No doubt because of his ancestry, the Duke of Orléans at the time of the French Revolution was an all-out Anglophile, and his obsessive affinity for all things English was directly responsible for the development of a bizarre fad in Parisian circles known as Anglomania. The Duke was a great admirer of the British Parliament and of the constitutional monarchy, and had openly opposed the despotic rule of his uncle, Louis XV, who had him exiled to England in 1771. He eventually returned to Paris only to begin at once opposing the new king of France, Louis XVI, who was his first cousin.
In 1786 the Duke of Orléans was elected Grand Master of the Grand Orient de France, and thus effectively the leader of all the Freemasons in the land. Immensely rich, as sole owner of much of France's choicest real estate, the Duke teamed up with the famous revolutionary orator, Mirabeau, and the vast grounds of his private residence at the Palais-Royal became a regular meeting place for the revolutionary crowds. Many believe that he used his great fortune to fund the revolutionaries and some even think he was the unseen force behind the storming of the Bastille in July 1789. Whatever the truth, it is absolutely certain that he vehemently opposed his cousin, Louis XVI, and that he was among those who voted for his execution in 1793. It is also certain that the Duke entertained the perhaps unrealistic hope that he could become king himself and form a constitutional monarchy such as in England.
So fervent was his support for the Convention and the Commune de Paris – the two principal revolutionary bodies that ruled France in the aftermath of the Revolution – that in 1792 Philippe d’Orléans changed his name to Philippe Égalité. Unfortunately, however, Philippe Égalité developed a great antipathy for the Marquis de Lafayette, the hero of both the French and American Revolutions. This, as well as other factors, led to his eventual downfall and, ironically, in November 1793 Philippe Égalité was to suffer the same fate as his royal cousin, when he lost his own head under the blade of the Guillotine. Nonetheless, his great ambitions for a constitutional monarchy in France would materialise with his eldest son, Louis-Philippe I, the so-called Citizen King, who was helped to the throne of France in 1830 by none other than his father's bitter enemy of old, the Marquis de Lafayette.
We shall now see how the very disturbing anti-clericalism that was to ensue after 14 July 1789 would send a shock wave across the whole of Christian Europe, as a new but also very old religion was about to be reborn from the womb of a goddess called ‘Reason’. Ironically, this would certainly have been something that would have enthralled Cagliostro who, sadly, was now rotting in the papal dungeon near Naples. For the goddess Reason, as it turned out, would much resemble the Egyptian goddess Isis whom Cagliostro had so much extolled in Paris …63
Behind the scenes of the Revolution
On the morning of the 14 July 1789 a crowd of about 800 people gathered in the city of Paris and marched in disorder towards the Bastille. Armed with an assortment of weapons they had plundered earlier from the arsenal at the Invalides, this unruly mob hurdled themselves on the poorly defended prison and, within hours, had ‘liberated’ its seven pathetic inmates.64 Six of the Swiss mercenaries stationed to guard the Bastille were chopped to pieces. The head of the chief prison warden, Bernard-René Jourdan, the Marquis de Launay, was brutally hacked off with a blunt butcher's knife and paraded around Paris until late in the night.65
The clichéd images of the French Revolution that most of us learn in school depict oppressed Parisian citizens driven to revolt by famine, despotism and tyranny, marching in unison against the king's troops while chanting the Marseillaise. The truth, of course, was a great deal more complicated than that.
The economic and political conditions in France were certainly appalling, and thus ripe for revolutionaries to exploit. The winter of 1788 – 9 been terrible and very poor harvests followed. In addition King Louis XVI was an incompetent political player whose attempts to deal with the state's bankruptcy played into the hands of the agitators. All these factors created a context for the Revolution but we should not leap to the conclusion that any of them actually caused it.
History has shown that full-blown revolutions rarely take place without a great deal of covert intellectual and even financial activity going on behind the scenes. In France a subversive intellectual movement had been active amongst the educated classes and the liberal aristocracy for many years. By promoting the enlightened political visions of writers such as Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the so-called Encyclopédistes – many of whom were Freemasons66 – this at first loosely-organized movement did much to set the scene for the overthrow of the Old Regime.
The Duke of Orléans, having been rudely shunned by Queen Marie-Antoinette who bitterly disliked him, had developed a deep hatred not only for her but also for his cousin Louis XVI and for the entire court at Versailles. He soon began to use his great personal fortune to subsidize a variety of organizations, such as the infamous Jacobin Club, that were hostile to the king and queen. There is even evidence, somewhat downplayed by historians, that points to the existence of a sort of shadowy ‘government-in-waiting’, led by the Duke of Orléans and other agitators, which conducted subversive propaganda campaigns in many of the 600-plus Masonic lodges in France – of which 65 were in Paris. We've seen that the Duke was an avid admirer of Britain's constitutional monarchy. He was also the richest man in France and in direct line to the throne of France. All this would imply, if not prove, that the ‘Revolution’ may initially have been intended not to replace but to ‘reform’ the existing monarchy into a British-style constitutional system under the Duke of Orléans, and that the more radical idea of setting up an American-style republic came later.
When the Third Estate found its voice
Early in 1788, Louis XVI was coerced into agreeing to call a meeting of the Estates-General for May 1789. It was to prove a fatal mistake.
Traditionally, there were three so-called Estates in France: the nobility comprised the First Estate, the clergy comprised the Second Estate, the bourgeoisie and the nation in general comprised the Third Estate. In January 1789 Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, better known as the Abbé Sieyès, published a pamphlet that starkly highlighted how little say the Third Estate actually had in matters of politics even though it represented 98 per cent of the population.67 Entitled Qu'est-ce que le tiers-état? (‘What is the Third Estate?’), Abbé Sieyès pamphlet boldly proposed the immediate drafting of a Constitution and the formation of a National Assembly outside the nobility and the clergy. Thousands of copies of his article were sold and distributed all over France. And with this, the seeds of republicanism began to sprout.
It is not an accident that Abbé Sieyès was a Freemason, and a member of the powerful Nine Sisters lodge in Paris.68 In Chapter One we discussed the origins of this important lodge, whose other members included thinkers such Benjamin Franklin, the Marquis de Condorcet, anatomist Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, Tarot inventor Antoine Court de Gébelin, astronomer Jérôme Lalande, mathematician Charles-Gilbert Romme, and radical revolutionary leaders Camille Desmoulins and Georges Jacques Danton.69
Like Sieyès, Desmoulins had preached revolution and written a pamphlet entitled La France Libre (‘Free France’) which was followed in June 1789 by a violent attack on the monarchy. Desmoulins was chief among those who called for an armed uprising on the eve of the Revolution during a rally at the residence of the Duke of Orléans, which was at that time serving as the command headquarters for the revolutionaries.
Danton was the founder of the dreaded Club des Cordeliers which, like the Jacobin Club, was one of the most radical and influential organizations at work during the Revolution. The Club des Cordeliers was officially known as the Society of Friends of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, but it had inherited the name ‘Cordeliers’ from a former Franciscan monastery located on the Rue des Cordeliers, where its first meetings were held. The Cordeliers accepted members of all races, classes and creeds, and many were influential journalists and writers such as Jean-Paul Marat, Camille D
esmoulins, Pierre-François-Joseph Robert and Nicolas de Bonneville.
The disastrous meeting of the Estates-General began on 5 May 1789. The Third Estate had 584 representatives compared to the 290 for the nobility and 292 for the clergy. Present were King Louis XVI and the Queen Marie-Antoinette. Many leading Freemasons and men of letters had been elected as representatives of the Third Estate and also had a strong presence in the other two Estates as well. Among them were the Marquis de Lafayette, Mirabeau, the Duke of Orléans and Robespierre.
As the days dragged on the king and his supporters appeared increasingly weak and confused, and it became obvious that they lacked any clear plan for solving the very real economic crisis in which the country by then found itself. Predictably, the negotiations between the Third Estate and the nobility broke down in chaos. In defiance, the Third Estate changed its name to the Communes (the ‘Commons’), implying a constitutional monarchy by default, and Sieyès and Mirabeau took the helm. Mirabeau proposed that the Communes be called the ‘Representatives of the French People’. Sieyès went one better, and had the name ‘National Assembly’ accepted. Immediately several members of the nobility, principal amongst them the Duke of Orléans and the Marquis de Lafayette, offered their support to the National Assembly. That had been expected but a shock wave hit the clergy and the nobility when Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, a representative of the Second Estate, also crossed the fence to side with the National Assembly.
Born into the nobility, Talleyrand entered the clergy at an early age. In 1789, just before the fall of the Bastille, he was made a bishop by Louis XVI. As soon as he joined the National Assembly, he was among the first to propose the confiscation of all the assets of the Church in France.70 With such radical views being increasingly flaunted as the weeks of discussions went by the king intervened on 20 June and ordered his guards to prevent the members of the National Assembly from entering the meeting hall. In response the outraged National Assembly met instead in another hall at Versailles – one that was used by the royals for playing tennis. Immortalized as the ‘Tennis Court Oath’, the members swore not to be moved until a constitutional monarchy was formed under a solid political and legal foundation.
Another meeting was called with the king on 23 June, but at this point Louis XVI threatened to exercise his divine right to rule and to act alone ‘on behalf of the people’. He then ordered the delegates of the National Assembly to ‘disperse forthwith’ and stormed petulantly out of the hall. The delegates remained seated, refusing to budge. The Marquis de Dreux-Brézé, a staunch royalist and spokesman for the king, again ordered them to leave ‘in the name of the King’. He was shouted down by Mirabeau, the Freemason who was sponsored by the Duke of Orléans: ‘Sir, go tell to those who send you that we are here by the will of the people, and that we will not be moved except by the force of the bayonets’. When Dreux-Brézé reported this to the king, he is said to have replied: ‘Damn them, let them stay!’71
The dye was cast, and from here on events rushed forward like a roaring tide. Louis XVI called in his troops to Versailles, sacked his finance minister, Jacques Necker, and formed a new government to ‘oppose’ the National Assembly. But it was all too late. At the Palais-Royal in Paris the National Assembly, buttressed by the financial power of the Duke of Orléans, and with the whole of the Parisian population behind them, prepared for a full confrontation with the king's troops, and now the agitators were calling openly for an armed revolt against the Old Regime. Soon there began to be defections from the army to the side of the National Assembly. The point of no return was reached on 14 July 1789 when mobs of citizens took to the streets and the Bastille was stormed.
Impregnating the national conscience
It is, of course, not the purpose of this book, or indeed within its scope, to pass in review the full complexity of the political and cultural upheavals behind the French Revolution. Nor can we look at all the arguments and opinions that have been laid for and against the involvement and influence of Freemasonry on the Revolution. For not only are the historical events lost in the chaos of the times, but they have also suffered much distortion, bias and misinformation under the pen of factions wanting either to downplay the role of the Freemasons or to play it up. Not least amongst these factions, or course, is Freemasonry itself which seems to prefer to cloud the issue. In 1976, for example, Fred Zeller, Grand Master of the Grand Orient de France, had this piece of peculiar obfustication to offer on the subject: … We can be assured that the Freemasons did not conspire against the throne, nor worked towards the formation of the Republic. In truth, no one had thought of this at the time. But they had slowly, patiently, during half-a-century of secret discussions (and forbidden by the laws of the time) impregnated the national conscience with the hope and will for change. In 1789 there were more than 70,000 Freemasons in France. Not surprisingly that in the revolutionary assemblies we note a majority of parliamentarians who were initiated in Masonic lodges!72
Even such carefully chosen words cannot entirely disguise the obvious implication that the Masonic lodges played a major role in the events that led to the French Revolution! In a more candid manner in 1983, the Grand Master of the Grand Orient, Paul Gourdot, made a declaration similar to Fred Zeller's but then could not avoid adding that although it was the writings and examples of the Encyclopédistes, of Montesquieu, of Diderot, of Voltaire, that prepared the ‘spirit’ of the Revolution, it was nonetheless: … those like Condorcet, Saint-Just, Danton [all Freemasons] who applied the principles of the formation of the First Republic with its immortal Declaration of the Rights of Man which was formulated in our lodges …73
Besides there is another aspect of the French Revolution, in which Freemasons were also directly involved, that still requires explanation. This is the phenomenon of de-Christianisation that we introduced in Chapter One, and the attempt by the National Assembly to replace Christianity with the ‘Cult of Reason’ and the ‘Cult of the Supreme Being’ …
2/100th of a second
On the cold morning of the 21 January 1793, a huge crowd gathered in Paris at the Place de la Révolution, today the Place de la Concorde, to watch the execution of King Louis XVI. With his hands tied behind his back, four executioners pounced on him, laid him flat facing down, and pushed his head into the crossbeam of the dreaded guillotine. To the surprise of the Parisian mob the king behaved bravely throughout the horrific ordeal, and even attempted a poignant farewell speech to the nation, but it was rudely interrupted by the thundering roll of drums immediately preceding his decapitation. Louis XVI’s last audible words apparently were: People of France, I am innocent, I forgive those who are responsible for my death. I pray God that the blood that will be spilt here never falls on France! And you, unfortunate people …
The guillotine, which had been improved from an old design only a short while before by Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, was extremely efficient. Apparently painless, it is estimated that each beheading took just 2/100th of a second. Guillotin was a Freemason and member of the Nine Sisters lodge. He was also an active member of the National Assembly. He had developed this death machine specifically to cater for the anticipated high demand for executions after the fall of the Bastille. But no one, however bloodthirsty they might have been, could have predicted the thousands upon thousands of decapitations by guillotine during those early years of the Republic known appropriately to history as the ‘Reign of Terror’.74 After Louis XVI was beheaded, Marie-Antoinette was to wait a further nine months for her own appointment with the guillotine. But some years earlier, in 1790 when she had been under house arrest at the Tuileries Palace, the queen had written these haughty words to her cousin, Emperor Leopold II of Austria: Take heed in your country of all Masonic associations. We already can see that all these monsters here have intentions to do the same in all other countries. Oh, that God saves my homeland, Austria, of such troubles.75
Isis of the Bastille
A few weeks before the guillotining of the
queen, a very strange thing indeed had taken place in Paris. As if arising out of some inherent need for a matriarchal figurehead, a replacement in the form of a statue of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis suddenly appeared on the scene. It was raised in the Place de la Bastille on 10 August 1793. As we saw when we introduced this mystery in Chapter One, it had been designed in haste by the artist Jacques-Louis David, who was an intimate friend of the revolutionary leader Robespierre and was acting as minister of propaganda for the National Assembly.
A coin was struck in 1794 to commemorate the occasion, and is described as being: … the work of the famous engraver DUPRE … which evokes the cult of Isis chosen to illustrate the goddess of Reason, and is also the first commemorative coin issued in France.76
The coin preserves the image of the so-called Isis of the Bastille or ‘Fountain of Regeneration’ which, along with its pedestal, stood some 20 feet high. The statue depicted the Egyptian goddess sitting on her throne flanked by two lions, and at her feet was placed a large bath emblazoned with the ancient Egyptian winged solar disc, a symbol of the pharaohs which was also much used by the Hermetics, the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons.77