Rumor from Orléans
The rumor of Orléans is a rumor with an anti-Semitic background that arose in the French city of Orléans in May 1969 .
Content and course
Allegedly 28 girls and young women disappeared after visiting certain fashion stores. Rumor has it that they were drugged with a syringe in the locker rooms, held captive in the basement of the shop and taken at night through a branched system of tunnels to the Loire , from where they were kidnapped by submarine to Tangier or overseas and forced into prostitution .
The rumor later took an anti-Semitic turn, emphasizing that many of the businesses involved were Jews . These allegedly bribed the authorities and the police in order to buy their silence about their crimes. The rumor was thus similar to old ritual murder legends . As a result of this rumor, anti-Semitic leaflets surfaced and calls for boycotts have been launched against these stores, in front of which people have threatenedly gathered. The rumor collapsed after it was found that there were no missing persons reports during the period in question and the press, politicians and trade unions condemned the flare-up of anti-Semitism. The French sociologist Edgar Morin used this example to study the origin and spread of rumors.
origin
The origin of this rumor lies in several incidents. In previous years, an activist against the “white slave trade” made a tour of France and warned against underestimating this problem. The subject was then taken up by the writer Stephen Barlay in his novel "The Sex Dealers" (L'Esclavage sexuel). The now discontinued tabloid Noir et Blanc presented the scenario of the novel in its May 14, 1969 issue as if it were a recent true event.
Spread
Edgar Morin found the incubation places of the rumor in girls' schools: “These young schoolgirls, isolated from social realities, who lived in a closed environment, are a favorable breeding ground for the emergence of sexual fantasies, and such imaginary scenarios express repressed desires: a classmate tells her friends like it as if it really happened to her, and the friends therefore envy her and make it their own. [...] Within a few days, every girl is privy to the secret in this resonance body, which the boarding schools and high schools make, knows, believes and shudders, because the more the story is believed the more it is with the attraction of sexual prohibitions plays. "(Kapferer 1996, p. 46)
This rumor was later spread by the girls' mothers to the general public. For them it also seemed to gain plausibility because some of these fashion stores were selling mini skirts , which were then trendy . In the more provincial Orléans this seemed to confirm the alleged instinctiveness of the shopkeepers. The rumor later took an anti-Semitic turn. Apparently, anti-Semitic ideas of allegedly “hidden machinations” of the Jews could still be called up.
Further spread
In the following years the rumor kept coming up in some cities in France, sometimes without anti-Semitic connotations. The rumor of Orléans thus also has the character of an urban legend .
literature
- Jean-Noël Kapferer: Rumors. The oldest mass medium in the world . Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, Leipzig 1996, ISBN 3-378-01007-X .
- Edgar Morin et al. a .: La rumeur d'Orléans (Collection Points; 143). Edition du Seuil, Paris 1982, ISBN 2-02-002290-7 (reprint of the Paris 1969 edition)