Four years ago, when Donald Trump was campaigning for the office of President, he ran on the idea that, as an outsider, he was best suited to clean up corruption in government, and he complained that, because of this, all the forces of establishment politics were arrayed against him. While this may have been true during the Republican primaries, it certainly was no longer the truth following his nomination, after which his party fell in line behind him as if he’d always been their first choice. Politics as usual. However, Trump never gave up his claims that an entrenched bureaucracy was sabotaging him and preventing him from doing the will of his constituents—an odd claim when he and his party held the executive office, the majority in both houses of Congress, and made history with the number of conservative judges they were appointing to federal courts and the Supreme Court. With what looked like a growing dominance over every branch of our government, it seems absurd to complain about his power being blocked. Nevertheless, every time something leaked from his administration or whenever one of his own was indicted for the very kind of corruption he had run on rooting out, his supporters blamed it on a so-called “deep state,” a kind of shadow government sabotaging their outsider president and limiting what he could do. Soon, Trump himself, already known to favor and amplify conspiracy theories like birtherism, climate change denialism, and anti-vaccination claims—began to use the term “deep state” to describe the nebulous forces he and his supporters claimed were actively foiling him. But the term did not originate here. It was originally used to describe those loyal to the secular nationalism of Turkey, who engage in violent resistance to the ruling party of President Tayyip Erdoğan. While in Turkey it refers to an actual conspiratorial network that did not shrink from murder, in America, it is used to refer to any resistance, from leakers in their own employ to negative press, none of which is uncommon or conspiratorial. Emails in which career bureaucrats expressed negative opinions of the new President were held up as proof of a plot against him, despite the fact that any new administration has to deal with holdovers from previous administrations who often don’t care for the new boss. None of this is proof of conspiracy, but that hasn’t stopped the conspiracy mongering during the last four years, which has seen the conservative conspiracy machine operated by such organizations as The John Birch Society folding this conspiracy into their already unwieldy conspiratorial view of world politics and history, suggesting this “Deep State” is just the façade of an even deeper state, composed of political think tanks and economic conferences, like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg group, and the Trilateral Commission, and beyond them influential banking families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. And if you keep pulling back the curtain, they say, you’ll find an old and insidious conspiracy, one responsible for all the major political upheavals of the modern age: the Illuminati.

I have covered historical conspiracy theories before, including the survival of the Templars in a patron exclusive podcast minisode, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in a lengthy series, and numerous posts that address aspects of the false Jewish World Conspiracy theory. Perhaps only the last of these could possibly rival the scope of the claims about the Illuminati, and even then, it’s unclear that they can be separated. Certainly, Illuminati conspiracy theories contributed to the claims of a worldwide Jewish plot, but there are also claims that it preceded any such plots. Some conspiracists who argue that the Illuminati are bent on the subversion of all governments and the destruction of religion will claim that the Illuminati can be traced all the way back to antiquity, to the sorcerous magi of old, and the Gnostic secret societies within early Christianity that seemed bent on perverting orthodox doctrines. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, luckily I did episodes earlier this year about the Zoroastrian magi and Gnosticism that you can listen to for context. However, to simplify things, I can tell you that the Illuminati, first of all, were very real, and their origins, along with the origins of modern conspiracy theory as we know it, can be traced back to Europe during the Age of Enlightenment, in the late 18th century. Because of this, my recent series on miracles purported to have occurred in Enlightenment France also serves as a perfect backdrop to this series. Also called the Age of Reason, this period is characterized by the spread of the philosophical notions that reason is the key to knowledge and that liberty is a human right. These beliefs led many to rebel against absolute monarchy as a system of government and to throw off the yoke of traditional religion. Thus we see the revolutions of the American colonies as well as the French Revolution in these years as an organic response to specific grievances as well as a swing toward ideals of freedom and democracy. But this was a time of frightening and sudden change, especially for the more conservative of the era. Many were looking for some simpler explanation of what was behind the violent upsets of established order that they saw transpiring around them. In 1797, almost a decade after the start of the French Revolution and nearly simultaneously, two books appeared, each written without knowledge of the other, that offered many the explanation for which they yearned. A French Jesuit priest named Abbé Augustin Barruel published his Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, and Scottish Professor of Natural Philosophy John Robison published his Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, both of which argued that a theretofore obscure secret society called the Illuminati was the prime mover responsible for the bloody revolution in France.

A cartoon that illustrates what many thought of the Age of Reason at the time. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Maybe it stretches the imagination that these nearly identical theories appeared simultaneously, but it appears they did, much as the theory of evolution occurred separately to both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace during the same years, but in this case it is not because the theory was accurate. That is not to say that this secret society was made up, though. Far from it. The Illuminati did exist, and not everything that Barruel and Robison claimed about their intentions can be dismissed as false. What we know is that the Order of the Illuminati was founded in the university town of Ingolstadt, in the Electorate of Bavaria, in 1776. Now before that year sends any of you spiraling into conspiracy theories about Illuminist Founding Fathers in America, let me assure you that in that year, it was but a fledgling club, with few members from recruited mostly from among the university student body. There are claims that the Illuminati eventually reached U.S. shores, though, and I’ll address those later, in part two of this series. At the time of its creation, its originator, a young Professor of Canon Law at the University of Ingolstadt, Adam Weishaupt, who had dreamed up the order before his thirtieth year, conceived of it as a tool for spreading Enlightenment ideals, a remedy for the twin evils of ignorance and superstition that plagued humanity. The idea was to create a network of likeminded men who were in influential positions, such as advisors to sovereign rulers, who could quietly whisper to the leaders of this world, pushing them and therefore everyone, away from vice and toward virtue, with an eye to remaking the social order according to republican principles and attaining liberty for all peoples.

These appear to have been the Order’s objectives when Weishaupt first discussed it with friends, back when he was still toying with calling them the Perfectibilists, a name which further indicates his desire for the betterment of the world. However, Weishaupt also believed that those in power would work against these ends, and so his idea was to work in secret, through a society structured like the Freemasons, with numerous degrees to keep secrets from all but the innermost circle, but designed more like the Jesuits, who centralized power in one man, which would be Weishaupt himself, Rex or king of the Illuminati—an ironic structure since the group’s stated objectives were to do away with such clerical authority and absolute power structures. At first, slow to spread and with few members of any influence, Weishaupt’s endeavor seemed doomed to failure, but then he met Baron Adolph von Knigge, who had some influence in Masonic circles and took an interest in the goals of Weishaupt’s Illuminati. It was resolved that, in order to accomplish their goals, they would need to essentially appropriate the existing infrastructure of the Freemasons, by presenting Illuminism as the final uppermost degree of Masonry to be attained, at which the true aims of the Freemasons would be revealed—a kind of top-down hostile takeover of Continental Freemasonry. This Baron von Knigge set about doing, travelling around to lodges throughout Europe and initiating Masons into the Illuminati until the numbers of Weishaupt’s order finally began to swell, and its reach to spread.

Portrait of Weishaupt. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

According to Abbé Barruel, the conspiracy really started before the organization of the Illuminati, though, with the writings of the philosophes of the French Academy. He argued that Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot had commenced the plot with their popular writings advocating for reason and progress and denouncing organized religion. Indeed, Barruel had been a vocal critic of the philosophes long before the French Revolution and the formulation of his grand conspiracy theory. Rather than seeing them as proponents of liberty and equality, he believed them to be a band of rabble-rousers fomenting unrest by redefining words like reason and terms like public opinion in an effort to undermine hierarchy and make the will of the populace sovereign, which was tantamount to treason. While most of these thinkers were Deists, meaning that rather than espousing a particular religion they instead arrived at a belief in a creator god based on observation and reason, to Barruel and many other clergy, this was only atheism under a different name, so he saw the destruction of Christianity as part and parcel of the plot of the philosophes, making them, quite literally, anti-Christ. While Barruel was not the only person to suggest that the philosophes contributed to the revolutionary ideology of the Jacobins and other revolutionary groups in France—indeed this is widely agreed upon—he appears to be the first to suggest that the public politics their philosophy helped bring forth could not have possibly evolved organically from ideas in the zeitgeist but rather must have been a premeditated ploy thrust upon the public by wicked academics bent on overturning the natural order. Likewise, Robison was not the only observer at the time or since to suggest the organizational structures and memberships of French Freemasonry might have overlapped or provided a framework for the revolutionary clubs like the Jacobins, but he and Barruel were alone in seeing a concerted and premeditated plot by the Freemasons to manipulate the masses and incite them to revolt, not for the Enlightenment principles they preached but in reality to achieve their own secret ends. And certainly unique was the addition of the Illuminati as the central command, inspired by the philosophes to transform the world into a place with no order, no law, no religion, insinuating their way like a parasite into the massive lodge system of the Freemasons and through them playing the public like a puppet. By their reckoning, the Illuminati, through the Freemasons, made real the impious and apocalyptic dreams of the philosophes by overthrowing both church and state, toppling altar and throne alike to usher in a new age of chaos and bloodshed.

Much of what Barruel and Robison claimed cannot in good faith be denied. First, Adam Weishaupt and the likeminded men he initiated into his order were certainly inspired by the Enlightenment ideals of the philosophes and other modern thinkers. Even their name, Illuminati, the illuminated or enlightened ones, seems to be a reflection of their Enlightenment principles. But more than this, their practices and stated goals were not as innocent as many apologists and debunkers often suggest in their efforts to discredit Barruel and Robison’s theories. The fact of the matter is that the public was eventually made privy to the innermost secret intentions of the Order of the Illuminati. In 1785, Charles Theodore, the Elector of Bavaria, concerned about the power wielded by secret societies whose memberships included many influential persons, outlawed all such orders. It was not long before the Illuminati came to his attention. According to Barruel, this transpired because a high-ranking member happened to be struck by lightning, and on his smoking body were found numerous papers and communiques that revealed the Illuminati and their plans. This story of Barruel’s isn’t supported anywhere else, though, and could well be fiction. Regardless, it is clear that, once the Elector began his campaign against secret societies, some low-ranking members betrayed the order out of resentment for never being raised to higher degrees, and soon raids were being conducted on members of Weishaupt’s inner circle. It wasn’t long before their papers were being published for all of Bavaria to read, and rather than revealing that they were just an idealistic group innocently promoting egalitarian ideals, they showed that they really were nefarious and deserved to be suppressed. Among the lower order members, they may have represented their aims as being this innocuous—to serve as a positive influence on mankind, especially to those in power, to encourage benevolence and discourage fanaticism—but among the inner circle, they emphasized a further end of establishing a world that had no need for monarchs and magistrates, princes and priests. While to many today this still seems a noble goal, the very fact that they kept their true objectives a secret even from their underlings goes to show that they were an untrustworthy group. Indeed, their papers show that they did not shrink from recommending criminal acts to seize power for their cause, like having members who were close to government officials steal and copy their seals in order to facilitate forgery. Their lofty ideals were tarnished by the very fact that they believed they could only be realized through manipulation and deceit. Believing that they knew better than the people what the people needed turned their democratic crusade into a plot for authoritarian control.

Portrait of Augustin Barruel. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Thus in 1785, four years before the French Revolution, the Order of the Illuminati was crushed, and Weishaupt and his lieutenants found themselves exiled. This turn of events serves as the central evidence against Barruel and Robison’s theses. The Illuminati had been shut down, its leaders scattered and forced into retirement, long before the events attributed to them in France. Weishaupt himself just devoted himself to writing various screeds defending his former endeavor, no longer even pretending at secrecy. And the very fact that he could not keep his order’s existence or its schemes a secret in Bavaria, whether because of a random act of god smiting someone with lightning or because of treachery from within, serves to demonstrate that a conspiracy of such a size is doomed to be revealed, and not by lone theorists in manifestos. Barruel and Robison claimed that the Illuminati had survived their exposure and suppression, but they offered no evidence. Indeed, using the telltale circular reasoning of a paranoid, they suggested that the very fact that there was no evidence of the conspiracy served as evidence of its existence. And beyond this conjecture presented as fact, Barruel and Robison also misrepresented the Illuminati’s objectives and practices in numerous ways. For example, even in their secret writings, the Illuminati did not encourage the incitement of violence. They intended to surround the powerful with men who would guide them toward establishing a perfect world, a global community, a eutopia, and they were very specific that revolutions were not to be fomented, as those simply replace one tyranny with another. They believed that wise counsel should have no recourse to violence. They did indeed seek a dramatic change in world order, abolishing property and authority, but they saw government as serving a role like that of a parent, necessary at first, but to be outgrown. In the case of humanity, they did not anticipate that these changes would happen for thousands of years and certainly did not intend to precipitate a hasty and violent reform. Barruel would argue that the truly evil plots were not made known beyond the highest degrees, but in truth, when Baron Knigge traveled among the Masonic lodges of Europe trying to grow their numbers, he readily offered the highest degrees in order to tempt Freemasons into the fold. Still, Abbé Barruel insisted, there were even higher degrees than the papers and testimonies revealed, the degree of the Magi, he called them, trying to conjure images of occult evil, and it was in those degrees, he assured his readers, that the really evil stuff happened. But there is no evidence of this.

All these things have been pointed out since the time Barruel’s and Robison’s books were published, in such authoritative refutations as Jean Joseph Mounier’s On the Influence Attributed to Philosophers, Free-Masons, and to the Illuminati, on the Revolution of France. Works such as this, and the continuing empirical scholarship of history that helps us understand more and more all the various contributing factors that culminated in the French Revolution, are why no serious historian entertains Barruel’s or Robison’s theories today, and why anyone who still relies on them as an academic proof of an Illuminati conspiracy theory is an outlier pretending at genuine historical analysis. If you challenge them on the reliability of these sources, they will likely resort to even wider conspiracy theories and suggest that historians everywhere are in on the plot to discredit Barruel and Robison. But the fact of the matter is that Barruel and Robison discredited themselves. As stated, Barruel was already a rabid opponent of the philosophes with an axe to grind, especially after the French Revolution forced him, as a clergyman, out of the country. He could not admit that the revolution had been a genuine grassroots phenomenon or that church and throne had done anything to precipitate it, so a shadowy cabal of godless provocateurs was the only natural answer. And when none of the Illuminati papers revealed an atheistic tenet, he said it must have been a closely held secret atheism, and he even, according to Mounier, mistranslated a passage discussing how to appeal to initiates that were enthusiasts of the theosophy of Swedenborg and Rosicrucianism, representing it instead as being about how to initiate people who suffer from “the fantasy of believing in God.” Mournier suggests this error is so egregious that either Barruel’s grasp of German was so tenuous that we cannot trust any of his analysis of Illuminati papers, or he was translating unfaithfully, and thus deceptively. As for Robison, he had previously been a man of strong reputation in the scientific community, but ever since a debilitating groin spasm had sent him into torturous isolation and drove him to abusing opium, he was known to suffer from paranoia and depression. It was in this state, that he read the constant barrage of news on the French Revolution. Add to this his resentment of French thinkers like Antoine Lavoisier who were revolutionizing Robison’s field of chemistry with notions that didn’t leave much room for God, and we have another reactionary seeing plots to overturn the natural order. Being a Freemason himself, and having visited Continental lodges and disliked the brand of Enlightenment atheism and licentious behavior he saw there, secret societies became a natural component of his theory, one that, as with Barruel, might reflect more on his own prejudices.

Portrait of John Robison. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Despite the credibility issues of these authors and their books, the Illuminati conspiracy theory of the French Revolution gained quite a bit of traction among conservatives in Britain. When one considers why this was, though, it becomes clear that they were drawn to the theory for the same reasons that Robison and Barruel concocted it: namely that it jibed well with their prejudices and provided a simpler explanation than the messy reality. British conservatives harbored their own distaste for the philosophes of the French Academy, preferring to lionize their homegrown philosophers like Roger Bacon, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, who always kept God at the center of their philosophy. The suggestion that the Enlightenment philosophers of France were actually demoniacal agents of evil struck them as reasonable because of the disdain in which they already held them. Moreover, this view of a diabolical conspiracy to overthrow God’s ordained systems of governance gave them ammunition against their own political opponents at home. Thus when the Society of United Irishmen, inspired by revolutionary movements abroad, rose up against British rule, conservatives declared that the Illuminati had stirred up yet another club of Jacobins, this time in their own backyard. And when a group of vocal advocates for women’s rights emerged under the leadership of Mary Wollstonecraft, they declared them to be “Illuminata,” or female adepts of the order, bent on seducing all British women into depravity as part of their grand conspiracy to overthrow all moral standards. In their minds, as in the minds of most conspiracy theorists, nothing ever just happens, at least not the things with which they’re uncomfortable. There are no liberal or progressive tendencies. People don’t just stand up for their rights, or for change, not even because they are inspired by others who have done the same. Instead, they must be pawns moved by the devil’s own hand.

There are more than a few reasons that a historian might cite to disprove the Illuminati theory of the French Revolution, such as all the social and cultural dominos that fell in the decades beforehand, some of the earliest of which I discussed in my series on the Old Regime’s response to Jansenist miracles. And if it does no good to cite the specific failures of the Old Regime to handle particular crises as an explanation for the grievances and motivations of revolutionaries, then there are the facts about philosophes about whom much has been written and Barruel and Robison are poor sources of information about them. For example, many philosophes, such as Voltaire, were sympathetic to and even had close ties with the monarchy and did not want to see them abolished; the most influential, including Voltaire and Rousseau, actually passed away years before the revolution; and numerous Enlightenment scientists, many of whom were also Freemasons, found themselves in the guillotine as well, including Robison’s hated Antoine Lavoisier. Indeed, this conspiracy theory struggles to explain why so many of the initial instigators and later influential figures in the Revolution ended up themselves being victims of their own revolution except to claim that they must have only been pawns as well and not above the fray like the Illuminati prime movers. To many who believe theories like these, it seems a simpler explanation, and in a way it is. Some will even cite Occam’s razor and claim their theory must be true because it is a simpler explanation. In truth, Occam’s razor actually states that among competing hypotheses, one should err on the side of the one with the fewest assumptions. By that yardstick, grand unifying conspiracy theories like this fail miserably. Yet they remain appealing. Psychologists will suggest that it is due to cognitive biases like proportionality bias, which causes one to assume that events with massive implications and effects, like the French Revolution, must have some equally massive cause or must have been caused purposely. Others will say that we are hardwired, through adaptation for survival because of so much time spent scanning our surroundings for danger, to find patterns, and so we sometimes see enemies that aren’t there. Confirmation bias predisposes us to believe a theory that reinforces our existing beliefs, as we have seen was the case among British conservatives, and may also be the case among conservative conspiracy theorists in America today.

In part 2, we will look further into how this theory of a powerful Illuminati conspiracy reached America and changed forever our culture and politics.

Cartoon illustrating the conservative view of the French Revolution. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Illuminati Illuminated, Part One: The Order's Origins

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