The young girl recounted how she was going to Last School, the first step on the way to No School, as required by Mother. A person you might call a teacher explained that the Free Progress school was not designed to produce ready-made consumers, but rather to reveal to a child the truth of their being and to inspire their curiosity, so she would be capable of choosing what was right for her as an adult . . . And Juliette, who was always bored to tears in class, thought that was way too cool.

The documentary concluded with images of Christ-like, thin, bearded, long-haired men passing buckets of earth to each other on a huge construction site against a backdrop of the setting sun. Then came Mother’s warm, maternal voice over a panning shot that took in their serene faces: There are people who love adventure and I am addressing them when I issue this appeal: ‘Let me invite you on this great adventure.’ I know nothing of what will happen to you tomorrow. You must abandon everything you anticipated, everything you have planned, everything you have built, and set off on a journey into the unknown. And let come what may!

At that point, Tata started pointing her finger at the computer screen and screaming in a tone that was no longer the incoherent babbling nor the kindly granny tone we were familiar with. No, it was pure de Rigny, out and out.

‘Silly fool! Come home this instant!’

So that is where Pierre had gone at the age of twenty. He had set off on the great adventure to join up with men and women who had adopted the common values of material detachment, abandonment of ego and a gift economy, with the aim of reaching a new form of consciousness.

How could you resist such a thing six months after the publication of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle? Especially knowing that it wasn’t some bizarre, sectarian nonsense but an experiment that had been launched with great pomp and ceremony by UNESCO, which had sent delegates from one hundred and twenty-one countries to the community’s inauguration.

The documentary helped me understand why the de Rignys had completely disowned their son, Pierre. Because Money, the only language spoken by that family, had proved powerless to find the words to convince him to stay. So, having arrived at a point of being unable to communicate at all, you might as well just be done with it.