booknetsaWebster-secretSocietiesAndSubversiveMovements

merce by customs, excise duties, and taxes... to procure a universal toleration for all religious opinions... to
take away all the arms of superstition, to favour the liberty of the press, etc.[21]
From all this we see then that Mirabeau did not become an Illuminatus in 1786 as I had supposed before
this document was known to me, but had been in the Order from the beginning apparently as one of its
founders, first under the " Illuminated " name of Arcesilas and later under that of Leonidas. The Memoir
found at his house was thus no other than the programme of the Illuminati evolved by him in collaboration
with an inner ring of Freemasons belonging to the Lodge Theodore. The correspondence of the Illuminate
in fact contains several references to an inner ring under the name of " the secret chapter of the Lodge of St.
Theodore," which, after his initiation into Masonry, Weishaupt indicates the necessity of bringing entirely
under the control of Illuminism. It is probable that Weishaupt was in touch with this secret chapter before
his formal admission to the lodge.
Whether, then, the ideas of Illuminism arose in this secret chapter of the Lodge Theodore independently
of Weishaupt, or whether they were imparted by Weishaupt to the Lodge Theodore after the directions had
been given him by Kölmer, it is impossible to know; but in either case there would be some justification for
Robison's assertion that Illuminism arose out of Freemasonry, or rather that it took birth amongst a group of
Freemasons whose aims were not those of the Order in general.
What were these aims? A plan of social and political " reform " which, as M. Barthou points out, much
resembled the work accomplished later by the Constituent Assembly in France. This admission is of great
importance; in other words, the programme carried out by the Constituent Assembly in 1789 had been
largely formulated in a lodge of German Freemasons who formed the nucleus of the Illuminati, in 1776.
And yet we are told that Illuminism had no influence on the French Revolution !
It will be objected that the reforms here indicated were wholly admirable. True, the abolition of the corvée,
of main morte, and of servitudes were measures that met with the approval of all right-minded men, including
the King of France himself. But what of the abolition of the " working guilds " and " all the corporations,"
that is to say, the " trade unions " of the period, which was carried out by the infamous Loi Chapelier
in 1791, a decree that is now generally recognized as one of the strangest anomalies of the Revolution?
Again, to whose interest was it to do away with the customs and excise duties of France? To establish the
absolute and unfettered liberty of the press and religious opinions? The benefits these measures might be
expected to confer on the French people were certainly problematical, but there could be no doubt of their
utility to men who, like Frederick the Great, wished to ruin France and to break the Franco-Austrian alliance
by the unrestricted circulation of libels against Marie Antoinette, who, like Mirabeau, hoped to bring about a
revolution, or who, like Voltaire, wished to remove all obstacles to the spread of an anti-Christian propaganda.
It is therefore by no means impossible that Weishaupt was at first the agent of more experienced conspirators,
whose purely political aims were disguised under a plan of social reform, and who saw in the Bavarian
professor a clever organizer to be employed in carrying out their designs.
Whether this was so or not, the fact remains that from the time Weishaupt assumed control of the Order
the plan of " social reform " described by Mirabeau vanishes entirely, for not a word do we find in the writings
of the Illuminati about any pretended scheme for ameliorating the lot of the people, and Illuminism becomes
simply a scheme of anarchic philosophy. The French historian Henri Martin has thus admirably
summed up the system elaborated by " Spartacus ": 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.
From his doctrine would naturally follow the German ultra-Hegelianism and the system of anarchy recently
developed in France, of which the physiognomy suggests a foreign origin.[22]
This summary of the aims of the Illuminati, which absolutely corroborates the view of Barruel and
Robison, is confirmed in detail by the Socialist Freethinker of the nineteenth century Louis Blanc, who in
his remarkable chapter on the " Revolutionnaires Mystiques " refers to Weishaupt as " One of the profoundest
conspirators who have ever existed."[23] George Sand also, Socialist and intime of the Freemasons,
wrote of " the European conspiracy of Illuminism " and the immense influence exercised by the secret soci-
Nesta H. Webster — Secret Societies and Subversive Movements — Part I
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