Besides the Churches and Freemasonry, there are a host of mystical and esoteric circles. Very discreet, little known, with limited numbers, they influence society more than one might suppose.
Imagining the end of the Revolution, the new bourgeois class which had conquered power and acquired national property considered the Concordat of 1802 as an acceptable sharing of influence. Each thought police has its sector of competence: the lodges control the elite and the Concordat Churches monitor the people. This phenomenon is gradually spreading throughout Europe, even in the former South American Spanish colonies, as transposed in Drieu La Rochelle's novel The Man on Horseback.
Far from opposing, the grand masters like the Ministers of the Interior, the venerable members of lodges like the prefects, provide information to those in power, like the bishops and priests incardinated in the dioceses. These, Emperor Constantine, gave back to Caesar what Caesar's, giving the Vatican the largest intelligence service in the world because secrecy often leaks out of the confessional. For good measure, the pope is on an extended stay at Fontainebleau, what we would call confinement these days. We are far from the troubles during the 1905 inventories since if the notables are initiated, this does not prevent them from sending their offspring to catechism and their servants to mass, under the indifferent eye of an increasingly urban proletariat. dechristianized amid general indifference since there are still a few of them. The industrial revolution and the rural exodus have not yet depopulated the parishes. One might believe that the Empire is spiritually quite solid, especially since the parody of coronation on December 2, 1804, at Notre-Dame de Paris, its consolidation by the necessary ceremony of the iron crown in Milan, while leaving aside the more than admissible hypothesis of an initiation of the young general Bonaparte: see the unmistakable Masonic board represented by The Beaucaire Supper. Things could remain there if there were not numerous spiritualist circles which are all the more tolerated by those in power as high dignitaries are closely linked to them.
Theophilanthropy
They claim to believe in God and practice love of neighbor. Under the Directory, director La Réveillère-Lépeaux saw an opportunity to consolidate the republic while scuttling Catholicism. Director Merlin de Douai and Minister of the Interior François de Neufchâteau gave it a certain luster by introducing the decadal cult dear to the republican calendar of Fabre d'Églantine and its accents of natural religion. Everything is good for destroying divine right through a naturalism taken from the physiocrats' crafts.
Drawing their quibbles from a down-to-earth morality, a large part of the Theophilanthropists' logorrhea consists of spreading blasphemy and accusing the Church of profiting without scruple from the constitution of Year III providing for freedom of worship. They reduce their theology to two dogmas: the existence of a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul. This summary dogmatics denies the Trinity, therefore it is compatible with the Muslim monotheistic impulses conveyed by the veterans of the Egyptian campaign; as for the immortality of the soul, it comes from Neoplatonic fragments of certain Masonic lodges tinged with Anglomania.
In the minds of the members of the Directory, it is a question of maintaining an acceptable cult of the goddess Reason by disembodying her while denying invisible Eternity. This morality of secular patronage delights in parodies of fruit and vegetable offerings. Talleyrand ridicules La Réveillière-Lépeaux: “Jesus Christ, to found his religion, was crucified and resurrected. You should have tried to do the same. » Napoleon banned this cult in 1803. During his stay in Paris, Thomas Paine remained seduced by theophilanthropy and exported it to the United States of America. Its immense prestige, associated with the lifestyle of which Joseph Bonaparte is an example of the high society of the East Coast, is reflected today in Hollywood cinema with esoteric pretensions.
Napoleon's lucky star
Many historians claim that Napoleon was superstitious. If we successively observe three periods, childhood in a mountain island where immemorial and irrational beliefs persist to the point of having welcomed Seneca in exile, then adolescence in a military college run by religious infected with quietism, Gallicanism, rejection of Thomism, but above all slyly worked by the Jansenist heresy, and that a third dagger of fatalism is planted there, that of the stay in the land of Islam in 1798, we should not be surprised of the result.
From the cradle, his nurse practices all kinds of exorcisms against vampires, will-o'-the-wisps, spells, and ghosts. Later, the young artillery officer frequented the salons of strong minds who nevertheless did not hide their fascination for Illuminism, Messmer's tub, and the booby traps of Jean-François Gaultier de Biauzat at the summit of Mont d'Or. The ardent Rousseauist is sensitive to the assertion of Saint-Just who considers that nothing happened between Rome and the Revolution. From there to deducing that haruspices can guide battles, there is only one step. He has trusted his lucky star since he escaped the guillotine after the 9th of Thermidor.
When he founded the Legion of Honor, which must originally be written with a hyphen, it was both his lucky star and the Pythagorean emblem containing the golden ratio φ = ½(√ 5+1) = 1.618 which adorns the East of the lodges on the plateau of the venerable. The only one capable of seeing his star in broad daylight, he faced the fire with courage, not only at the bridge of Arcole and Regensburg (Regensburg) where he was wounded in the leg, but in all the battles while the grapeshot took its toll in the general staff, like Lannes. He even seeks death at Waterloo in the last four. He does not disdain talismans, such as a scarab brought back from Egypt and an amethyst engraved in intaglio, but the principle is embodied in the person of Joséphine.
Bad luck being contagious, he keeps away what we nowadays call losers, and when he promotes a colonel to the rank of general, he asks if he is lucky. He also listens to his intuition and his presentiments. When the King of Sweden adopts Bernadotte and he comes to ask for his approval, Napoleon deeply feels the presentiment of betrayal and almost feels uneasy.
So much intuitive finesse on multiple occasions has a dark side: attentive anguish in the face of the signs of destiny. Whether it is the miniature portrait of Josephine that breaks during the Egyptian campaign, from which he deduces that his wife is either ill or unfaithful; whether it is a decorative eagle that breaks during the coronation or a fire during an official ball, everything is a pretext for interpretation. He was worried during the festivities in Erfurt in 1808, where he sought to dazzle the Tsar, which he consoled himself for during his meeting with Goethe, whom he wanted to know.
At Rochefort in 1815, Napoleon saw a bird heading towards the English frigate HMS Bellerophon and decided to follow it. He believes in Nemesis, a principle higher than the gods. Nemesis establishes a fair retribution, establishes a principle of redistribution similar to the wheel of fortune. However, he never felt the desire to consult a fortune teller, especially since he knew he was gifted with charisma: even strong minds, even jaded, are sensitive to it, like Cambacérès, Talleyrand, and Chateaubriand. This talent for piercing the secrets of the souls of his interlocutors and reading their thoughts has undoubtedly kept the mystics away, since we do not know any among the people he met, unlike the sovereigns of the Holy Alliance, who seek more or less frequentation.
No Saint Catherine Emmerich or Juliane de Krüdener in Napoleon’s entourage; no voluntary sacrifice of believing soldiers like von Schill. On the other hand, he mysteriously imposes it without a murmur on thick brutes, saber draggers, who sometimes had expressed the desire to correct him, but to whom he gives marshals' batons. Although many deny it, the ascendancy of its spirit still acts after two centuries, as if the Las Casas Memorial had opened a Pandora's box.
All in love with the beautiful Juliane
Juliane von Krüdener (1764-1824) was born Miss von Vietinghoff, into a prestigious family of the high Baltic nobility, made up of very ancient lines of Germanic barons descended from Teutonic knights who emerged during the secularization of the order. All related to each other, these lineages serve the Russian Empire and the German princes in their aulic positions. These polyglots speak fluently in German, Russian, French, and the vernacular language of their servants and subjects. Often Lutherans like their ancestors, know Orthodox customs, sometimes local ancestral customs steeped in ancient shamanism. His father, an influential figure, served as state councilor, senator, and governor of Riga; this Freemason is in close contact with the French of the Order. He educates his daughter to rub shoulders with the powerful courtiers of Versailles. His family properties are near Mitau, the future place of exile of the Count of Provence, he knows the legends of the Nibelungen and the legendary birthplace of the Merovingians in Courland. She is forced to marry a man twenty years older than her. His marriage is a failure.
Her life turns upside down when she is frightened by the Revolution and takes a lover. She returns to Riga. Upset by the death of her father, she finds an escape by financing charitable works. She joins her ambassador husband in Berlin, where she is very bored. Her husband died in 1802. She frequented Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant.
In 1804, she went through a mystical crisis and was introduced to the doctrine of the Moravian brothers, Martinism, and counter-revolutionary romanticism. In Prussia, shaken by the defeat at Jena, she became a friend of Queen Louise. Among the Pietists, Napoleon is seen as the Antichrist, which means that the end of the world is approaching. She felt a vocation as a preacher and traveled through Catholic Germany, Switzerland, and Alsace, followed by thousands of disciples, both peasants and aristocrats. Among these, the rejection of wealth, luxury, and honor contributed to the success of Berlin cast iron jewelry. The most famous of these jewels is sorely desired by soldiers: the Iron Cross.
Juliane searches among the princes to help the poor. The work of Emanuel Swedenborg raises awareness of the eschatological destiny of Jerusalem. She suffered police persecution from German princes who owed their fortune to Napoleon and who were worried about her popular success. This does not prevent him from sympathizing with Queen Hortense. Tsarina Elisabeth wants him to meet the Tsar who is prey to spiritual concerns. The most powerful ruler burst into tears. She asks him to fulfill his destiny as chosen by God by redeeming the Revolution and the Empire. Juliane invents the phrase of the Holy Alliance.
At the height of her glory, she became a true priestess, since she was present alongside the Tsar and the Orthodox popes during the open-air high mass on September 10, 1815, in Vertus in Champagne, the Russian army being arrayed on the plain: 87 generals, 450 senior officers of the aristocracy, 150,000 soldiers tens of thousands of horses. The next day, the mass of Saint-Alexandre-Nevski was celebrated at the summit of Mont-Aimé in the presence of the army, an expiatory ceremony of the Revolution.
Arriving in Paris, she became the queen of the Élysée evenings. It attracts celebrities like the famous Marquis de Puységur, an eminent mathematician, artillery general, and magnetizer. Returning to Russia, she preached in favor of the crusade during the repression that the Turks were carrying out in Greece.
Only a memory of the splendor of the beautiful Juliane remained when she died in Crimea in 1824, at the age of sixty. She, who squandered her fortune relieving the misery of the humble, died in a village of Swiss settlers who were passing through Crimea while waiting to emigrate to the Holy Land. Treated as crazy by some, as a saint by others, she leaves the memory of a strong character whose eschatological visions haunted the tsar, who perhaps died in Siberia under the identity of the starets mystic Fyodor Kouzmitch.
The Frankists in France
Jakob Frank, a Polish Jew born in 1721, died in 1791 in the principality of Hesse-Cassel. He caused a certain emotion in public opinion because he claimed to be the reincarnation of the patriarch Jacob and proclaimed his messianic visions. According to Ben Zion Dinaburg, his interest in occultism and magic earned him the goodwill of some German aristocrats linked to the same circles of Versailles. His cousin, Moses Dobruska (1753-1794), converted to Christianity and called himself Franz Thomas von Schönfeld. He entered the court of Emperor Joseph II and acclimatized to Freemasonry, in which he practiced Kabbalah. He is also Enlightened from Bavaria.
In 1792, the National Legislative Assembly of Paris gave him French citizenship under the name Junius Frey. Compromising with the Dantonists, he was guillotined. He left a work, Social Philosophy dedicated to the French people, which Gershom Scholem hails as a synthesis of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. Gershom Scholem, Jewish historian and philosopher, a specialist in Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, born in (Berlin 1897-Jerusalem 1982), notes that Frey claims to decipher the messianic dimension of democracy in the name of Frankism. This current is maintained throughout Europe thanks to the financial network. As early as 1757, Oppenheimer, who had joined Frankism, had hired the young Amschel Meyer Rothschild. Banker to Prince William, elector of Hesse-Cassel, who rented mercenaries to George II against the Insurgents, his fortune increased.
In 1786, Charles of Hesse-Cassel, brother of the prince, led the messianic movement aimed at the secularization of religions and their ecumenical fusion through secret societies. The two brothers from Hesse-Cassel are the grandsons of King George II and benefit from the financial support of the City, a true state within a state and almost independent of the United Kingdom. Their network extends to Austria, where Eve Frank, Jakob's daughter, is the mistress of Emperor Joseph II.
When Napoleon abrogated the Holy Roman Empire and founded the Confederation of the Rhine, he entrusted its construction to the banker Emmerich Joseph von Dalberg, enlightened in Bavaria, linked to the Rothschilds. He relies in particular on the tsar's consul, Simon Moritz von Bethmann II (1754-1811), merchant and shipowner, founder of the Protestant bank Bethmann, who in addition to finance, practiced espionage. He is in contact with Eve Frank, who influences politics in Vienna. Defeated at Leipzig in 1813, Napoleon fled and stayed with Simon Moritz von Bethmann II. Shortly after, the Tsar also passed by and spoke with Simon and Eve. Alexander I, passionate about syncretism and the Holy Alliance, aspired to fulfill the prophecy of the conversion of the Jews to Christianity, as Solzhenitsyn recalls in Two Centuries Together, implicitly allowing Frankism to extend its influence in all the kingdoms linked by the Holy Alliance, but also in the kingdom of Louis XVIII under a temporary occupation regime. The Frankist program is rooted in metapolitics and persists today.
The neo-Templar order
Alongside the neo-occultism that was raging in England, romantic and neo-Gothic fashion found followers among Napoleon's subjects. One of the most picturesque was founded by Fabré-Palaprat, fascinated by the Templars. First a seminarian, he renounced ordination because of the Revolution. Initiated in the lodge, he was enthusiastic about a forge, the Charter of Larmenius, supposedly dated 1314, which claims that Jacques de Molay would have had a successor. Among those who reportedly followed were Du Guesclin and other celebrities.
In 1808, a procession brought together two hundred people dressed as knights with white ribs and red crosses to the Saint-Louis-des-Jésuites church in the Marais district. In 1812, Fabré-Palaprat was crowned grand master by Guillaume Mauviel, an equivocal adventurer and constitutional bishop. Lovers of attractive but dubious archives, this great master unearths a falsified version of the Gospel of Saint John which contains esoteric and initiatory accents. This encouraged him to found Abbot Ferdinand Châtel, also linked to the constitutional clergy, a Johannine Templar Church.
Following insults, the accomplices retrain in grocery shopping and other expedients. Fabré-Palaprat still retained a certain dignity, having distinguished himself as founder of the Academy of Medicine in 1805, as a health officer during the battle of the Paris barrier in 1814, which earned him the Legion of Honor to fire, then as a benefactor during the cholera epidemic in 1832. His neo-Templar order helped him found a charitable hospice.
The most enduring spiritualist movement for two centuries: the emancipation of the Jews
Louis XVI and Napoleon were directly involved in the emancipation of a minority which thanks to them had a power that today weighs on the destiny of the world: the Jewish community. From the end of the Ancien Régime, draft laws had inspired the legislator in this direction. Under the Revolution, ardent speeches prepared a change of mentality towards the people described as perfidies in the specificity of the Mass of Holy Thursday. On July 14, 1796, an event occurred which, in its time, went almost unnoticed but of unsuspected importance: during the Italian campaign, Bonaparte used a maximum of forces in decisive places, but entrusted unpleasant missions to a few faithful people. Isolated in Livorno with a ridiculously weak garrison, General Belgrand de Vaubois faced the inconveniences without glory. Some revolutionary fanatics forced his hand and he found himself entering the synagogue at the head of a procession during the commemorations of 1789 and 1790.
This is the first time that a Republican dignitary has entered a non-Catholic place of worship. This is the famous synagogue of which Rav Benamozegh was later to become the leader, and inventor of the Noachite religion in the colors of the rainbow, which is so successful today. In 1889, the deputy Raspail, whose work had been preceded by that of the late Adolf Crémieux, born in 1796, obtained that the national holiday be fixed on July 14: the mystical wedding of Marianne and the synagogue to secularize the messianic message and millenarian.
The other significant event, that of the reconstitution of the Sanhedrin, is due to Napoleon. This institution, which died out in the year 70 during the capture of Jerusalem by Titus, was re-established in the deconsecrated premises of the Saint-Jean chapel, currently razed, whose location is in the eastern part of the town hall of Paris. Equivalent to the new Church resulting from the concordat of 1802, the Sanhedrin of 1807 became the consistorial institution of power. However, one should not imagine a unanimous community. For example, Shneur Zalman of Liadi, leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, supports the tsar and sees in Napoleon a blasphemous danger of a false messiah. The same feeling among the Karaites.
Far from being negligible, all these minority spiritualist movements other than Freemasonry largely influenced civil society and the army under the First Empire. Some of their echoes are still audible. The Catholic Church, dominant for fifteen centuries, reduced to obedience to the regime, had to give way to competing movements. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” says Aristotle; the invisible supernatural too.
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