Order of the Solar Temple

The Order of the Solar Temple (French Ordre du Temple Solaire) was a secretive esoteric group that drew on neo-Templar mythology, claiming a lineage from the medieval Knights Templar, together with Rosicrucian, New Age, and survivalist-apocalyptic themes. It was led by Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret, and attracted a relatively affluent and educated membership in France, Switzerland, and Quebec. The group taught an apocalyptic expectation of a coming catastrophe and a doctrine of "transit", a passage, through death, to a higher state of existence, sometimes associated with the star Sirius. Its history came to a violent end in a series of linked deaths in 1994, 1995, and 1997, in which some 74 members in total died in Switzerland, Quebec, and France in events investigators concluded involved a combination of suicide and homicide, including the deaths of children.

The deaths, occurring in multiple countries and staged with ritual elements, made the Solar Temple, alongside Jonestown and later Heaven's Gate, one of the principal cases in the scholarly study of why a small number of new religious movements turn to collective violence. Analysts point to the combination of apocalyptic belief, internal crisis and external pressure, and a leadership that framed death as spiritual transit.

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.