En 1961, two French intellectuals: Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels (future creator of the Figaro Magazine!) create a magazine, the Magazine Planète, that will experience a great success for seven years. Its concept: combining realism and fantastic, in other words: science and science fiction. Forty years later: what became of the children of that magazine? To answer this question, we gathered Wiktor Stoczkowski, anthropologist (EHESS and Collège de France), Jean-Luc Rivera, expert in paranormal and Stéphane François, counterculture specialist.
First, our three participants will talk about the content of the magazine and the burst of critics - sometimes violent - especially from the French Rationalist Union. Then, they shall try to decipher whether a way of thinking has sprung from it, and if heirs could have taken advantage from it: hippy movement? Conspirator groups? New right-wing? Ufologists? New Age followers? Parapsychologists? Neuroscientists?
During that turning point period of the 50-60's, between the reconstruction and ten years before the events of May 68, the Planète magazine (and the book Le matin des Magiciens (The morning of the Magus) by the same authors edited in 1960) have forecast a new era for our western world. That social transmutation, cultural, but also spiritual announced a new world, a third way for the third millennium: beyond the declining Christian way of thinking and beyond the triumphant scientific materialism.
For these visionaries, the aim was to find a lost initiatory wisdom by exploring the most avant-gardists sciences. Indeed, renowned searchers coming from official academic backgrounds, like Teilhard de Chardin, Mircea Eliade, Carl Gustav Jung or Edgard Morin, haven't hesitated to face the dogmatic positivism of their time.
Thanks to their courage and to their intuition of genius, they have directed their axis of research towards unaccepted fields and who managed to reach a saving knowledge, "a redemptive knowledge" which has changed since the scientific representation we have of the world.
Do you wish to discover that time when enlightened searchers,... or sometimes too enlightened didn't hesitate to take up their quill? What a great breath for our time where uniformity has been replaced by unity, and consequently the mainstream by culture...
A debate which lasts an hour and forty minutes, presented by Patricia Martin and filmed at the Forum 104 (Paris).
En 1961, two French intellectuals: Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels (future creator of the Figaro Magazine!) create a magazine, the Magazine Planète, that will experience a great success for seven years. Its concept: combining realism and fantastic, in other words: science and science fiction. Forty years later: what became of the children of that magazine? 
