Barruel had been combating the Enlightenment in print since 1781, and kept up his critique in the first years of the Revolution, which he saw as God’s punishment on the French for having tolerated and embraced its false philosophy. In 1792 he fled to England, where he published his two-volume Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme. It was reprinted six times in the space of a year and translated into all the major European languages, and continued in print for decades. Barruel’s writing has a tone of authority that brooks no argument, and his assertions, extravagant and improbable as they might appear, carried conviction.
In the opening sentence, he declares that the French Revolution was the fruit of a vast conspiracy carried out by a sect which had latterly taken the name of Jacobins, whose aim was to overthrow all existing thrones and altars and unleash anarchy. According to him, it consisted of 300,000 active leaders manipulating a further two million. ‘In this French Revolution, everything, including its most frightful crimes, was foreseen, premeditated, calculated, resolved, decreed,’ he affirmed, ‘everything was the consequence of the most profound perfidy, since everything was prepared and brought about by men who alone had knowledge of the conspiracy long planned in the secret societies, and who knew how to choose and bring on circumstances favourable to their plans.’13
Barruel believed it all began in the late 1720s, with Voltaire, who enlisted the support of Frederick II of Prussia and recruited D’Alembert and Diderot, who compiled the Encyclopédie, which under the guise of scientific knowledge and reason undermined religion, social hierarchy and most human institutions. The next step was the dissolution of the Jesuits, brought about by the manipulation of public opinion and statesmen. According to Barruel, the benign Freemasons interested in human welfare were the ‘useful idiots’ who helped destabilise society by creating spurious hierarchies and undermining existing institutions, above all the Church, with their pseudo-religious foolery. The Illuminati were more focused, and Weishaupt’s philosophy more dangerous. Barruel defined it thus: ‘Equality and liberty are the essential rights which man, in his original and primitive state, received from nature; the first blow to equality was dealt by property; the first attack on liberty by political society and governments; the only bases for both property and governments are the religious and civil laws; thus in order to re-establish man in his primitive rights of equality and liberty, one has to begin by destroying religion and civil society, and finish by abolishing property.’14
According to Barruel, the Illuminati were well organised and intelligent. In the interests of making useful converts to their cause they would gather information on persons of influence, meticulously recording their likes and dislikes, dietary preferences, sexual habits and so on, so as to be able to approach them in the most appropriate way, to manipulate them, and even blackmail them. They also meant to introduce women into their order, in two separate categories: one of virtuous high-born ladies who would help to make converts and raise money, the other of dissolute women and prostitutes who would pander to the needs of the members.
Barruel’s book was not meant as history: it was a clarion call demanding action. He warned that ‘the French Revolution is still no more than a trial of strength for the sect; its conspiracy covers the entire universe’. It was already preparing the subversion of other states, sending out envoys and using Masonic networks in countries the French were intending to invade – he claimed there were five hundred adepts in London waiting for the signal to act. ‘It is still possible to crush this sect which has sworn to destroy your God, your motherland, your families and the whole edifice of your communities,’ he warned his readers, but time was running out and they must face up to the threat. ‘The danger is certain, it is continuous, it is terrible, and it menaces each and every one of you,’ he hectored.15
The Anglican minister and distinguished astronomer Francis Wollaston, Fellow of the Royal Society, wholeheartedly agreed. ‘To the liberty and equality of original Freemasonry; to the fierce rancour of Voltaire and his self-called philosophers against Jesus Christ and his religion; to the democratic principles of Rousseau, and his visionary schemes about the origin of all government’, the Jacobins had added ‘the rage of Weishaupt and his pretended more enlightened followers, against all kings, or rather against all who under any title bear any rule among men’.16
If educated people could view what was taking place in such wildly conflicting ways, it is hardly surprising that the ignorant and those living in rural areas adopted even more extreme positions. While some embraced the new shibboleths of freedom and the sovereignty of the people as though they were a new religion, others saw them in terms of Satanic wickedness threatening everything they held dear. Rumour and imagination conjured dread of what one historian has recently described as ‘the eighteenth-century equivalent of a Martian invasion’. The word ‘Jacobin’ joined those of ‘Freemason’ and ‘Illuminato’ in the conservative canon of horrors, and came to stand for any member of what was increasingly referred to as the ‘sect’. Blind fear set the seal of veracity on untested assumptions, and in the prevailing psychological climate every coincidence had the power of proof: there is a point at which fear becomes a social pathology that floats entirely free of evidence. A powerful conviction took root in conservative thought that a vast conspiracy was afoot. The concept of an occult association working for the overthrow of the social order entered the imagination, never to leave it.17
Having alerted society to the danger, Barruel suggested how it should be met. As the Jacobins were waging ‘a secret war of delusion, error and darkness’ against the mind, people should respond with ‘wisdom, truth and light’. As they were unleashing ‘impiousness and corruption’ against the faith, the faithful should respond with morality and virtue, and strive to convert the enemy. ‘The Jacobins are waging on Princes and the Governments of nations a war of hatred of the law and society, a war of rage and destruction, I want you to oppose them with society, humanity and conservatism,’ Barruel wrote.18
Princes and governments did not heed his advice. Their response to the events unfolding in France was dictated almost entirely by fear, and fear breeds irrationality and aggression. It thrives on the notion that aside from identifiable threats there are others lurking in the shadows. The need to uncover these unknown dangers and to identify them becomes compulsive. This, and the compulsion to strike back at the source of their fears, was to dominate their policies over much of the next half-century, and was to play a decisive role in transforming the way European societies ordered themselves.
3
No European state was remotely prepared to meet the challenge posed by the French Revolution, let alone that suggested by Barruel and other conspiracy theorists. Rulers and ministers interfered minimally in the lives of the majority of their subjects: cities administered themselves, outside them a semblance of order was maintained by a combination of local nobles, parochial institutions, religious constraint and custom. Central organs of control barely existed. The French monarchy had introduced a force dedicated to maintaining order when, in 1544, it set up the Maréchaussée (marshalcy), a body of mounted men whose task was to keep roads safe and an eye on who was using them. Paris acquired police in 1667 to contain the plague then ravaging the country. Police commissioners were appointed in St Petersburg in 1718, Berlin in 1742, and Vienna in 1751. But the word ‘police’ is misleading.
In his monumental four-volume Traité de la police, published in Paris between 1705 and 1738, Nicolas de La Mare explained that ‘police’ meant the ordering of public space for the benefit of all who occupy it. The word encompassed the regulation of the width, length and layout of streets,