HISTOCRACY - Secret Societies or Network States? // French Revolution

Secret societies were less secret than they were societies. An emergent term in modernity that would be a spiritual successor might be ‘Network State(s)’.

Already established in the Anglosphere of both England and The Colonies, France would also embrace, officially and without debate, efforts to establish these Lodges (again, using a more contemporary sobriquet, ‘nodes’). They were indeed an amalgam of Natural Philosophers—a transitioning word from our perspective, bridging alchemist with scientist—Philosophes, Artists, Mechanical Practitioners, and Writers. They were commonly of certain ethical, moral, and civic stature to assist in improving the great work of society, in toto.

The Vatican, a long-tenured enterprise standing in the way of orders, both of their own making and outside their direct machinations, would quickly respond to Freemason infiltration once it penetrated French soil.

Pope Clemens XII would draft, decree, and deem Freemasonry an organization that should be neither supported nor enabled in spirit or specie.

Some twenty years later, The Holy See would also begin suppressing the Society of Jesus, otherwise known as the Jesuits, completing the removal across much of Europe by 1773.

In the spirit of André-Michel de Ramsay’s ‘Discourses’: “to unite to provide the materials for a universal Dictionary of all the liberal Arts and all the useful Sciences, with Theology and Politics alone excepted,” starting with the work of Ephraim Chambers' ‘Cyclopedia’ in 1728, Denis Diderot, through brute will, luck, and obstinacy, along with help from many of the best minds of the century, created the encyclopedia, publishing it by mid-century. In parallel, in both England and America, Samuel Johnson’s ‘Dictionary’ would also be published.

In spite of many personal dramas between many of the personas, humanity’s knowledge was being pooled together as never seen before. A dream made manifest by the clear and penetrating minds of these new organizations, neither throne nor altar.

Not only did they share paths mentally but geographically as well. Baron Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, and others would share time in England, France, and Switzerland; sometimes together, often separate but always thinking, writing, printing, and planting their ideas from similar soil.

The Spirit of Laws would begin in Geneva and within a generation would penetrate the Lodges of England and The Colonies, eventually the minds of Franklin, Jefferson, and Lafayette.

One fraternal order would invite competition from another; a professor in Bavaria would join a local Masonic lodge looking to recruit his own members into his own order with parallel yet different standards.

The order, created by Adam Weishaupt, similarly associated with new Enlightenment ideals, sought to eradicate superstition from state power and use rationalism as a means to separate church from state. Weishaupt’s Illuminati would succeed briefly in Germany. While France’s infrastructure was crumbling, incapable of deterring Rosicrucians, Masons, Illuminati, Jesuits, or anything else, societies both remained, flourished, or collapsed under their own weight.

With the Reign of Terror officially taking over The French Revolution, consequences before its aftermath already began to take form.

A Jesuit priest, absconding to safety in England from France, enraged and vengeful, writes and publishes the seminal work that would define, culturally, the Western world’s understanding of secret societies and conspiracy theories to this day.

In his work, History of Jacobinism, Abbé Barruel indicts the Philosophes, the Freemasons, and the Bavarian Illuminati in a grand 60+ year conspiracy to devise means and Machiavellian plots to overthrow the French Monarch and to bring an end to the Holy Roman Empire, vis-a-vis the Catholic Church. Ironically, this work was first published nearly years before Napoleon would fill the vacuum.

To this day, the spirit of Abbé Barruel’s work lives on in modernity, deeply embedded in the zeitgeist of public, cultural, and spiritual confusion.

***ORIGINAL SOURCES***

SLIDE 1

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1511354j.image

SLIDE 2

https://www.papalencyclicals.net/clem12/c12inemengl.htm

SLIDE 3

https://archive.org/details/gri_33125011156375/page/n8/mode/1up

SLIDE 4

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8618461c/f9.item.r=.langEN

SLIDE 5https://archive.org/details/WeishauptADeLapsuAcademiarumCommentatioPolitica1775/page/n5/mode/2up

https://archive.org/details/WeishauptAApologieDerIlluminaten1786/page/n7/mode/2up

SLIDE 6

https://archive.org/details/BarruelMemoirsIllustratingTheHistoryOfJacobinism/page/n38/mode/1up