Anthracite: Is The French Cult and Murder Series Based on a Real Case?

In Anthracite, an amateur detective named Ida overhears her father being kidnapped during a phone call. Although he manages to warn her not to go looking for him, she decides to go to Lévionna, a small mountain town where, according to the data from her tracking app, it was the last place where her father stayed. Lévionna, which is a fictional town, has a complicated history, marked by the case of a mysterious cult that ended with a mass suicide and the murder of a woman, leading to the leader being arrested and locked up in a psychiatric hospital. Ida arrives in town and finds that her father’s disappearance is not the only problem.

The police are also investigating the disappearance of a woman and some believe that the cult case did not happen as reported at the time, in addition to the fact that the town is fighting against a local company that they accuse of releasing contaminants that affect the health of people. everyone in the place. The French series moves between the present and the past to reveal the history of the cult and its leader, revealing a connection between them and Ida’s father, and with a man who seems to be connected somehow to the group and its plans. In Anthracite, a journalist obsessed with the case of a sect of the Ecrins disappears after 30 years of having investigated the collective suicide of several of its members in the Alpine village of Levionna. Now, his daughter will try to unite the ends of an intricate web of secrets to rescue her mother alive. At the same time, we will meet the son of the one chosen to perpetuate the lineage of the sect and we will see how madness and fanaticism will take over the place.

Is Anthracite Based on a Real Cult?

Anthracite is fiction, the French series was written by Fanny Robert and Maxime Berthemy with elements of religious fanaticism, suspense, and police thriller, but some elements are inspired by reality. For example, the Anthracite that is talked about so much in the series is a real mineral that is very similar to traditional coal. At the same time, the town of Lévionna is inspired by the city of Grenoble and, according to Moviedelic, the city was used from Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, in the south of France, for filming. Furthermore, the cult we see in the series, which believed in the existence of light and darkness within each person and had a plan to ensure that the light won, was created concerning a real cult called The Order of the Solar Temple.

The Order of the Solar Temple cult was founded in Geneva in the 1980s by a man named Luc Jouret and Joseph De Mambro. Like the series’ cult, its history was marked by suicide and murder. According to Britannica, the cult “is best known for the murder-suicide of 74 of its members in 1994-1997”. Britannica explains that the cult took as reference the belief of some Knights Templar that the end of the world was near. Jouret was a descendant of a member of the Renewed Order of the Temple, who shared this belief and he proposed that the world was going to suffer a catastrophic and devastating event in the 90s, so he and the members of his cult should prepare and ensure this on a high spiritual plane.

Death was part of the process, so 53 cult members were murdered or took their own lives in October 1994, while there was a second round of suicides and murders in March 1997. In both cases, the buildings where this happened were set on fire. And it is not the only cult that had cases of mass suicides, this also happened with the Jonestown cult and Heaven’s Gate, where the members thought they had to die to achieve salvation. The Anthracite cult case is similar to that of Jonestown, where poisoned drinks were used to cause the deaths of dozens of the group’s followers.