French historian Michel Vovelle reports that the Cult of Reason first appeared during the trial of the Marie-Antoinette, and then took off with zest immediately after the queen's public execution on 16 October 1793.94 It has been confirmed that the first signs of de-Christianisation were witnessed in the Allier and Nièvre departments on 2 October 1793 during the closing stage of the trial.
Then, on 7 October, a shockwave hit the country. It was reported that a representative of the National Convention, an ex-pastor called Philippe Rühl who was acting under the orders of Chaumette and Hébert, had taken the Sainte Ampoule – a glass chalice containing holy oil – from the Cathedral of Reims and smashed it in the public square. The Sainte Ampoule was said to contain the sacramental oil that had been used to consecrate the kings and queens of France since the time of Clovis in AD 496. When the Sainte Ampoule was smashed by Rühl, it is said that a priest, the Abbé Serrain of the village of Saint-Remi, rushed to the spot and managed to mop up some of the sacred oil.95
But Rühl's act was only a prelude. On 7 November 1793, a few weeks after the decapitation of Marie-Antoinette, the bishop of Paris, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gobel, was defrocked in front of a large audience at the National Convention. This charade too was orchestrated by Chaumette. The bishop, who was frightened out of his wits, promptly declared that he wanted to join the Hébertists and the Cult of Reason.
Three days later, on 10 November, the unthinkable happened: a large crowd, accompanied by a choir, stormed the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. They carried in a makeshift throne upon which sat the ‘goddess’ personified by a beautiful Parisian actress, Mlle Aubry, who was dressed in the blue, white and red republican colors and wearing the Phrygian cap. The ‘goddess’, who was labelled ‘Liberty, daughter of Nature’, brandished a torch to signify that ‘Liberty is the light of the world’.96 The whole congregation was then led by Chaumette and the ex-Bishop Gobel to the National Convention. There it was decreed that the Cathedral of Notre Dame was henceforth to be known as the ‘Temple for the goddess Reason’.97
City of Light
Let us note in passing that Chaumette was no ordinary Freemason. Like many Freemasons at the time, he had acquired a taste for ‘Egyptian’ symbols and rituals. He was, for example, a keen supporter of the astronomers Charles-François Dupuis and Jérôme Lalande, and it comes as no surprise that a contemporary critic was to exclaim: ‘Messrs. Dupuis and Lalande see Isis everywhere …!’98 It was fashionable in Masonic circles just before the Revolution to see ancient Egypt as the source of all Masonic enlightenment,99 and we shall recall that the astronomer Dupuis was among those who argued that Isis was the original tutelary goddess of Paris. Indeed Dupuis in 1794 published the thesis that the Cathedral of Notre Dame was actually an Iseum, i.e. a former ‘Temple of Isis’, which had been converted or built upon by the Christians: This famous Isis was the goddess of the ancient French or the Sueves who joined to her cult the symbolic boat, known as the boat of Isis. This boat still exists on the coat-of-arms of Paris, the city of which Isis had become the tutelary goddess. It is Isis, mother of the God of Light, to whom the people [of Paris] make offering and light candles at the New Year and even during the rest of the year, in memory of the Feast of the Illumined Ones …100
Once again we note the epithet ‘God of Light’ which was used by the Gnostics and Manicheans in the first few centuries after Christ, and later by the Cathars. It also occurs in various forms in Freemasonry and in the Rosicrucian Manifestos as we have reported in earlier chapters, but never in the Christian Bible.
In support of Dupuis’ position, the astronomer Lalande wrote: M. Dupuis concluded in his research into the façade [of Notre Dame de Paris] that it is a crude copy of a frontispiece of an ancient Temple of Isis, the goddess whose cult was long ago established in Gaul [ancient France] and especially in Paris.101
With their clear Masonic penchant for the goddess Isis, whom they called ‘mother of the God of Light’ and also correctly identified as ‘goddess of the year’ (as she was known in ancient Egypt)102 it is easy to understand the inspiration for the new Republican calendar that Dupuis and Lalande were closely involved in creating. The reader will recall from Chapter One that this so-called Republican calendar was built around the ancient Egyptian year of 365 days, which was divided into 12 months of 30 days each with ‘five extra days’ added to make up the full solar year.
But along with the goddess Isis-cum-Reason-cum-Nature, the revolutionaries of late 18th century Paris also made profuse use of other well-known Egyptian symbols: the pyramids and the so-called Eye of Providence. It was while trying to understand why such symbols were used that Robert Bauval stumbled on the key that would open a secret window looking out over Paris and allow us to see an enchanted, almost-magical landscape interwoven in the modern layout of this ‘City of Light’ …
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
PARIS UNVEILED
In French Freemasonry the allegorical and metaphorical aspects [of architecture] appear to have been invested with greater significance than in eighteenth-century England. Architectural history was equated with the development of society. And architecture was seen as a means of establishing a just and ordered system …
James Stephen Curl, The Art and Architecture of Freemasonry
On 14 July 1792 a republican ceremony was held at the Champ-de-Mars in Paris at which a ‘Pyramid of Honour’ was erected to commemorate those who died during the storming of the Bastille.1 An etching has survived of another republican ceremony that took place a little over a month later on 26 August 1792 in the Tuilleries Garden next to the Louvre. Again a pyramid was raised in honour of the martyrs of the Revolution. A third pyramid appeared in the Parc Monceau, this one commissioned by Philippe Égalité and designed by the architect Bernard Poyet, next to a pavilion that probably served as a Masonic temple. And there were many other pyramid projects that, though never built, still serve to show the peculiar obsession with the pyramidal form in the decades surrounding the 1789 Revolution.
There are, for example, the curious projects of the revolutionary architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux,2 a Freemason, who the architectural historian James Curl describes as being ‘involved with Masonic and crypto-Masonic cults’. Indeed so involved was he with such interests that when a fellow Freemason from Britain, an architect, attended a Masonic meeting in Ledoux's home in Paris, he was put out by what he felt to be the excessively occult nature of the event. He commented afterwards: ‘it would seem that Ledoux was more involved in the type of heretical Masonry of Cagliostro’.3 Many architects have been intrigued by one of Ledoux's most ambitious designs, the so-called Vue perspective d'une forge à canons (‘Perspective view of a forge cannon’), an iron smelting plant with massive pyramids and a layout that recalls ‘various versions of the Temple complex in Jerusalem’.4
Then there are, of course, those most extraordinary pseudo-Egyptian designs by the revolutionary architect Étienne-Louis Boullée, the most famous of which was the so-called Cénotaphe dans le genre égyptienne (‘Cenotaph in the Egyptian style’), which was a series of gigantic pyramids with their capstones missing – a design very reminiscent of the actual appearance throughout historical times of the Great Pyramid at Giza and of the truncated pyramid seen on the Great Seal of the United States.5 James Curl, who is regarded as an expert on Masonic architecture, comments that ‘in spite of its title Cénotaphe, the building was clearly a cemetery or a centre for cults, to judge from the processions going up and down the gigantic ramps.’6
Imaging the Supreme Being
Were Ledoux and Boullée thinking of the ‘Supreme Being’ in their designs? Perhaps. But both these men, like many architects of their generation, were much influenced by the famous architect and Freemason Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy. The latter was known for having presented a prize essay to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1785 on ancient Egyptian architecture and, more specifically, on the pyramids.7 According to James Curl, ‘Quincy
was not only a Freemason, but was very powerfully influenced by his Masonic convictions’.8
There is, too, an extraordinary project by Ledoux – Quatremère de Quincy's pupil – which is shown in his book L’Architecture Considérée published in Paris in 1804. There we can see a plan for the theatre of the city of Besançon in the form of a gigantic ‘all-seeing-eye’ which James Curl describes as ‘an unquestionably Masonic allusion’.9 The same idea was used by the revolutionary architect Poyet who had designed the Parc Monceau pyramid for Philippe Égalité. Another of Poyet's ambitious plans was for a public hospital in Paris, where a gigantic ‘all-seeing-eye’ can easily be discerned in the general layout.10
The ‘Eye of Providence’, the ‘all-seeing-eye’, the ‘eye in the pyramid’, and the ‘eye in the triangle’ were all symbols of the Supreme Being, the Être Suprême of Robespierre. Thus, for example, we have a poster dating from the Revolution, which depicts the hero-philosophers Voltaire and Rousseau pointing to a glowing solar disc within which is the ‘all-seeing-eye’ and a caption that reads: ‘Être Suprême, Peuple Souverain, République Française’ (‘Supreme Being, Sovereign People, French Republic’).11 The ‘all-seeing-eye’ is also prominent on a poster of the Fête de la Fédération at the Champ-de-Mars dated to 1790, where the rays of the Sun shoot down to form a golden pyramid that engulfs two tricolor flags and a red Phrygian cap fixed on a ‘pole of Liberty’.12
The association of the ‘all-seeing-eye’ with Voltaire on the first of these posters is particularly interesting. It is a very well-known fact among Freemasons that Voltaire was initiated on 7 April 1778 at the Nine Sisters lodge in Paris by the astronomer Jérôme Lalande and Benjamin Franklin.13 When Voltaire died a month later, the lodge was converted into a ‘Lodge of Sorrows’, a sort of Masonic funerary service, and on 28 November 1778 a service was held there for his departed soul. In line with Masonic tradition, the whole interior of the lodge was draped in black veils. At the far end of the room was raised a stepped pyramid, also draped in black.14 On the summit of this pyramid was a cenotaph, and at the place where the capstone would normally have been could be seen hovering a glowing triangle with the letter ‘G’ inscribed in it.
Such a pyramid with the same glowing capstone is, of course, to be seen on the Great Seal of the United States, the design of which was coordinated by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in 1776.15 In Masonic symbolism the ‘eye’ representing the Supreme Being, is interchangeable with the letter ‘G’, and both symbols stand for ‘God’ i.e. the ‘Grand Geometrician’ or the ‘Grand Architect of the Universe’. Author and professor, Michel Vovelle, also draws attention to a French revolutionary poster where the ‘all-seeing-eye’ is depicted over the breast of the ‘goddess Reason’; she holds a victory wreath above a plaque on which appears a small ‘glowing pyramid with the eye’.16 Indeed, the same glowing triangle with the all-seeing-eye found it way to the top of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen signed in August 1789 at the National Assembly. The text was modeled on essays written by the Marquis de Lafayette and the Abbé Sieyès, two very prominent Scottish Rite Freemasons. Perhaps we ought to recall the telling words of the Grand Master of the Grand Orient, Paul Gourdot, when he claimed that intellectuals such as Voltaire provided the ‘spirit of the Revolution’ and that the outcome of this – the First Republic – was based on ‘the Declaration of the Rights of Man which was formulated in our lodges.’17
The cry of a dying tiger
Ironically, the extravagant ceremonies during the so-called Festival of the Supreme Being on 8 June 1794 were to lead to Robespierre's downfall. Not all who witnessed the event liked his spurious display of piety and reverence towards an effigy of a pagan deity, and even some of his closest allies were put off by what they saw as his increasing pompousness and vanity. Many worried that being at the helm of the National Convention had gone to his head.
The Montagnards (the ‘Mountains’) who were normally Robespierre's most ardent supporters, began to have doubts. And being mostly atheists, many of them were deeply embarrassed by the strange psuedo-religious shows he was now putting on. Amazingly, they found a way to accuse the previously invulnerable Robespierre of anti-republicanism and sent him to the guillotine on 28 July 1794. His jaw had been blown off by a pistol shot so he was bleeding profusely and unable to talk. All that the poor man could do was let out a frightening cry which, according to an eyewitness, sounded ‘like that of a dying tiger’.
The Revolution had nearly run its course and, for a brief, tantalizing moment, the reigns of power were dangling free and there for the taking. A young Corsican officer who had been closely monitoring these grisly events and biding his time was slowly getting ready to make his move.
A new Alexander the Great was in the making …
Napoleon's goddess
On the evening of the 5 March 1798, a date that, oddly, coincided with the well-known ancient Roman Feast of the Navigium Isidis, the Feast of the Boat of Isis, a carriage under heavy military escort left Paris for the port of Toulon. In it was the new hero of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, and his lovely wife Joséphine. They were on their way to meet up with the French fleet which was waiting to sail to Egypt.
In a mere two years Napoleon had risen from being an obscure artillery officer amidst the ‘Terror’ of 1794, to commander-in-chief of the army by early 1796. A week after his appointment as commander of the French army in Italy, Napoleon had married the exquisitely beautiful Joséphine de Beauharnais,18 widow of Viscount Alexandre de Beauharnais, a Freemason and nobleman who, like many others of his Estate, had ended on the guillotine in 1794. Joséphine was the eldest daughter of Joseph-Gaspard de Tascher de La Pagerie, an impoverished nobleman who had settled in Martinique where Joséphine had spent the first 15 years of her life. She had come to Paris in 1779, a decade before the Revolution, and there had married the ill-fated de Beauharnais. It was an arranged marriage and never happy. When Napoleon met her in 1795, she was widowed with two children and on the verge of breaking up a turbulent affair with the Viscount Paul-François-Jean-Nicolas de Barras, the commander-in-chief of the Army of the Interior. Napoleon, who was deputy-general to Barras, was only 27 years old at the time. Joséphine was 33 and the darling of Parisian high society, into which she had been introduced by the beautiful Thérésa Tallien. The latter was the wife of Jean-Lambert Tallien who, along with Barras, had plotted the downfall of Robespierre back in 1794. It was Thérésa, in fact, who had introduced Joséphine to her own lover Barras who, in turn, passed her on to Napoleon.
Joséphine seems to have been attracted to Freemasonry quite early in her career – perhaps partly because it was considered to be very fashionable among women of the aristocracy and partly because her first husband, the Viscount de Beauharnais had been a prominent Freemason who came from a family of illustrious Freemasons.19 Joséphine was probably initiated in women's Freemasonry at Strasbourg while her husband, the viscount, was commander of the Rhine army.20 Long afterwards, their son, Eugène de Beauharnais, who now was about to go to Egypt with Napoleon, would become Grand Master of the Grande Oriente d’Italia and also of the Supreme Council of the 33rd Degree in Italy.21
When she become empress of France in 1804 Joséphine was elected as the Grand Mistress and Patroness of women's Freemasonry in Paris.22 Many ladies close to her also joined the Masonic sisterhood. Apparently Joséphine's lady-in-waiting, Madame de Canisy, was initiated into women's Freemasonry by the wife of the mayor of Strasbourg, Madame Dietrich, and to mark the event a commemorative medal was struck, showing a golden triangle at the tip of which was placed a star in a crown – almost a premonition of Joséphine's future role in France.23 Joséphine's favourite niece, Émilie de Beauharnais, wife of Antoine Marie Chamans, Count of Lavalette and director-general of the Imperial Postal Office, was elected Grand Mistress of the adoption lodge Anacreon in Paris.24
Being a Freemason initiated in the ancient mysteries, and now with all this post-Revolution talk of deism,
it may be possible that Joséphine had begun to take an interest in Islam and may even have privately encouraged Napoleon to bring it into the fold of Western Europe. For it is well known that her first cousin and closest friend, the beautiful Aimée du Buc de Rivéry, had been kidnapped by Arab pirates and sold to the harem of the sultan of Turkey, Abdul Hamid I, where she soon became his favourite concubine and bore him a son, the Emir Mahmoud. When the old sultan died, Aimée became the mistress of the heir-apparent, the young and glamorous nephew of the sultan, the Emir Selim, over whom Aimée was to wield enormous influence by turning him into a keen Francophile.25 There thus existed a ‘dynastic’ link between Joséphine of France and her cousin the ‘sultana’ of Turkey, a connection which might have brought the Middle East and Islam within Joséphine's sphere of attention. At any rate, whatever was going on secretly in Joséphine's and Napoleon's minds, he would one day write to her from Egypt these curious words: I saw myself founding a new religion, marching into Asia, riding an Elephant, a turban on my head and in my hand a Koran that I would have composed to suit my needs.26
Whether or not such words were written in jest, we shall never know.
Inspirations for the invasion of Egypt
The idea for a French invasion of Egypt was not original to Napoleon. It was the brainchild of Talleyrand, the great French statesman and diplomat. We have already encountered Talleyrand when, in 1789, he resigned from his role as representative of the Second Estate – the clergy – and sided with the revolutionaries. But because he was in favour of a constitutional monarchy, he had to flee France in order to save his neck as the Revolution developed. He first went to England in late 1792 then, in 1794, to America where he stayed till September 1796, after the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. Upon his return to France, he was made foreign minister by Napoleon.