alexandre sold land he owned to the Famille Missionnaire de Notre-Dame (FMND), including an abandoned industrial site, for a total of 260,000 euros. The second-in-line deputy mayor, Jean-Louis Pereyron, became involved in the construction through his building company, while the son of one of his colleagues was handed plumbing work. The influence of the religious community prompted one inhabitant of the village to contact the local prefecture and France’s interministerial body for combatting sects, the MIVILUDES, to warn of the FMND’s potential hold over the local council. The MIVILUDES did not respond to Mediapart’s request for comment.
Sophie Nahas is the principal deputy mayor of the village. On the municipal council, she told Mediapart, “We never speak about the subject”, adding that there has never been any official discussion about the building site. “I have on three occasions asked the mayor to put the matter on the agenda, but he doesn’t answer me,” she added. One evening at the beginning of February, she received a strange call on her landline phone. It was a woman who was chanting a hymn. In the background Nahas could hear distant discussion and the sounds of a refectory.
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Ami·es de la Bourges chairman Daniel Calichon said that, over the years, the members of the FMND and their entourage succeeded in buying the presbytery in Saint-Pierre-de-Colombier and around 20 houses. “Entire blocks of the village belong to them,” said Francis Chabanis, a former mayor of the village. One inhabitant, speaking on condition her name is withheld, said that members of the religious community, upon learning of the death of a home owner, would then try to find out who owns the property. “They try to position themselves even before the deceased is buried,” she said. “It happened to my family.”
The concerns are also present in nearby Burzet. A local councillor, who also spoke on condition her name is withheld, said that when she and her political allies were elected in municipal elections in 2020, they immediately went about purchasing, in the name of the council, an old care home with a surface area of 600 square metres. “It was the first thing we did. We knew that the FMND had already visited it and we didn’t want them to set up there,” she said.
Members of the community regularly visit the residents of the care home. In recent months, several relatives of residents have asked the home’s management to establish rules for the visits and to submit them for authorisation from the families. “The religious [visitors] do no harm to anyone,” objected Burzet deputy mayor Jean-Louis Pereyron. “When someone is ill, whatever their political colours, they go and visit them in hospital. When my uncle had a heart attack, every month a brother or a sister [from the FMND] came to visit him at home to talk with him.”
At the New Year, members of the religious community habitually visit homes in the village. “They’ve already come to my place, when I moved in,” said Clémence Delahaye, from the Ami·es de la Bourges association. “They want to know who you are, where you come from, where your children are schooled.”
According to some accounts given to the association, some of those visits have included a request for donations. “That is calumny,” said Bernard Domini, the Father Superior of the FMND. “The object of our visits is quite simply to exercise a Christian ministry of proximity with all the people of Saint-Pierre-de-Colombier.” He did not respond to any other of Mediapart’s questions, which he initially proposed answering by email. After he was submitted with a list of questions, he then referred Mediapart to the FMND website.
The FMND’s influence on local life at Saint-Pierre-de-Colombier includes elections. In the 2022 French presidential elections, there were 118 people recorded on the electoral register as being domiciled with the FMND, whereas it is estimated that only between 30 and 50 individuals live throughout the year at the community’s property. The remainder travel between the FMND’s other sites. The local commission of control of electoral lists, on which sits councillor Claude Minjoula-Rey, active with the FMND, has shown no concern over the matter.
While the precise numbers involved are unclear, Daniel Calichon says the effect is. “If one adds around 15 [voters] associated with the community to these 118, you get around 130 voters, which amounts to about a third of registered voters and almost half of those who go to the urns,” said Calichon. The former mayor, Francis Chabanis, added that “the members of the congregation never miss one proxy, there’s never anyone missing”. During the first round of the 2022 presidential elections, there were exactly 130 votes cast for the far-right candidate Éric Zemmour, equal to about 40% of votes cast.
That was part of a pattern in Saint-Pierre-de-Colombier. In the first round of the 2002 presidential elections, the maverick rightwinger Christine Boutin, who promoted traditionalist Catholic values and opposed civil partnerships and gay marriage, came first in the village. In the 2007 elections, the hard-right candidate Philippe de Villiers, with similar views to Boutin, came first. This pronounced support for such figures rhymes with the opposition of the FMND against the legalisation of abortion, same-sex marriage and contraception, all of which was legislation described by Father Superior Bernard Domini as being part of “a larger combat against God, inspired by Satan”.
The “Stop béton” panels erected on the facade of his home by Daniel Calichon have in the past been pasted over with stickers proclaiming “Soral is right” – a reference to the French far-right negationist and anti-Semite Alain Soral – along with others promoting the far-right movement Génération identitaire, which is now outlawed in France. Clémence Delahaye said that when the opponents of the construction project occupied the building site last October, the gendarmerie officers present said they were above all there to protect the protestors, “because,” she said, “small far-right groups were hiding in the roads close by”.
The association’s militants claim that it is councillor Claude Minjoula-Rey, a former colonel in the French army who served in the former Yugoslavia and Mali, who appears to coordinate the FMND in defending the construction project. “He orientated them, he told them how to go about things and what the limits were,” said a woman member of the association, who received a doctor’s certificate for two days’ sick leave due to injuries she sustained in the clashes. In 2016, Minjoula-Rey led a workshop for the FMND on the theme of “miséricorde” (mercy), in which he explained to those gathered how it is possible to kill someone and remain a Christian.
Beyond the environmental impact of the construction project, the tensions that it has caused are too much for some. Deputy mayor Sophie Naha is one of them, and she is now considering giving up her post. “They use certain flaws of the Fifth Republic [the French constitution] to take over the village,” she told Mediapart. “One doesn’t have the right to misuse it for the benefit of a group which is immersed in a retrograde, even royalist, imaginary.”
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse