2023-06-22 08:17:36
About twenty coffins were taken out of their vaults, opened and searched. Height of horror, some bodies were even manipulated. The desecration of two cemeteries in the south of Charente-Maritime, located in Chartuzac and Tugéras-Saint-Maurice, was noted last Friday, in the early morning. This prompted the Saintes public prosecutor’s office to open an investigation for “violations of graves accompanied by damage to the integrity of the corpse” and “thefts or attempted thefts in meetings”, entrusted to the Jonzac research brigade and the territorial brigade of Montendre.
Facts far from being unpublished, because the desecrations of cemeteries are relatively frequent in France. But who are their authors, and why do they disturb the sleep of the deceased? Are their motivations political? Esoteric? 20 Minutes asked the question to Raphaël Liogier, philosopher and sociologist, specialist in religion and questions of identity.
A significant part of the desecrations is attributed to people close to the extreme right. What drives them to degrade graves?
Their motivation is political, social, identity. Far-right people are obsessed with identity. But identity is genealogy. It’s the idea that a piece of land belongs to you because your ancestors have been buried there for several generations. When they desecrate graves, it’s a way of saying: “You don’t really belong to this land, you think you’re putting down roots here, but we are preventing you by digging you up. We refuse your presence and your progressive rooting. »
What other motivations might the perpetrators of desecration have?
There are two other layers of justification. The second is the supreme violence represented by the desecration of the dead, it is the absolute insult. There is, behind, the desire to humiliate what you are, that is to say the heir of the buried person.
It is to tell the living, who may be Muslims or Jews, that we humiliate them because we humiliate their ancestors. This motivation is often linked to the first, moreover.
Finally, there is a third more superficial, less calculated motivation. It is, for some, a kind of performance. A bit of the “You can’t do that” side, something that’s supposed to be the worst. It’s a way of saying that we are capable of crossing all the limits, of doing something that is strictly forbidden. We don’t target certain deaths in particular. It is therefore not anti-Semitic racists who will specifically dig up Jewish dead to violate or humiliate Jewish memory. It is an emotional experience which consists in going beyond all limits, in desacralizing everything. And what is most sacred is the mystery of death.
There may also be a way of exorcising one’s own fear of death, the idea of being stronger than death. It is not the target itself that motivates them.
Is there a common point among the authors of profanation?
If there is a sociological regularity, it is age. They are often young people, rarely people over 30 or 35 years old. Most frequently, they are part of far-right groups, or a sub-group. These people get together, train and take this more radical initiative, to go further.
And what about the question of black masses and satanic rituals?
We find, among the followers of black magic, the mystery of death and the desire to have power over it. Magic is the feeling we give ourselves of controlling the uncontrollable with supernatural forces. It is linked to the unbearability of uncertainty.
Dying is not the problem. It’s more the fact that everything can stop at any time, death is unpredictable. When we bury a person, we have the feeling of controlling something by creating a ritual. The followers of black magic have the feeling of acting on death, on their own anguish, on unbearable uncertainty, by desecrating graves.
Do desecrations happen at specific times?
There is no season for desecration! The authors are always several, it is a collective training. The conditions for emulation must be met: series of meetings, political events that create excitement in certain circles, the fact that people have been drinking a little and are uninhibited.
But is there sometimes a link with the societal or political context?
Of course, when there is a media effervescence on subjects like the veil, immigration, that is to say in the relationship to the other who should not be there. We also saw it during the period of the terrorist attacks committed in the name of Daesh. When one begins to enter into a certain emotional relationship to anxiety, all ideological pretexts are good.
I think it’s first of all the feeling of loss, which is deep and which can be worked on by the context, which creates a desire to let off steam, to do something about the situation. The ideological justification comes after, and serves to give coherence to all that. The desire to take action needs to grab hold of something that makes it coherent.
There are images in the media that appeal to emotion, to the feeling that everything is screwed up, that nothing is right, that everything is collapsing. Gradually, we designate figures of this collapse.
#Touching #dead #absolute #insult.. #defilers