booknetsaWebster-secretSocietiesAndSubversiveMovements

In the famous speech of the Chevalier Ramsay already quoted, which was delivered at Grand Lodge of
Paris in 1737, the following passage occurs: The fourth quality required in our Order is the taste for useful
sciences and the liberal arts. Thus, the Order exacts of each of you to contribute, by his protection, liberality,
or labour, to a vast work for which no academy can suffice, because all these societies being composed
of a very small number of men, their work cannot embrace an object so extended. All the Grand Masters in
Germany, England, Italy, and elsewhere exhort all the learned men and all the artisans of the Fraternity to
unite to furnish the materials for a Universal Dictionary of all the liberal arts and useful sciences; excepting
only theology and politics. The work has already been commenced in London, and by means of the unions
of our brothers it may be carried to a conclusion in a few years.[23]
So after all it was no enterprising bookseller, no brilliantly inspired philosopher, who conceived the idea
of the Encyclopédie, but a powerful international organization able to employ the services of more men than
all the academies could supply, which devised the scheme at least six years before the date at which it is said
to have occurred to Diderot. Thus the whole story as usually told to us would appear to be a complete fabrication-struggling
publishers, toiling littérateurs carrying out their superhuman task as " independent men of
letters " without the patronage of the great-which Lord Morley points out as " one of the most important
facts in the history of the Encyclopædia "-writers of all kinds bound together by no " common understanding
or agreement," are all seen in reality to have been closely associated as " artisans of the Fraternity " carrying
out the orders of their superiors.
The Encyclopédie was therefore essentially a Masonic publication, and Papus, whilst erroneously attributing
the famous oration and consequently the plan of the Encyclopédie to the inspiration of the Duc
d'Antin, emphasizes the importance of this fact. Thus, he writes: The Revolution manifests itself by two
stages:
1st. Intellectual revolution, by the publication of the Encyclopédie, due to French Freemasonry under
the high inspiration of the Duc d'Antin.
2nd. Occult revolution in the Lodges, due in great part to the members of the Templar Rite and executed
by a group of expelled Freemasons afterwards amnestied.[24]
The masonic authorship of the Encyclopédie and the consequent dissemination of revolutionary doctrines
has remained no matter of doubt to the Freemasons of France; on the contrary, they glory in the fact.
At the congress of the Grand Orient in 1904 the Freemason Bonnet declared: In the eighteenth century the
glorious line of Encyclopædists formed in our temples a fervent audience which was then alone in invoking
the radiant device as yet unknown to the crowd " Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." The revolutionary seed
quickly germinated amidst this élite. Our illustrious Freemasons d'Alembert, Diderot, Helvetius, d'Holbach,
Voltaire, Condorcet, conipleted the evolution of minds and prepared the new era. And, when the Bastille
fell, Freemasonry had the supreme honour of giving to humanity the charter (i.e. the Declaration of the
Rights of Man) which it had elaborated with devotion. (Applause.)
This charter, the orator went on to say, was the work of the Freemason Lafayette, and was adopted by
the Constituent Assembly, of which more than 300 members were Freemasons.
But in using the lodges to sow the seeds of revolution, the Encyclopædists betrayed not only the cause of
monarchy but of Masonry as well. It will be noticed that, in conformity with true masonic principles, Ramsay
in his oration expressly stated that the encyclopaedia was to concern itself with the liberal arts and sciences[25]
and that theology and politics were to be excluded from the contemplated scheme. How, then, did
it come to pass that these were eventually the two subjects to which the Encyclopædists devoted the greatest
attention, so that their work became principally an attack on Church and monarchy? If Papus was right in
attributing this revolutionary tendency to the Encyclopédie from the time of the famous oration, then Ramsay
could only be set down as the profoundest hypocrite or as the mouthpiece of hypocrites professing intentions
the very reverse of their real doings. A far more probable explanation seems to be that during the interval
between Ramsay's speech and the date when the Encyclopédie was begun in earnest, the scheme underwent
a change. It will be noticed that the year of 1746, when Diderot and d'Alembert are said to have
embarked on their task, coincided with the decadence of French Freemasonry under the Comte de Clermont
and the invasion of the lodges by the subversive elements; thus the project propounded with the best intentions
by the Freemasons of 1737 was filched by their revolutionary successors and turned to a diametrically
opposite purpose.
But it is not to the dancing-master Lacorne and his middle-class following that we can attribute the efficiency
with which not only the Encyclopédie but a host of minor revolutionary publications were circulated
all over France. Frederick the Great had seen his opportunity. If I am right in my surmise that Ramsay's
Nesta H. Webster — Secret Societies and Subversive Movements — Part I
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