Civil War among the Masons
We have seen that the emancipation of the Jews in 1789-91 was carried out chiefly by the Freemasons. This is hardly surprising, given the Jewish nature of the central Masonic myth and rites. Judaism and Masonry are inter-related and inter-dependent.
The first stage of the Revolution, from 1789 to 1791, was dominated by the Masons, whose numbers had grown at an astonishing rate in the pre-revolutionary years. Adam Zamoyski writes that “there were 104 lodges in France in 1772, 198 by 1776, and a staggering 629 by 1789. Their membership included virtually every grandee, writer, artist, lawyer, soldier or other professional in the country, as well as notable foreigners such as Franklin and Jefferson – some 30,000 people.”[11] “Between 800 and 900 Masonic lodges,” writes Doyle, “were founded in France between 1732 and 1793, two-thirds of them after 1760. Between 1773 and 1779 well over 20,000 members were recruited. Few towns of any consequence were without one or more lodges by the 1780s and, despite several papal condemnations of a deistic cult that had originated in Protestant England, the élite of society flocked to join. Voltaire was drafted in on his last visit to Paris, and it was before the assembled brethren of the Nine Sisters Lodge that he exchanged symbolic embraces with Franklin.”[12]
In 1791 a split began to emerge between the more moderate liberal Masons, the great majority, who had been responsible for liberal reforms like the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and a more violent and revolutionary minority. The split was reflected in the composition of the Convention elected in 1792. It was divided between “Montagnards” (Jacobins) on the left, led by Marat, Danton, Robespierre and the Parisian delegates, and the “Girondins” on the right, led by Brissot, Vergniaud and the “faction of the Gironde”. The Montagnards were identified with the interests of the Paris mob and the most radical ideas of the Revolution; the Girondins – with the interests of the provinces and the original liberal ideals of 1789. The Montagnards stood for disposing of the king as soon as possible; the Girondins wanted a referendum of the whole people to decide.
The Montagnard Saint-Just said that a trial was unnecessary; the people had already judged the king on August 10; it remained only to punish him. For “there is no innocent reign… every King is a rebel and a usurper.”[13] Robespierre had voted against the death penalty in the Assembly, but now he said that “Louis must die that the country may live” – an unconscious echo of the words of Caiaphas about Christ: “It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not” (John 11.50). And he agreed with Saint-Just: “Louis cannot be judged, he has already been judged. He has been condemned, or else the Republic is not blameless. To suggest putting Louis XVI on trial, in whatever way, is a step back towards royal and constitutional despotism; it is a counter-revolutionary idea; because it puts the Revolution itself in the dock. After all, if Louis can still be put on trial, Louis can be acquitted; he might be innocent. Or rather, he is presumed to be until he is found guilty. But if Louis can be presumed innocent, what becomes of the Revolution?”[14]
There was a certain logic in these words: since the Revolution undermined all the foundations of the ancien régime, the possibility that the head of that régime might be innocent implied that the Revolution might be guilty. So “revolutionary justice” required straight execution rather than a trial; it could not afford to question the foundations of the Revolution itself. It was the same logic that led to the execution without trial of Tsar Nicholas II in 1918.
But the majority of the deputies were not yet as “advanced” in their thinking as Robespierre. So “during the third week of January 1793,” writes Jasper Ridley, “the Convention voted four times on the issue. A resolution finding Louis guilty of treason, and rejecting the idea of an appeal to the people by a plebiscite [so much for Rousseauist democracy!], was carried by 426 votes to 278; the decision to impose the death penalty was carried by 387 to 314. Philippe Egalité [the Duke of Orléans and cousin of the king who became Grand Master of the Masons, then a Jacobin, renouncing his title for the name ‘Philippe Egalité’] voted to convict Louis and for the death penalty. A deputy then proposed that the question of what to do with Louis should be postponed indefinitely. This was defeated by 361 to 360, a single vote. Philippe Egalité voted against the proposal, so his vote decided the issue. On 20 January a resolution that the death sentence should be immediately carried out was passed by 380 to 310, and Louis was guillotined the next day.”[15]
Now the Jacobins cast the Girondins aside. A coup against the Girondist deputies was carried out between May 31 and June 2, 1793. “In July 1793,” writes Jasper Ridley, “a young Girondin woman, Charlotte Corday, gained admission to Marat’s house by pretending that she wished to give him a list of names of Girondins to be guillotined. She found him sitting as usual in his bath to cure his skin disease, and she stabbed him to death.[16] She was guillotined, and the Girondin party was suppressed.
“In Lyons, the Girondins had gained control of the Freemasons’ lodges. In the summer of 1793 the Girondins there defied the authority of the Jacobin government in Paris, and guillotined one of the local Jacobin leaders. The Lyons Freemasons played a leading part in the rising against the Paris Jacobins; but the Jacobins suppressed the revolt, and several of the leading Girondin Freemasons of Lyons were guillotined.”[17] The revolutionary government now took terrible revenge on its defeated enemies. On October 12 the Committee “moved a decree that Lyons should be destroyed. Its very name was to disappear, except on a monument among the ruins which would proclaim ‘Lyons made war on Liberty. Lyons is no more.’”[18] Lyons was not completely destroyed, but whole ranges of houses were burnt and thousands were guillotined and shot. “The effect… was designed to be a salutory one. ‘What cement for the Revolution!’ gloated Achard in a letter to Paris.”[19]
And so the Revolution was frenziedly devouring its own children.[20] Or rather, the Masons were devouring their own brothers; for the struggle between the Girondists and the Montagnards was in fact, according to Lev Tikhomirov, a struggle between different layers of Masonry.[21] “In the period of the terror the majority of Masonic lodges were closed. As Louis Blanc explains, a significant number of Masons, though extremely liberal-minded, could still not, in accordance with their personal interests, character and public position, sympathize with the incitement of the maddened masses against the rich, to whom they themselves belonged. In the hottest battle of the revolution it was those who split off into the highest degrees who acted. The Masonic lodges were replaced by political clubs, although in the political clubs, too, there began a sifting of the revolutionaries into the more moderate and the extremists, so that quite a few Masons perished on the scaffolds from the hands of their ‘brothers’. After the overthrow of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor the Masonic lodges were again opened.”[22]
O.F. Soloviev writes: “The brotherhoods were considered outposts of counter-revolution, many disbanded themselves, some members emigrated, others stopped all work. Only after the coming to power of Napoleon, who protected the order, was its activity renewed and even broadened.”[23]
The Jacobins and the Illuminati
If we look into the origins of Jacobinism, then we very soon come up against the name of an organization called Illuminism, founded on May 1, 1776[24] by a Bavarian professor called Weishaupt, who assumed the name of “Spartacus” (from the slave who rebelled against Rome in the first century BC). Illuminism arose out of the dissatisfaction of a group of Masons with the general state of Masonry. Thus another founder member, Count Mirabeau, noted in the same year of 1776: “The Lodge Theodore de Bon Conseil at Munich, where there were a few men with brains and hearts, was tired of being tossed about by the vain promises and quarrels of Masonry. The heads resolved to graft on to their branch another secret association to which they gave the name of the Order of the Illuminés. They modelled it on the Society of Jesus, whilst proposing to themselves something diametrically opposed.”[25]
“Our strength,” wrote Weishaupt, “lies in secrecy. Therefore we must without hesitation use as a cover some innocent societies. The lodges of blue masonry are a fitting veil to hide our real aims, since the world is accustomed to expecting nothing important or constructive from them. Their ceremonies are considered pretty trifles for the amusement of big children. The name of a learned society is also a magnificent mask behind which we can hide our lower degrees.”[26]
“Weishaupt constructed his organization on several levels, revealing his most radical plans only to his chosen co-workers. Weishaupt chose the members of his organization mainly amidst young people, carefully studying each candidature.
“Having sifted out the unreliable and dubious, the leaders of the order performed on the rest a rite of consecration, which took place after a three-day fast in a dark basement. Every candidate was consecrated separately, having first had his arms and legs bound. [Then] from various corners of the dark basement the most unexpected questions were showered upon the initiate.
“Having replied to the questions, he swore absolute obedience to the leaders of the order. Every new member signed that he would preserve the secrets of the organization under fear of the death penalty.
“However, the newcomer was not yet considered to be a full member of the organization, but received the status of novice and for one to three months had to be under the observation of an experienced illuminé. He was told to keep a special diary and regularly present it to the leaders. The novice filled in numerous questionnaires, and also prepared monthly accounts of all matters linking him with the order. Having passed through all the trials, the novice underwent a second initiation, now as a fully-fledged member.
“After his initiation the new member was given a distinguishing sign, gesture and password, which changed depending on the rank he occupied.
“The newcomer received a special pseudonym (order’s name), usually borrowed from ancient history…, and got to know an ancient Persian method of timekeeping, the geography of the order, and also a secret code.
“Weishaupt imposed into the order a system of global spying and mutual tailing.
“Most of the members were at the lowest level of the hierarchy.
“No less than a thousand people entered the organization, but for conspiratorial purposes each member knew only a few people. As Weishaupt himself noted, ‘directly under me there are to, who are completely inspired by me myself, while under each of them are two, etc. Thus I can stir up and put into motion a thousand people. This is how one must command and act in politics.”[27]
“Do you realize sufficiently,” he wrote in the discourse of the reception of the Illuminatus Dirigens, “what it means to rule – to rule in a secret society? Not only over the lesser or more important of the populace, but over the best men, over men of all ranks, nations, and religions, to rule without external force, to unite them indissolubly, to breathe one spirit and soul into them, men distributed over all parts of the world?”[28]
The supposed aim of the new Order was to improve the present system of government and to abolish “the slavery of the peasants, the servitude of men to the soil, the rights of main morte and all the customs and privileges which abase humanity, the corvées under the condition of an equitable equivalent, all the corporations, all the maîtrises, all the burdens imposed on industry and commerce by customs, excise duties, and taxes… to procure a universal toleration for all religious opinions… to take away all the arms of superstitions, to favour the liberty of the press, etc.”[29] This was almost exactly the same programme as that carried out by the Constituent Assembly at the beginning of the French revolution in 1789-91 under the leadership of, among others, the same Count Mirabeau – a remarkable coincidence!
However, this liberal democratic programme was soon forgotten when Weishaupt took over control of the Order. For “Spartacus” had elaborated a much more radical programme, a programme that was to resemble the socialism of the later, more radical stages of the revolution. “Weishaupt had made into an absolute theory the misanthropic gibes [boutades] of Rousseau at the invention of property and society, and without taking into account the statement so distinctly formulated by Rousseau on the impossibility of suppressing property and society once they had been established, he proposed as the end of Illuminism the abolition of property, social authority, of nationality, and the return of the human race to the happy state in which it formed only a single family without artificial needs, without useless sciences, every father being priest and magistrate. Priest of we know not what religion, for in spite of their frequent invocations of the God of Nature, many indications lead us to conclude that Weishaupt had, like Diderot and d’Holbach, no other God than Nature herself…”[30]
Weishaupt proceeded to create an inner secret circle within Masonry. He used the religious forms of Masonry, and invented a few “mysteries” himself. But his aim was to found a political organization controlled by himself.
His political theory, according to Webster, was “no other than that of modern Anarchy, that man should govern himself and rulers should be gradually done away with. But he is careful to deprecate all ideas of violent revolution – the process is to be accomplished by the most peaceful methods. Let us see how gently he leads up to the final conclusion:
“’The first stage in the life of the whole human race is savagery, rough nature, in which the family is the only society, and hunger and thirst are easily satisfied… in which man enjoys the two most excellent goods, Equality and Liberty, to their fullest extent. … In these circumstances… health was his usual condition… Happy men, who were not yet enough enlightened to lose their peace of mind and to be conscious of the unhappy mainsprings and causes of our misery, love of power… envy… illnesses and all the results of imagination.’
“The manner in which man fell from this primitive state of felicity is then described:
“’As families increased, means of subsistence began to lack, the nomadic life ceased, property was instituted, men established themselves firmly, and through agriculture families drew near each other, thereby language developed and through living together men began to measure themselves against each other, etc… But here was the cause of the downfall of freedom; equality vanished. Man felt new unknown needs…’
“Thus men became dependent like minors under the guardianship of kings; the human must attain to majority and become self-governing:
“’Why should it be impossible that the human race should attain to its highest perfection, the capacity to guide itself? Why should anyone be eternally led who understands how to lead himself?’
“Further, men must learn not only to be independent of kings but of each other:
“’Who has need of another depends on him and has resigned his rights. So to need little is the first step to freedom; therefore savages and the most highly enlightened are perhaps the only free men. The art of more and more limiting one’s needs is at the same time the art of attaining freedom…’
“Weishaupt then goes on to show how the further evil of Patriotism arose:
“’With the origin of nations and peoples the world ceased to be a great family, a single kingdom: the great tie of nature was torn… Nationalism took the place of human love…. Now it became a virtue to magnify one’s fatherland at the expense of whoever was not enclosed within its limits, now as a means to this narrow end it was allowed to despise and outwit foreigners or indeed even to insult them. This virtue was called Patriotism…’
“And so by narrowing down affection to one’s fellow-citizens, the members of one’s own family, and even to oneself:
“’There arose out of Patriotism, Localism, the family spirit, and finally Egoism… Diminish Patriotism, then men will learn to know each other again as such, their dependence on each other will be lost, the bond of union will widen out…’
“… Whilst the ancient religions taught the hope of a Redeemer who should restore man to his former state, Weishaupt looks to man alone for his restoration. ‘Men,’ he observes, ‘no longer loved men but only such and such men. The word was quite lost…’ Thus in Weishaupt’s masonic system the ‘lost word’ is ‘Man,’ and its recovery is interpreted by the idea that Man should find himself again. Further on Weishaupt goes on to show how ‘the redemption of the human race is to be brought about’:
“’These means are secret schools of wisdom, these were from all time the archives of Nature and of human rights, through them will Man be saved from his Fall, princes and nations will disappear without violence from the earth, the human race will become one family and the world the abode of reasonable men. Morality alone will bring about this change imperceptibly. Every father of a family will be, as formerly Abraham and the patriarchs, the priest and unfettered lord of his family, and Reason will be the only code of Man. This is one of our greatest secrets…’
“… His first idea was to make Fire Worship the religion of Illuminism; the profession of Christianity therefore appears to have been an after-thought. Evidently Weishaupt discovered, as others have done, that Christianity lends itself more readily to subversive ideas than any other religion. And in the passages which follow we find adopting the old ruse of representing Christ as a Communist and as a secret-society adept. Thus he goes on to explain that ‘if Jesus preaches contempt of riches, He wishes to teach us the reasonable use of them and prepare for the community of goods introduced by Him,’ and in which, Weishaupt adds later, He lived with His disciples. But this secret doctrine is only to be apprehended by initiates…
“Weishaupt thus contrives to give a purely political interpretation to Christ’s teaching:
“’The secret preserved through the Disciplinam Arcani, and the aim appearing through all His words and deeds, is to give back to men their original liberty and equality… Now one can understand how far Jesus was the Redeemer and Saviour of the world.’
“The mission of Christ was therefore by means of Reason to make men capable of freedom: ‘When at last reason becomes the religion of man, so will the problem be solved.’
“Weishaupt goes on to show that Freemasonry can be interpreted in the same manner. The secret doctrine concealed in the teaching of Christ was handed down by initiates who ‘hid themselves and their doctrine under the cover of Freemasonry,’ and in a long explanation of Masonic hieroglyphics he indicates the analogies between the Hiramic legend and the story of Christ. ‘I say then Hiram is Christ.’… In this manner Weishaupt demonstrates that ‘Freemasonry is hidden Christianity… But this is of course only the secret of what Weishaupt calls ‘real Freemasonry’ in contradistinction to the official kind, which he regards as totally unenlightened.”[31]
But the whole religious side of Weishaupt’s system is in fact simply a ruse to attract religious men. Weishaupt himself despised religion: “You cannot imagine,” he wrote, “what consideration and sensation our Priest’s degree is arousing. The most wonderful thing is that great Protestant and reformed theologians who belong to Q [Illuminism] still believe that the religious teaching imparted in it contains the true and genuine spirit of the Christian religion. Oh! men, of what cannot you be persuaded? I never thought that I should become the founder of a new religion.”[32]
Only gradually, and only to a very few of his closest associates, did Weishaupt reveal the real purpose of his order – the revolutionary overthrow of the whole of society, civil and religious. Weishaupt has been credited with founding the idea of world revolution.[33] Elements of all religions and philosophical systems, including Christianity and Masonry, were used by Weishaupt to enrol a body of influential men (about 2500 at one time[34]) who would obey him in all things while knowing neither him personally nor the real aims of the secret society they had been initiated into. The use of codes and pseudonyms, and the pyramidal structure of his organization, whereby nobody on a lower level knew what was happening on the one above his, while those on the higher levels knew everything about what was happening below them, was copied by all succeeding revolutionary organizations.
In 1782 Weishaupt convened a Universal Congress of Illuminati in Wilhelmsbad, and was well on the way to taking over Freemasonry when, in July, 1785, an Illuminatus was struck by lightning and papers found on him led to the Bavarian government banning the organisation. However, both Illuminism and Weishaupt continued in existence – only France rather than Germany became the centre of their operations. Thus the Parisian lodge of the Amis Réunis, renamed the Ennemis Réunis, gathered together all the really radical Masons from various other lodges, many of which were still royalist, and turned them, often unconsciously, into agents of Weishaupt. These adepts included no less than thirty princes. For it was characteristic of the revolution that among those who were most swept up by the madness of its intoxication were those who stood to lose most from it.
Some far-sighted men, such as the Apostolic Nuncio in Vienna and the Marquis de Luchet, warned against Illuminism, and de Luchet predicted almost exactly the course of events that the revolution would take on the basis of his knowledge of the order. But no one paid any attention. But then, in October, 1789 a pamphlet was seized in the house of the wife of Mirabeau’s publisher among Mirabeau’s papers and published two years later.
“Beginning with a diatribe against the French monarchy,” writes Webster, “the document goes on to say that ‘in order to triumph over this hydra-headed monster these are my ideas’:
“’We must overthrow all order, suppress all laws, annul all power, and leave the people in anarchy. The law we establish will not perhaps be in force at once, but at any rate, having given back the power to the people, they will resist for the sake of the liberty which they will believe they are preserving. We must caress their vanity, flatter their hopes, promise them happiness after our work has been in operation; we must elude their caprices and their systems at will, for the people as legislators are very dangerous, they only establish laws which coincide with their passions, their want of knowledge would besides only give birth to abuses. But as the people are a lever which legislators can move at their will, we must necessarily use them as a support, and render hateful to them everything we wish to destroy and sow illusions in their path; we must also buy all the mercenary pens which propagate our methods and which will instruct the people concerning their enemies which we attack. The clergy, being the most powerful through public opinion, can only be destroyed by ridiculing religion, rendering its ministers odious, and only representing them as hypocritical monsters… Libels must at every moment show fresh traces of hatred against the clergy. To exaggerate their riches, to makes the sins of an individual appear to be common to all, to attribute to them all vices; calumny, murder, irreligion, sacrilege, all is permitted in times of revolution.’
“’We must degrade the noblesse and attribute it to an odious origin, establish a germ of equality which can never exist but which will flatter the people; [we must] immolate the most obstinate, burn and destroy their property in order to intimidate the rest, so that if we cannot entirely destroy this prejudice we can weaken it and the people will avenge their vanity and their jealousy by all the excesses which will bring them to submission.’
“After describing how the soldiers are to be seduced from their allegiance, and the magistrates represented to the people as despots, ‘since the people, brutal and ignorant, only see the evil and never the good of things,’ the writer explains they must be given only limited power in the municipalities.
“’Let us beware above all of giving them too much force; their despotism is too dangerous, we must flatter the people by gratuitous justice, promise them a great diminution in taxes and a more equal division, more extension in fortunes, and less humiliation. These phantasies [vertiges] will fanaticise the people, who will flatten out all resistance. What matter the victims and their numbers? Spoliations, destructions, burnings, and all the necessary effects of a revolution? Nothing must be sacred and we can say with Machiavelli: “What matter the means as long as one arrives at the end?”’”[35]
The early phase of the revolution – that of the constitutional monarchy and the Declaration of the Rights of Man - was led by the more idealistic kind of Freemasons. But its later stages were controlled by the Jacobin-Illuminati with their radically destructive plans. Thus “according to Lombard de Langres [writing in 1820]: ’France in 1789 counted more than 2,000 lodges affiliated to the Grand Orient; the number of adepts was more than 100,000. The first events of 1789 were only Masonry in action. All the revolutionaries of the Constituent Assembly were initiated into the third degree. We place in this class the Duc d’Orléans, Valence, Syllery, Laclos, Sièyes, Pétion, Menou, Biron, Montesquiou, Fauchet, Condorcet, Lafayette, Mirabeau, Garat, Rabaud, Dubois-Crancé, Thiébaud, Larochefoucauld, and others.’
“Amongst these others [continues Webster] were not only the Brissotins, who formed the nucleus of the Girondin party, but the men of the Terror – Marat, Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins.
“It was these fiercer elements, true disciples of the Illuminati, who were to sweep away the visionary Masons dreaming of equality and brotherhood. Following the precedent set by Weishaupt, classical pseudonyms were adopted by these leaders of the Jacobins, thus Chaumette was known as Anaxagoras, Clootz as Anacharsis, Danton as Horace, Lacroix as Publicola, and Ronsin as Scaevola; again, after the manner of the Illuminati, the names of towns were changed and a revolutionary calendar was adopted. The red cap and loose hair affected by the Jacobins appear also to have been foreshadowed in the lodges of the Illuminati.
“Yet faithfully as the Terrorists carried out the plan of the Illuminati, it would seem that they themselves were not initiated into the innermost secrets of the conspiracy. Behind the Convention, behind the clubs, behind the Revolutionary Tribunal, there existed, says Lombard de Langres, that ‘most secret convention [convention sécrétissime] which directed everything after May 31, an occult and terrible power of which the other Convention became the slave and which was composed of the prime initiates of Illuminism. This power was above Robespierre and the committees of the government,… it was this occult power which appropriated to itself the treasures of the nation and distributed them to the brothers and friends who had helped on the great work.’”[36]
What was this occult power that controlled even the Illuminati? Many writers think that it was the Talmudists, the rabbinic leaders of the Jewish people. However, the final triumph of the Talmudists was delayed temporarily by an excess of the revolutionary zeal they had themselves stimulated. “In the local communes,” writes L.A. Tikhomirov, “individual groups of especially wild Jacobins, who had not been initiated into higher politics, sometimes broke into synagogues, destroying the Torah and books, but it was only by 1794 that the revolutionary-atheist logic finally forced even the bosses to pose the question of the annihilation not only of Catholicism, but also of Jewry. At this point, however, the Jews were delivered by 9 Thermidor, 1794. Robespierre fell and was executed. The moderate elements triumphed. The question of the ban of Jewry disappeared of itself, while the Constitution of Year III of the Republic granted equal rights to the Jews.”[37]
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