Publishing, the Rules of the Trade

Les Nouvelles Sectes

Alain Woodrow, Éditions du Seuil, original edition, 1977, Coll. Bfm - Limoges

The polemical subject of sects was increasingly present in the news at the end of the 1970s. Alain Woodrow, a religious journalist working especially for the daily Le Monde, wrote a book called Les Nouvelles Sectes (1979) in which he questions the role of these movements in society and their methods. Le Seuil, fearing legal actions from the groups mentioned by Woodrow, commissioned a legal expertise of the manuscript.  In spite of this precaution, a Belgian priest successfully sued the author for libel and obtained that the decision should be published in the press.