Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848. Adam Zamoyski
condemned the entire canon of the Enlightenment, arguing that God presided over a natural order of things, departure from which was perverse, and that the Catholic faith was ‘the mother of all good and real knowledge in the world’. He believed the eighteenth century would come to be seen by posterity ‘as one of the most shameful epochs in the history of the human mind’. As for the French Revolution, it was, according to him, an ‘inexplicable delirium’, ‘an atrocity’, ‘an impudent prostitution of reason’ and an insult to the concepts of justice and virtue. ‘There is in the French revolution,’ he concluded, ‘a satanic character which distinguishes it from everything we have seen and, perhaps from everything we will ever see.’8
Like those of Burke, which sold in great quantities and were translated into the principal European languages, the writings of Maistre echoed and gave form to the feelings of many who had viewed the progress of the Enlightenment with suspicion. As they watched events unfold during the 1790s they were confirmed in all their earlier objections to the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau and other eighteenth-century philosophers. With the benefit of hindsight, they could chart how the spread of their teachings had led to the catastrophe which had shattered their world.
While some saw it as an unfortunate process fostered by impious or misguided intellectuals, others saw it all in terms of a conspiracy against not only the established political order but against the very bases of European society and civilisation. Voltaire had waged a lifelong war which verged on the pathological against the Catholic Church, which he referred to as ‘l’Infâme’ (the infamous one). His influence was clearly discernible in the virulently anti-Christian tenor of the Revolution. Some related this not just to his writings and the secularising influences of the Enlightenment: Louis de Bonald saw everything that had happened since the first breaths of the Reformation in the fifteenth century as a gradual decline into the abyss. Others reached further back, tracing the rot to Jan Hus, John Wycliffe and the Lollards.9
There were those who pointed out that the date of the storming of the Bastille, 14 July, was the same as that on which Jerusalem fell to the First Crusade in 1099, suggesting some kind of revenge of the Infidel. To the more fanciful, the fall of the French monarchy was the outcome of ‘the curse of the Templars’, who had been destroyed by it nearly five centuries earlier. The Templars no longer existed, but there was a theory that while awaiting execution in the Bastille in 1314, the last Grand Master of the Order had founded four Masonic lodges to avenge its dissolution and his death on the French royal family.
Freemasonry had originated in Scotland at the beginning of the eighteenth century, spread to every country in Europe, and grew rapidly. As the movement attracted the intellectual elites, its membership was overwhelmingly secularist and freethinking, a loose brotherhood vaguely dedicated to the betterment of humanity through the spreading of reason, education and humanist values. Its members were grouped in lodges which met to listen to lectures and discuss anything from social problems to the latest fashions in the arts. Some came together for purposes of social networking, others in order to pursue more sensual interests such as drinking or sex. There was ritual involved, much of it extremely silly, purporting to have medieval or even Biblical origins. Freemasons often met in temples, crypts or artificial grottos, which added a whiff of the occult, and initiation rites involved blindfolding novices who were made to swear solemn oaths amid a panoply of gothick props, including cloaks, daggers, axes, burning braziers and cups of red wine symbolising blood – although real blood was sometimes drawn too.
As the lodges were founded by groups of individuals rather than by any organised system of delegation or procuracy, they evolved markedly different styles. In France, Freemasonry was generally social and often frivolous. In countries such as Poland and Russia it had more to do with aping French fashions than anything else. But in Germany it was taken very seriously. It reflected and partially overlapped religious trends seeking a return to a ‘purer’ form of Christianity and genuinely aspired to some kind of spirituality.
In 1776 Adam Weishaupt, Professor of Canon Law at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria, started a student society, the Order of Perfectibles. There was nothing remarkable in this, as German universities pullulated with such confraternities. In 1778 he changed its name to the Order of the Illuminati, and introduced grades, along with an elaborate system of signs and passwords. There were also synonyms for people and places: Bavaria was ‘Greece’, Munich ‘Athens’ and Weishaupt himself ‘Spartacus’.
In 1780 a new recruit, Baron Adolf Franz von Knigge, alias ‘Philo’, began to transform the Order, imposing on it his own doctrine that all political states were unnatural and perverse creations which should be swept away. They should be replaced by a miasma of mutual respect and love which would bring about universal happiness. This supposed panacea to the world’s ills attracted large numbers of supporters, and seeped into the Masonic network of Germany, and thence into those of Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, northern Italy and even France. Adepts included Goethe, Schiller, Mozart, Herder and many other notables.
In 1785 the Elector of Bavaria suppressed the Order, thereby according it a notoriety and validation it hardly deserved. Spine-chilling tales began to circulate as to its occult aims. An anonymous book entitled Essai sur la secte des Illuminés, published in Paris on the eve of the Revolution, traced the origins of the sect to the Freemasons and dwelt with evident glee on its induction rituals and ordeals, describing how occult symbols were painted on the body of the novice in his own blood, and so on. It revealed that the Illuminati had a castle outside Paris with underground oubliettes into which those who had betrayed its secrets were thrown and forgotten. The author affirmed that the sect ‘has conceived the plan of taking over minds, and of conquering not kingdoms, not provinces, but the human spirit’, with the ultimate aim of destroying all thrones and governments, and then society itself. It operated through a network of circles in every country, each controlling a cluster of subsidiary circles, which he listed meticulously, giving the impression that the whole of Europe was comprehensively covered.10
This chimed with a fashion for the occult and a fascination with ancient Orphic and Egyptian cults, with Eleusinian and Rosicrucian ‘mysteries’, and with secret societies of every kind, whose most famous expression is Mozart’s Magic Flute. In Germany it gave rise to a literary genre, the Bundesroman, to which Schiller, Jean-Paul Richter and Goethe contributed works. Its most commercially successful product was Carl Grosse’s novel Der Genius (1791–95), whose aristocratic young protagonist’s picaresque adventures include not only much curious sexual activity but also involvement in an order which compels him to assassinate the King of Spain. Such books helped to propagate a belief in the ubiquity and omnipotence of the secret societies allegedly operating in the shadows, and a shelf of supposedly more factual publications established a connection between them and politics, confirmed in the minds of many by the fact that a majority of the prime movers of the French Revolution had been Freemasons. Some asserted that the ideological powerhouse of the Revolution, the Club des Jacobins, named after the former Dominican convent they met in, was actually an offshoot of Freemasonry. ‘The political committees that gave rise to the Jacobin Club had their origins in Illuminism which started in Germany, and, far from having been snuffed out, they are operating underground and have become all the more dangerous,’ wrote Leopold Alois Hoffmann. He pointed out that one of the leading Illuminati, Johann Christoph Bode, had visited Paris two years before the outbreak of the Revolution to confer with French Freemasons, and that the prominent revolutionary the marquis de Mirabeau had visited Berlin shortly before the fall of the Bastille.11
When, on 16 March 1792, King Gustavus III of Sweden was shot at a masked ball, it was evident to many all over Europe who was behind it. Later that year, when the Duke of Brunswick, a former Freemason who commanded the royalist forces invading France to crush the Revolution, drew back after the inconclusive Battle of Valmy, leaving the revolutionary army triumphant, it was again obvious that he had followed an occult order from above. A spate of sensationalist ‘revelation’ literature spoke of dark arts, secrets, spells and poison, and of their involvement in the unexpected deaths of various kings. The writers defended themselves against