Freemasonry: A Very Short Introduction - Andreas Önnerfors 2017
The 19th century
Three centuries of freemasonry
At the turn of the new century, Napoleon revived freemasonry in France and aligned the brotherhood closely with the ruling establishment. Thus he created the ideological basis of, and forged an elite in service to, the universalist (and expansive) project of the French Republic and later Empire. This patriotic enthusiasm, where humanist values of the Enlightenment were married with ideas of national independence and self-assertion, spilled over into a number of typically mid- and late-19th-century national freemasonries such as those in Italy, Bulgaria, or Belgium, thus influencing ’independencia’ movements as far as Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela. Within this new masonic momentum it is also possible to see a larger tolerance towards female participation in freemasonry: new mixed gender and female lodges were established. In a spirit of progress, opposition to Church and Crown, where ’traditional values’ were conserved, hardened throughout the century. It caused and cemented the profound disruption between anti-clerical/secular freemasonry (predominantly in southern Europe) and Catholicism in which paranoid persecution and conspiracy theories prevailed. Between 1821 and 1884 these theories were manifested in no less than six papal constitutions and encyclicals as well as in organized Catholic anti-masonry messages across the globe. In Russia, freemasonry was eventually prohibited in 1822.
The legacy of freemasonry was also questioned in the USA. After successful foundations of grand lodges in various states, the so-called ’Morgan Affair’ in 1826 led to the establishment of an anti-masonic party, the first ’third-party’ political force in the USA. William Morgan, a freemason himself, had announced the publication of an exposure of masonic ritual but he disappeared subsequently under unclear circumstances. Allegedly, he was abducted by freemasons and drowned in the Niagara River. The event sparked off religious resentment (in this case from what we would today call ’evangelical’ congregations) and political unrest directed against societal elites and their masonic membership. Only by the middle of the century did freemasonry in the USA recover from being persecuted. It was boosted in connection with European mass migration, particularly after the Civil War. Masonic lodges acted as contact nodes for immigrant communities, provided a link between established elites and immigrants, and occupied proto-governmental functions during Western expansion. This development continued well into the 20th century.
During the same period, freemasonries in predominantly Protestant countries such as Great Britain, Prussia, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark formulated patriotic and masculine ideologies around a (theologically underpinned) monarchy in frequent personal union with the position of grand master. Masonic philanthropy (at times proactively addressing pressing social issues) was exercised for the people but was not in need of approval by the people. Generally speaking, progressive ideas of societal change and democracy in these societies drifted away to liberal factions of the bourgeoisie. These would typically choose different forms of sociability instead of freemasonry and would engage with the liberal press and nascent party politics to express their opinions.
The 19th century marks the rise of modern forms of (mass) association, from the soccer team to the trade union, pointing to significant changes in leisure, economy, and political organization. It is possible to observe an overlap between the organizational forms of freemasonry, early trade unions, and the so-called friendly societies, aiming to provide mutual help, education, social security, or to promote soberness and prohibition. This is particularly the case with Australia and its concept of ’mateship’, denoting equality, loyalty, and friendship. At the end of the 19th century, new forms of fraternal orders such as the International Order of Good Templars (1851) were transferred from the USA to Europe.
A significant difference between freemasonry and the liberal bourgeoisie in Europe is the issue of nationalism. In principle a cosmopolitan movement with a universal ethos, freemasonry promoted loyalty and patriotism, but was far from adopting a national ideology based on the idea of mutually exclusive cultures. The political unification of Italy and Germany was not headed by freemasonry, although individual freemasons and masonic-like organizations such as the Italian Carbonari or the Deutsche Bund played a crucial role. As a rule, freemasonry kept its distance from emergent mass society and popular culture. Its main function at this time was to transfer the culture of the 18th-century privileged elites to the wealthy middle and upper classes of the 19th, nostalgically looking back rather than ahead towards the future. This cultural elitism prepared the ground for attacks on freemasonry by modern totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. For them, there was no room for independent elites between leaders and their masses.
In Britain, the year 1813 marks an important event in masonic history since it was then that the two rival grand lodges of the ’Moderns’ (1717) and ’Antients’ (1751) merged to form the still-existing UGLE, thus creating a uniformity in practice. However, as far as the British Empire is concerned, freemasonry occupied an ambiguous role. Although in essence royalist and loyalist, the division of British freemasonry into three distinct bodies, Irish, Scottish and English, opened up different trajectories in national imagination and the projection of class-consciousness. Whereas recruitment in Ireland and Scotland and dependent lodges was more socially diversified, English lodges retained a more aristocratic and upper-class character. Andrew Prescott, a British scholar of freemasonry, has claimed that an ensuing loyalty to the monarchy engulfed British freemasonry until long after the Napoleonic wars, throwing a shadow over the fraternity for centuries to come. It has also been argued that British freemasonry promoted lay religiosity rather than secularization, and adopted well-known Anglican forms of religious ceremonies such as sermons, hymns, and prayers. In the late 19th century, freemasonry in Britain reached its Victorian peak, possibly influencing public perception well into the 1960s. As a sign of growing respectability, many purpose-built masonic halls were constructed in city centres adjacent to city halls and other public buildings. This trend can also be observed throughout the century in the USA, Germany, and the Nordic countries.
During the struggle for American independence, freemasonry did not cement political unity but rather it promoted plurality. However, according to American scholar Jessica Harland-Jacobs, British freemasonry elsewhere in later centuries tended to act as a ’builder of the Empire’, consolidating British rule across the globe. At the end of the 19th century, Rudyard Kipling and his writings can be seen as representative of the inclusiveness of freemasonry in the Empire. Kipling joined the freemasons in India during the 1880s and his lodge gathered members of at least four religious creeds, which were glorified in his poem ’The Mother Lodge’ (as well as in others). His novel The Man who would be King (1888, 1975 adapted into a feature film) has many references to freemasonry. Nonetheless, it is possible to argue that the breakaway of British lodges and the formation of ’national’ and independent provincial grand lodges in the white settler colonies, such as in Canada, South Africa, and Australia, as a rule preceded their political independence.
This holds true for Norway and the unification of Switzerland as a federal state. The grand lodge Alpina (1844) was founded four years before the Swiss Confederation (1848), Den Norske Frimurerorden was granted independence from Sweden in 1891, fourteen years before the dissolution of the Swedish—Norwegian political union (ironically negotiated in a masonic hall). Freemasonry in the Middle East, an intriguing subject that only fairly recently has received appropriate scholarly attention, has mainly been interpreted as a tool of Western colonial penetration. However, it is also possible to prove a link between masonic sociability and the first Pan-Arab ’nahda’, the period of cultural re-awakening combined with modernization. For instance, Abdelkader El Djezairi, an Algerian religious and military leader fighting for independence from French rule, was initiated into a French lodge. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that Arab elites handled the activities of competing European and US grand lodges in the Middle East with great self-confidence. Overcoming religious and sectarian divides, freemasons in Arab countries promoted local and regional identities and thus prepared the ground for future political independence. The same function was performed by freemasonry in Iran during the constitutional revolution of 1905—11.
Industrialization and growing social mobility created increasing pressure for substantial political reforms that could not be delivered by the conservative and reactionary Restoration regimes in Europe. The tension between bourgeois emancipation and the conservation of old privileges among the ruling elites was represented in a series of conflicts and by the 1840s culminated in various revolutions. Freemasonry was also affected by these developments. The establishment of the periodical Freemasons’ Quarterly Review in 1834 in Britain shows how tensions relating to the role of freemasonry in society also affected its country of origin. The journal promoted a more socially active form of compassionate solidarity based firmly on Christian values, which ran contrary to the intentions of the UGLE leadership, which aimed to open up freemasonry to a larger religious diversity.
In Germany, lodges in the port city of Hamburg, one of the country’s most important economic hubs at the time, pursued reforms aimed at a modernization of ritual and organizational masonic education as well as pushing for what could be called a more extroverted societal activism. This masonic reform movement spread all over Germany (and later into Switzerland and Austria too) and propagated its ideas in the masonic press. The reform movement also pushed for greater tolerance towards Jewish membership, which caused a split between more secularized forms of freemasonry and more traditional and Christian ones, such as the Prussian grand lodges. This dispute was even transferred to the USA. When German emigrés of the failed 1848 revolution (the so called ’48-ers’) arrived in New York and established lodges, their forthright criticisms of racial and social divides in US society immediately set them at odds with the American grand lodges. The conflict over racial issues in US grand lodges has prevailed to this day.
The split between more outspokenly political and liberal and more moderate forms of freemasonry later manifested itself on a grand European, even global, scale and has led to the erection of what Andrew Prescott has called the ’masonic equivalent of the Berlin Wall’. In 1877, the French GODF introduced the concept of a liberty of conscience concerning the masonic obligation or oath taken by each new member. Previous generations of freemasons made reference to a God of Creation (in general distinctively Christian or Abrahamic), a supreme being, as the ’Great Architect of the Universe’. This was now left to each member to decide, opening up the possibility that even atheists could join freemasonry, which ran contrary to the Charges of freemasonry of 1723. For the UGLE and many other grand lodges in Europe and the USA, a red line was crossed and relationships with the French GODF suspended. However, many other grand lodges followed in the French footsteps and the division in freemasonry over the issue of freedom of conscience and secularity was (and still is) a palpable reality.
The involvement of French freemasons in the short-lived Second Republic (1848—51), the later Paris Commune, and the subsequent Third Republic (1870—1940) points to two different conceptions of engaging with society that evolved during the 19th century. In Anglo-Saxon understanding, voluntary association has no political role to play by itself but is at the core of a liberal concept of self-organized (civil) society. In a more radical, continental reading, freemasonry was identified as a driving force of critical and progressive social change, possibly even social engineering. This is why we witness two ideal types of direction, already evident during the 18th century: one is introverted and ’esoteric’, resistant to revolutionary ideas and existing in a state of balance with the ideological and political powers of Church and State. For these, philanthropy primarily occupies a merely charitable function. The other direction is pushing proactively for an extroverted or ’exoteric’ realization of philanthropic ideas in conscious conflict with existing power relationships.
On an individual level both directions are about empowerment and thus are liberal in essence, but in different ways. The first, ’esoteric’, direction places ethical responsibility upon the individual. It stresses that the role (if any) of freemasonry in society is generated by its positive influence over each member, ’making good men better’ and thus better citizens of the communities in which they live. The total sum of refined and improved actions of all individual members is what any ’masonic influence’ is about. It is ’intra muros’ (within the walls) that refinement takes place and outside the lodges that it is practised, but with little if any corporative support of freemasonry as an organization. The ’exoteric’ direction holds the individual responsible for changing society and actively intervening in the state of current affairs. Political virtues cultivated within freemasonry thus by definition necessitate socio-political action ’extra muros’ (outside the walls). In this case, freemasonry as an organization aims to play a visible and formal function as an interest group in society.
However, it is not possible to maintain this clear-cut distinction in all decades of the 19th century and thereafter, and there are many overlaps. It does not hold true for all individuals who were aligned with either the one or the other direction of freemasonry. But it facilitates our understanding of the divergent standing and design of freemasonry in different political cultures. It also helps us to understand why the alleged interference of freemasonry with politics turned into a feature of violent anti-masonic feeling during the 20th century.
Significant new dynamics were brought into freemasonry through the distinct fin-de-siècle preference for mysticism. Pioneered by writers like the romanticist and early surrealist Gérard de Nerval, a more esoteric reading of freemasonry was disseminated in Europe, which was picked up by the theosophical and later anthroposophic movements. Annie Besant, British socialist, theosophist, writer, and women’s rights campaigner, in 1902 established a branch of the French mixed gender grand lodge, Le Droit Humain (1893), in Britain. Le Droit Humain (DH) has today around 40,000 members worldwide. Female initiation and membership in masonic lodges occurred across Europe at the end of the 19th century, mostly as an outcome of first-wave feminism. The response of established masonic grand lodges has, however, remained divided over this issue.