thibault

Through the layered site of the Château de Méhoncourt, this research unfolds a historical, political, and symbolic investigation where archival inquiry, ethnographic fieldwork, and narrative experimentation converge to expose institutional fictions, organized silences, and enduring ideological structures

The Château de Méhoncourt, currently a CRS (riot police) barracks, is a site marked by discontinuous yet entangled histories: a Wehrmacht field brothel during the Occupation, an orphanage run by the OSE for Jewish children, a colonial goods depot, and originally a 14th-century Augustinian monastery known as La Douce Amie. With no fixed scope at the outset, the investigation follows a method of ecosystem unfolding (Leibovici), tracing material, symbolic, and documentary threads tied to the château.

The research begins with archival work, focusing on Alexandre Gros, the Jewish owner expropriated in 1940. The administrative over-documentation of his life—property deeds, spoliation records, internal government communications—reveals both biographical content and the ideological structure of shifting state bureaucracies. This excess of documentation signals a counterpart: everything that resists being written, archived, or governed—desire, affect, violence, or shame.

Fieldwork complements this, including interviews with individuals familiar with the site’s current function. One source revealed a remarkable episode: a CRS company deployed to Kanaky–New Caledonia was recalled due to a collective gonorrhea outbreak, as briefly noted in Le Canard Enchaîné. This event echoes historical anxieties: military sexual regulation, especially under Nazi occupation, where brothel systems served to control both soldierly desire and violence. Méhoncourt was part of this network, yet archival traces are scarce—perhaps deliberately erased to protect postwar sex workers. Here emerges a critical question: What do we choose not to administer today? Especially regarding sexuality, institutional desire, and the management of bodily conduct.

The research expands into symbolic and speculative inquiry. The monastery’s original name—La Douce Amie—and the presence of a 19th-century Temple of Love (a replica of a gift from King René to his lover), point to erotic and chivalric motifs that continue to haunt the site. These echoes intensify with a striking anecdote: a CRS officer once joked on national television that CRS meant “Chevaliers de la Race Supérieure” (“Knights of the Superior Race”), revealing the convergence of uniform, myth, and ideology. This became the basis for investigating the neo-medieval imaginary in contemporary police and far-right rhetoric.

To probe these ideological fictions, the research unfolds along two axes:

A role-playing game (RPG), in the style of Dungeons & Dragons, designed around Méhoncourt’s CRS unit. The game becomes a laboratory of ethics, revealing how ludic structures shape players’ moral alignments and narrative priorities.
A political ethnography, involving interviews with the former head of an Identitarian movement in Sarthe and the spokesperson for a royalist micro-group in Mayenne. Each mobilizes medieval or racialized imaginaries as foundations for their political ethics—one through neo-pagan, racial cosmology, the other via Catholic royalist transcendence.

Two central questions emerge:

Just as the medieval knight was a performative ideal, does the modern CRS "play knight" under a different institutional mythology?
What political fiction justifies such a performance—what legitimates the narrative in which they act?

Through Méhoncourt, this research constructs a non-linear history—where archives, fictions, and ruins intersect. It seeks to capture what persists across administrative regimes: not just facts, but the forms of life, the fantasies of power, and the silences of governance that endure within, and around, institutional space.