The Order of the Solar Temple left seventy four dead across three countries and three episodes: fifty three in Switzerland and Quebec in October 1994, sixteen in the Vercors in France in December 1995, and five in Quebec in March 1997. Investigators in each jurisdiction reached the same mixed conclusion, that the deaths combined suicide and homicide in proportions that vary between sites and are not fully established for any of them.
The institutional consequence fell hardest in France. A parliamentary commission chaired by Alain Gest reported in December 1995, weeks before the Vercors deaths, and published a list of movements compiled largely from intelligence service material. The list was widely criticised, including by scholars of religion, for its method and for the effect of naming groups that had no opportunity to answer, and it was formally set aside years later. The apparatus it began was not. An interministerial mission followed in 1998 and was reconstituted in 2002 as MIVILUDES, which remains the French state's standing body on what it terms sectarian aberrations.
The About-Picard law of 2001 came out of the same sequence. It created an offence of the fraudulent abuse of a person in a state of ignorance or weakness, and allowed a legal entity to be dissolved where its officers had been repeatedly convicted. Its passage was contested at the time and remains so, on the ground that it reaches conduct through a category of organisation.
Switzerland, which carried the larger share of the deaths, produced no comparable legislation.