Freemasonry: A Very Short Introduction - Andreas Önnerfors 2017

The modern conspiracy myth
Perceptions, prejudices, and persecutions

The first modern conspiracy myth was born in connection with the French Revolution: it insinuated that political events had been triggered and deliberately orchestrated by dark forces that were opposed to Crown and Church and, ultimately, opposed to humankind. This idea was furthered by the writings of the Jesuit Augustin Barruel, who published the four-volume work Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme (1797—8) during his time of exile in London. Barruel accused anti-Christian Enlightenment philosophy of undermining the old order of Crown and Church. According to Barruel, freemasonry furthered this development by promoting freedom and equality. Finally, he held that the Illuminati—with their supposedly anarchist and Satanist spirit—were directly responsible for the Revolution. In the final volume of his work, he linked all these groups back to major heresies in world history.

At nearly the same juncture, John Robison, an Edinburgh professor of natural philosophy, also accused the Illuminati of being the main perpetrator of the French Revolution in his famous Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati and Reading Societies (1797). Once this myth was established, it was impossible to pull it back. Fuelled by conspiracy literature and spectacular press accounts, the ’proofs of a conspiracy’ became a commonplace in public perception, and were adopted by increasingly suspicious and nervous conservative governments in a clampdown on voluntary associations. Governmental regulations and prohibitions codified distrust and scapegoating across Europe. In the USA, conservative clerics gripped by Illuminati-related panic accused Thomas Jefferson, one of the first US presidents, of being a representative of the Order. About three decades later, the Anti-Masonic Party was established in the aftermath of the Morgan Affair, where a printer was alleged to have been killed for threatening to publish a comprehensive exposure of American masonic rituals. For more than twenty years afterwards, public confidence in the fraternity was profoundly disturbed.