The Orleans rumor, an anti-Semitic rumor

"Who hasn't heard of these alleged disappearances of young girls in the fitting rooms of Orleans clothing stores in 1969? The rumor came to us, infected other towns, spread invented variants. We do not know whether to laugh or cry at the mention of the abduction of these young girls via the underground passages of Orléans to a submarine anchored in the Loire... This fascination of people for the inconceivable intrigue the author that I am. But the click occurred in me when I discovered the anti-Semitic character of the rumor of Orleans, which designated the Jewish merchants of the city as the instigators of this “ dealing with whites”.

I live in Drancy. Every day I walk past these buildings that housed the Drancy transit camp and almost every day past the Bobigny station. Something registers in me at each of these passages, the trace of a pain, the mark of the unthinkable. I visited the Shoah Memorial, its documentation centre. I considered devoting time to research, with a view to one day writing a play about the Shoah or anti-Semitism. I was unable to complete this project for lack of time and lack of circumscribing my subject.

The rumor of Orleans is for me today the gateway to this writing project. It arouses my interest twice, because of its anti-Semitic character and because at the heart of this rumor, we find, as so often, teenagers." Luc Tartar

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Teenagers as first victims

"For several years I have been writing plays aimed at teenagers, their parents and those around them. I have worked on different themes, school bullying.

To broach the subject of rumor is to once again take an interest in adolescent fragility, in collective fantasies, in the threats and prohibitions sometimes brandished by adults, in this damaged world that we leave them as a heritage.

In Orléans, it is young girls who “disappear”. This "erasure" of the young girl's body is indicative of the trouble of the time facing the emancipation of women and their claim to a place in society. Many things have changed in girl-boy relationships over the past fifty years, but the current economic, environmental and social crisis is facilitating the emergence of new tensions and the return of the craziest rumours. Whether they are the subject of these rumors or whether they are at the origin of them, adolescents are the first victims, in 1969 as in 2020.

Writing about the Orléans rumor is of course putting it into perspective and linking it to all these contemporary rumors and other conspiracy theses circulating on social networks, it is questioning what is at the heart of adolescence and which never ceases to challenge me, the relationship between the individual and the group, the rejection and attraction of the other, the emergence of the nightmare in full reality, the fear of a world that vacillates and the grip- the body of a violence to blow up everything.

My responsibility as a theater writer is not to leave teenagers alone in the face of the violence of the world, by putting theatrical words to this violence, which is a way of questioning it and fighting it." Luc Tartar