Chapter 114. Freemasonry in Revolutions and Politics: America, France, Latin America and Romania

Whether the lodges made revolutions or merely hosted revolutionaries is a question the library’s sources answer in sharply different ways. Masonic insiders such as Keghel and the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania’s editor of Washington’s letters stress a Craft that trained citizens and was then slandered. Historians such as Margaret Jacob and Le Forestier treat the lodges as schools of constitutional practice and dismiss the master-plot thesis. Robison, Webster, Stoenescu and the Romanian anti-Masonic writers see in Freemasonry the hidden “Centre of Power” behind the upheavals. Steiner and Eliade add esoteric and cultural-critical readings. This chapter sets these voices side by side for four settings: the American founding, the French Revolution, the Spanish-American wars of independence, and the Romanian lands from 1848 to the present.

America: Founders, Morgan and the Anti-Masonic Party

Keghel, a past master of a Grand Orient lodge in Washington, writes that American Masonry “honors French Masonic heroes such as Lafayette and remembers that it was the French Masonic community that was instrumental in obtaining French support for the American Revolution” [Keghel, American Freemasonry, #62774, appended speech]. Levenda focuses on the Paris Lodge of the Nine Sisters, where Franklin led the frail Voltaire to his initiation on 7 April 1778. He writes that the lodge’s official journal “even published the Declaration of Independence, as well as some of the state constitutions”, and he quotes a historian who calls such activities a flagrant violation of “Masonic regulations” that the Grand Orient never questioned [Levenda, The Secret Temple, #64792, “The Lodge of Nine Sisters”]. Washington’s own Masonic correspondence, compiled from the Library of Congress papers by the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania in 1915, records his attendance at military and civilian lodges between 1779 and 1797. It also prints his answer to the Illuminati scare. To the Reverend G. W. Snyder he wrote (24 October 1798): “It was not my intention to doubt that, the doctrines of the Illuminati, and principles of Jacobism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more, fully satisfied of this fact than I am”. He added that he did not believe “the Lodges of Free Masons in this Country had, as Societies, endeavoured to propagate the diabolical tenets of the first” [Washington’s Masonic Correspondence (Gutenberg), 1798 letters to Snyder]. The editor notes that anti-Masons later “chiefly relied upon” these two letters [ibid.].

The decisive American crisis came in 1826. Keghel recounts how William Morgan, whose own initiation “remains” untraced, prepared an exposure of the rituals. He was jailed for a two-dollar debt on 11 September 1826, released, and “abducted on the spot by a small squad of Freemasons”. An unidentified body was found near Fort Niagara on 7 October 1827. New York’s 480 lodges in 1826 fell to “only seventy-five in 1835”, and “for the first time in American history” a third national party appeared, the Anti-Masonic Party [Keghel, #62774, ch. 3]. The long-run statistics Keghel reproduces from the Masonic Service Association run from 3,077,161 Master Masons in 1924 to a peak of 4,103,161 in 1959 and a low of 1,161,253 in 2015 [Keghel, #62774, Appendix I]. Esoteric writers read the founding as a planned work. Manly P. Hall argues that “world democracy was the secret dream of the great classical philosophers” and links the reverse of the Great Seal to an “Order of the Quest” [Hall, The Secret Destiny of America, #51410]. Sora titles his chapter “The Rosicrucians and the American Revolution” [Sora, Rosicrucian America, #64376, ch. 11].

France: Training Ground or Conspiracy?

Margaret Jacob describes the eighteenth-century lodge as a miniature polity: “a system of constitutions, elections, majority rule, pluralities, annual assemblies, sealed ballots, even taxes and eventually ‘courts'”. Lodges came to understand themselves “more self-consciously as schools of government where brothers learned to vote, give orations, live under constitutions and majority rule”. In Catholic Europe they were “often very anti-Jesuit” [Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry, #78059, ch. 3 “Schools of Government”]. Robison drew the opposite conclusion. “The most active leaders in the French Revolution were members of this Association”, he wrote, and “conducted their first movements according to its principles” [Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, #84234, Introduction]. Webster names “the old Illuminatus Mirabeau”, whom she describes as a “Freemason and an Illuminatus”. She concludes: “if it is said that the Revolution was prepared in the lodges of Freemasons … let it always be added that it was Illuminized Freemasonry that made the Revolution” [Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, #69057, ch. X].

Le Forestier’s chapter “Illuminism and the French Revolution” reconstructs how this thesis was built in German journalism after 1792. The Vienna press claimed that the Illuminati spread their principles in France, “and it was their propaganda that led to July 14 and the entire rebellion”. It also claimed that “the twenty founders of the Mainz Club … were all Illuminati”. He sets against this the 1795 Speech in Defense of the Illuminati, which argued that the order “did not preach violence, did not speak of beheading kings but sought only to bind their hands” [Le Forestier, The Bavarian Illuminati, #70667, Book Six ch. 2]. Greer agrees with Le Forestier that Barruel’s version came with a “complete lack of evidence” [Greer, The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies, #64911, “Bavarian Illuminati”].

Spanish America: Miranda and the Lautaro Lodges

Levenda calls Francisco de Miranda the “Father of Latin American Freemasonry”. He writes that Miranda “is believed” to have been initiated in Philadelphia around 1783 with Lafayette as “his Principal Recommender”, and that Bolívar, O’Higgins and San Martín all belonged to La Gran Reunión Americana and its “principle chapter the Lautaro Lodge”. Bolívar is “believed” to have been initiated in 1803. Levenda also writes that “for a time, it was believed that Miranda himself had created the Lautaro Lodge in London in 1797”. His conclusion is that Masonry caused these movements in “a qualified ‘yes'” sense, since “Masons were found on both sides of the conflict” [Levenda, #64792, ch. 10]. The reference shelf records a revision. “Recent research suggests that the Lodge was founded in Cádiz, Spain, and that Miranda was not amongst its founders.” Both lodges “had just a superficial compromise with freemasonry”, using secrecy “as a tool to promote liberal agendas” [Wikipedia: Lautaro Lodge]. In Buenos Aires the Lautaro Lodge (from 1812) “exercised control over the Buenos Aires government” until 1815. Historians often treat the Chilean “Lautarine” lodges of 1817 as “political and independence-focused secret societies rather than Masonic lodges”. Bolívar himself banned lodges in Colombia on 8 November 1828 [Wikipedia: Freemasonry in Latin America]. Fernando Alegría’s novel Lautaro gives the popular version: San Martín “founded at Mendoza a secret organisation whose ramifications soon spread through almost all America”, with a harsh code of officers’ honour [Alegria, Lautaro (historical novel), #23994].

The Romanian Lands: 1848, the Union and Cuza

Neagu Djuvara states the Masonic thesis most directly. The young Romanians who had studied in Paris, “almost all (we have proof now, since the archives of Freemasonry were opened)”, were “recruited to enter Freemasonry, and came back to our country as Masons”. “The Revolution of 1848, like the Union of the Principalities of 1859, was the work of the young Masons. The truth must be told, if it is proved by documents” [Djuvara, O scurtă istorie a românilor povestită celor tineri, #18387, p. 169]. Alex Mihai Stoenescu builds a whole volume on it. Given the divergent interests of the Great Powers between 1821 and 1871, “that Centre of Power which ensured the unified implementation of the scenario for the Romanians cannot be other than Freemasonry” [Stoenescu, Istoria loviturilor de stat în România, vol. 1 “Revoluție și francmasonerie”, #9603, Introduction]. Stoenescu separates authentic Masons from “Masonic-type” organisations; he finds “sufficient proof” against claims that Tudor Vladimirescu was a Mason. He quotes the letter of I. C. Brătianu and C. A. Rosetti to Edgar Quinet (26 June 1848): “every Romanian has two homelands: first the land where he was born and then France”. On 1859 he notes that the Wallachian unionists thought a double election “impossible” and “chimerical” until the night of 23-24 January. He reports that Cuza was asked for an oath of his “provisional” reign, and that, “according to other sources”, Cuza wished to lead national Freemasonry [Stoenescu, #9603, chapters on 1848 and “Complotul lui Grigore Sturdza”].

The Romanian Wikipedia chronology, based on Șerbănescu and Jacques Pierre, lists a first lodge at Iași in 1748 (Antonio Maria del Chiaro), Brașov 1749, Sibiu 1767 and Bucharest 1769. It names Paris initiates in the lodges Athénée des Étrangers and La Rose du Silence, among them Bălcescu, Cuza, Kogălniceanu, C. A. Rosetti and Alecsandri. It describes the 1850 Brussels lodge “Steaua Dunării” founded by the exiled forty-eighters, the closure of Masonry in 1938 by agreement between Carol II and Grand Master Jean Pangal, and the communist dissolution of 1948. Masonry was revived after 27 December 1989 through an Italian line (lodge “Concordia”, 1991) and a French one [Wikipedia RO: Istoria francmasoneriei în România].

Hostile Readings: Paulescu, Rosu, Niculae and Eliade

The physiologist Nicolae C. Paulescu presents Freemasonry as a Jewish creation. In his account, in the eighteenth century “the Jews succeeded in introducing into England Freemasonry, a secret society that they imagined and built after the model of their Kahal”. The English “then passed this baneful association into France”, where it posed “falsely” as philanthropic [Paulescu, Spitalul, Coranul, Talmudul, Kahalul și Francmasoneria, #47481]. Viorel and Camelia Rosu describe Masonry as a “satanic” organisation co-opting judges, prosecutors and politicians on behalf of “the Zionist movement”, and call for it to be outlawed [Rosu, Dezvăluiri cutremurătoare, #23839]. Cornel-Dan Niculae dates the post-communist revival to spring 1990, with articles by a “Paris Group” of 19 Masons, and says the “Concordia” lodge was founded in Bucharest in autumn 1990 “under the obedience of the Grand Orient of Italy”. The Wikipedia chronology gives 1991 [Niculae, Războiul nevăzut al evreilor sioniști cu românii, #75037; Wikipedia RO: Istoria francmasoneriei în România]. The Romanian Orthodox Holy Synod anathematised Masonry on 11 March 1937, and the reference shelf lists the Nazi and communist bans [Wikipedia RO: Persecuția francmasoneriei].

Mircea Eliade’s 1936 essay starts from ignorance: “I know no Freemason, and from all the books I have read I have understood nothing about Freemasonry”. From that “deranged literature” he extracts a “Masonic mentality”: “a simplistic way of seeing things, abstract criteria for judging history”. A Marxist “exemplifies this Masonic mentality wonderfully”, and Freud “laicises the Absolute”. He cites “a whole series of books of the ‘magister’ Ragon” as evidence, and ends with “the history of Romanian politics from the forty-eighters to 1933”, where “you meet nothing but abstract laws, Enlightenment facts, coarse thinking” [Eliade, “Mentalitatea francmasonică”, Vremea, 10 Sept. 1936, #75659].

Steiner, the Western Brotherhoods and the Twentieth Century

Steiner’s editor summarises the 1916 lectures this way: “the events of the war could not be understood without taking into account the existence and activities of elite brotherhoods in the West—mostly of a Masonic or semi-Masonic nature”. The editor adds that “the whole of recent history” is “the struggle between the ancient Roman-Latin element and that element that is to be made out of the English people” (lecture 11). The editor links these lectures to C. G. Harrison’s 1893 forecast of “experiments in Socialism” in Russia [Steiner, The Karma of Untruthfulness, Vol. 1, #64946, Introduction]. In the lectures Steiner says that a “certain Jesuit influence was brought to play so that the Masonic and Jesuit influences met; for there are higher instances, ’empires’, which can quite well make use of both”. “It was then necessary to obliterate the tracks” [Steiner, #64946, lectures]. Italy shows the political line running from the Carbonari, whose economia gave birth to Mazzini’s Young Italy [Greer, #64911, “Carbonari”], to P2. Greer describes P2 as a lodge founded in 1877 for secret parliamentary members. Under Licio Gelli it became a political secret society; in 1981 its seized records listed “3 Italian cabinet ministers, 43 members of the Italian parliament, the heads of all Italy’s intelligence agencies”. The Grand Orient of Italy had withdrawn its charter in 1974 [Greer, #64911, “P2 [Propaganda Due]”].

Key points

• Keghel and Levenda show French lodges (the Nine Sisters, Lafayette) tied to American independence. Washington in 1798 accepted that Illuminati doctrines had spread but denied that American lodges as societies propagated them.
• After the Morgan affair (1826) New York lodges fell from 480 to 75 and the Anti-Masonic Party arose. U.S. membership peaked at 4,103,161 in 1959 (Keghel, Appendix I).
• Jacob sees lodges as “schools of government”. Robison and Webster see Illuminised lodges making the French Revolution. Le Forestier traces that thesis to anti-Jacobin journalism.
• Levenda credits Miranda and the Lautaro Lodge with the Liberators’ networks. Wikipedia reports newer research placing its founding in Cádiz without Miranda.
• Djuvara calls 1848 and 1859 “the work of the young Masons”, citing the opened archives. Stoenescu calls Freemasonry the only possible “Centre of Power” of 1821-1871.
• Paulescu, Rosu and Niculae read Freemasonry as a Jewish or Zionist instrument directed against Romania; Rosu calls for it to be outlawed. Eliade (1936) turns “Masonic mentality” into a critique of abstract, single-key thinking, with Marxism and Freudianism as his examples.
• Steiner and his editor hold that the Great War cannot be understood without the “elite brotherhoods in the West”, mostly Masonic or semi-Masonic. Greer’s P2 entry carries the theme of politicised lodges into the 1970s and 1980s.