While we have evidenced the obsession of the Nazis with Freemasonry as the 'secret' body that 'controlled by world-Jewry' started the French Revolution, as a first ever, here we gather exemplary evidence, of what went on during and shortly after the Revolution, in regards to the fringes of Freemasonry.In the library of the Grand Orient of France, at 16 rue Cadet in Paris, there can now be found 750 boxes of French masonic archives recently returned from Moscow. Since 1945 they had been held in a secret archive. The Soviets tried to use these documents, and others, to barter with the Germans for the return of the Russian property that had been stolen by the retreating German army. Throughout the twentieth century fascist political forces believed that the paradox at the heart of modernity, namely the secrecy associated with masonic fraternizing, the secret passwords, rituals, and signs, told the whole truth: the secrecy must have been about a cover-up of a hidden agenda to seize power while pretending to be ushering in an egalitarian transparency and democratic institutions. As we are about to see, secrecy did provide a certain safety throughout the eighteenth century, but the goals pursued under its mantle would have startled an earnest, unbiased inquirer, had such a creature existed at the Berlin institute founded by the Nazis. Secrecy worked where repression, aided by state spies, occurred on a daily basis. Unwittingly, by taking up the habits of secrecy, eighteenth-century advocates of the cosmopolitan gave hostages to the future enemies of democracy, many of whom would in turn use secrecy to their own advantage.
By the 1770s and 1780s the secrecy of the masonic umbrella sheltered new, private societies with distinctively occult, yet curiously cosmopolitan interests. It was as if traditional Christianity had failed to satisfy the striving and curiosity of the lodges and the turn toward the occult became palpable in the German-speaking lands but also, and especially, in France. At the center of the mystical movement lay a Parisian lodge composed of the creme de la creme of ancien regime society. By 1780s the tableaux for membership in Les Amis Reunis contained financiers, bankers, tax farmers, commissioners of the Royal Treasury, the intendant general of the post, and various other government officials.
Out of it sprang a remarkable society, Les Philalethes, and its records-now further restored by the return of the Moscow archives-reveal the aspirations of powerful men searching for a vast and universal spiritual renewal. Les Philalethes was never a lodge, but rather a regime, a system inspired by the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg and Martinez de Pasquales, established for the purpose of human perfection. One of its founders was Savalette de Langes, the scion of a noblesse de robe family who had been active in l' opposition parlementaire that refused the reforms demanded in the early 1770S by the king's minister, Maupeou. At that moment the aristocracy using the parlements, or courts, served notice on the monarchy as to just how difficult it would be to challenge the traditional privileges that insured their financial exemptions. For his siding with the parlements, Savalette had been exiled and, probably as a consequence, his masonic activism increased annually.
In the setting provided by the lodges and their social off shoots, not only in Paris but also in Lyon, Strasbourg, Lille, among other towns, new and higher degrees were invented, and the ultimate forms of wisdom imagined as possible. Self-proclaimed masonic prophets, like Cagliostro, Martines de Pasquales, and J. B. Willermoz, became the pied pipers of this movement, which aspired to encompass all "les pays et regimes reunies a Paris." (Library of the Grand Orient of France (hereafter GODF), MS 113.1.602, f. 1, no. 395, 2nd Circulaire, February 1785.)
For Willermoz, philanthrophy, especially on the part of the aristocracy, held the key to spiritual renewal while Les Philalethes and Les Amis reunis wished to hold "un Convent fraternel' to be set up in Paris. Their documents tell us wisdom. Social exclusivity formed the core of the agenda from Paris, but the provinces and probably many Parisian lodges, except for the most aristocratic, were not buying into it.
Their documents tell us that they have put all their trust in ''l'impulsion secrete, mais certaine, de la Divine Providence." In this instance, secrecy had sanctioned gnosis. The mystical wisdom found must be placed in the service of a total reform. The members of Les Philalethes posed the question, "Has the masonic science possessed a rapport with the known sciences under the name of the occult science or secrets?" The answer presented itself. The assembled announced that they believed "in the rapport of masonry with Theosophy, Alchemy, the Cabala, Divine Magic, Emblems, Hieroglyphes, the Religious Ceremonies and the Rites of different Institutions, or Associations, masonic or otherwise." (GODF, MS 113 f. 12. )
They have discerned "a rapport between the usages generally adopted by the interior economy of the Masonic Society and those of which we have found the trace in the ancient works, which have conserved for us the usages of the primitive Church." (GODF, MS 113.1.602, f. 13, no. 361, art. 5.)
Wrapped in the mantle of secrecy, the brothers with occult interests wound up embracing every known form of ancient and modern learning and science-however far-fetched its foundation. They aspired "to develop the foundation of their opinion on the occult science ... and to distinguish ... which are the Schools of ancient Philosophy, and the other sources out of which Masonry has been enabled." (Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, "'Une ecole pour les sciences: Ie college des Philalethes et la tentation academique des elites mayonniques lilloises it la fin de I'Ancien Regime:' Revue du Nord, 81, 1999.)
The goal became a total synthesis of all learning, a new, cosmopolitan "world religion that all the devout of whatever persuasion can embrace." Working within the disastrous financial context that many of these same French administrators helped to create, it is tempting to imagine them during the 1780s as embarked on a grand intellectual odyssey that would ultimately bring them to personal transformation, to a new reality not quite of this world, an alternative that could be embraced-and escaped into.
Yet there is another way of reading the records of the society and its occult aspirations. This would be to see les Philalethes as profoundly secular. In these records there is barely a wink in the direction of Christian orthodoxy. Instead, in search of a new truth the brothers have leveled the spiritual playing field in such a way that all sorts of beliefs and religious traditions even mystical and irrational ones-can be accommodated under the mantle of sociability and secrecy. The mystical may not have been the kind of truth that Voltaire in Paris, or the Jewish reformer in Berlin, Moses Mendelssohn, had in mind when they preached toleration. Yet by its nature, the spirituality of Les Philalethes was harmless enough.
It looks forward to the muddle of ideas that well-intentioned people, disaffected from traditional religiosity and possessed of little theological training, bring, even now, to their spiritual odysseys. In its universalism Les Philalethes conjures up the vague religiosity or sentiments-or perhaps lack thereof-that have allowed people of many faiths peacefully to inhabit the same social space. In the heart of what in a few short years would become the "old regime" we have found the first stirring of what our own times will call "new age" groups.
Wrapped in the cocoon of well-intentioned mysticism did the French lodges ever escape long enough to confront the exterior world, and in the process drop the affectation of secrecy? Did the lofty exclusiveness of some enlightened circles ever give way to the reality outside? Clearly, in the eighteenth century, months in the Bastille for clandestine trafficking could be such a reality and, after 1789, so too was political upheaval. Rare among all forms of sociability to be found in France during the Revolution, the Loge Anglaise in Bordeaux has left records that span the greater part of the 1790s. Generally, in that decade only the Jacobin clubs were so audacious as to meet and leave written records of their conversations.
In November of 1788, as the national financial crisis deepened and the king was forced to accede to a new role for the parlements, the Bordeaux lodge responded to public events. Only rarely did the overtly political intrude into the life of the lodge: the convalescence of the king in 1757 was noted, the reintegration of the parlement of Bordeaux in 1775, and in 1778 and 1781 the lodge proposed that a mass be sung in celebration of the birth of two royal children, one the heir to the throne. In 1788 the reopening of the parlement in Bordeaux was celebrated by a banquet and speech making. (GODF, MS 113.2.96, 9 November 1788.)
The orator proclaimed that "justice will get back all its rights ... [before now] vain combinations based on foolish pride and human vanity ... a vile egoism and sordid interest ... have usurped the place of virtue and patriotic devotion:' A triumph for the magistrates and their "august chief" was hailed as was the maintenance of the rights of the province. We can contrast the parlementaire sentiments of the Bordeaux lodge with those found in a royalist lodge in Paris where officers of the crown reminded one another that while "masonry is an order in the universe:' it is not an order in the state. (BN, FM 276, records of La fidelite from the 1780s, item no. 38.)
Clearly, the universal principles proclaimed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen had implications for the practices of the Loge Anglaise. On 15 July 1790 an orator addressed his brothers on that very theme. Discord has appeared within the lodges and "the passions have been allowed to take too free access .... The practice of all the social virtues have been put in a troubled state by perfidious dissension:' The orator, M. Mailleres, urged the lodge to put itself under the same principles that now all of France accepted, and in particular to act upon the fact that in January 1790 the Jews of Bordeaux had been granted their civil rights.( GODF, MS 92.3.53, "Discours du F. Mailleres membre et depute de la loge la vrais anglaise ... 15 juillet 1790:' f. 32.)
When news reached the city a near riot had broken out against their liberation. Thus came the bold request, "a brother, a philosopher without doubt and a friend of humanity has made the following proposition: The Jews in a word are now active citizens. From this title they may hypothetically possess all the qualities associated with our mores, and will you admit them into our care or reject them?"( GODF, MS 92.3. f. 33.)Fittingly, the lodge was being asked to replicate in its proceedings the universal principles proclaimed by the Revolution. Now we will see quite clearly how difficult, even inflammatory, those cosmopolitan principles could be when reformers sought their application. At that moment, the Revolution had gone too far for the Loge Anglaise. Its principles drastically expanded the limits that the lodge had set on its own cosmopolitanism. The political and revolutionary process had created a new, and avant-garde, set of principles for public and private life, and this single masonic exemplar of civil society, private, secretive, and with a history of prejudice, might, or might not bend. Ultimately the lodge rejected the implications of human rights for all citizens and refused to admit Jewish brothers. In the course of the eighteenth century, practices that had once protected the Enlightenment were now used to subvert the logic of its principles. Finally, for fifteen months in 1794-95 the lodge did not meet because of the "force and vigor of the revolutionary turbulence' (GODF, MS 92.3. f. 33.)
During the Napoleonic years, as the attempt was made to turn back the clock on the more democratic innovations of the 1790s, the Loge Anglaise lost the right to recognize other lodges on its own. It had to be ceded to a provincial grand lodge. In 1806 the Bordeaux brothers put up a portrait of Napoleon the Great in its banquet room, and the lodge's finances were deemed to be in a pitiable state. On several occasions the issue of admitting Jews into the lodge roiled the waters, and, once again, the lodge proclaimed that it would never do so. It acknowledged as how other lodges might be different and its remarks indicated that Jewish freemasons existed, possibly even in Bordeaux with its significant Jewish community. In 1814 la Loge Anglaise held a banquet to celebrate the return of the Bourbons to the French throne. This was a lodge that at least up to 1815 had come to regard aspects of the legacy of the Revolution as deeply problematic. Yet in the same period and under the sponsorship of the reformed grand lodge of France, new lodges were established in the Low Countries (then occupied by France) that challenged local social prejudices and pushed in the direction of the egalitarian. (BN, MS 4996, on microfilm, on constituting lodges in Belgium, in Huyand Liege, 1809-12, under the auspices of the Grand Lodge of France.)
Clearly, no lodge would ever be able to embrace the damaging rightwing myth of a masonic conspiracy being at the root of the Revolution. The myth appeared as early as 1789. But at some later date, when anti-Semitism became codified, the Loge Anglaise or some other lodge might have imagined that the Jews had something sinister to do with their own revolutionary emancipation, however much it had been justified as a result of universal human rights. The universalism of the Enlightenment, and then of the French Revolution, could always founder on the privacy permitted, indeed required, for the vitality of the public sphere. While secrecy, privacy, and discretion may protect civil society in perilous times, or shield it from the prying eyes of the state, or permit social experimentation, such habits could also provide a refuge for scoundrels. (See Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, "Les veritables auteurs de la revolution de France de 1789 demasques: Discours de persecution et crimes d'indifferenciation chez F. N. Sourdat de Troyes:' Dix-huitieme siecle, 32, 2000: 403-21.)
One other element flourished within civil society of the late eighteenth century. National sentiments appear in the proceedings of the French lodges as well as in the Dutch lodges we have examined. Steven Bullock also has found republicanism at work in the lodges of the American colonies before 1776 and in the new republic. Orators told French brothers that "the health of the country has been your supreme law. Your personal interest disappears always before the national interest." (Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840, 1996)
Perhaps only the power of the state was sufficient to intrude on the privacy so cherished in civil society. As nationalist interests grew in importance-even in the deeply decentralized but discontented Dutch Republic-voluntary associations succumbed to the lure of state ideologies. In town after town, Dutch lodges took sides in 1787 as unrest turned into revolution. In Britain the lodges of the 1790S were aggressive in proclaiming their loyalism. Early modern cosmopolitanism was fragile in the face of the lure of nationalism. Yet the very survival of civil society was perceived to depend upon the triumph of republican values. At the same time, French, American, Dutch, Irish, even English republicanism could never be effectively separated out from national identity.
In fact subversion surfaced early in the life of bordelaise freemasonry, indeed earlier than in the life of any other European site, as far as we now know. A brother announced that women were holding their own lodge meetings in the town, "des Soeurs de l'Adoption." This would not do, the lodge decided, and in its wisdom decided to prevent them. Until this record came to light, the earliest known European women's lodge had been held in The Hague in 1751. There actors and actresses of the Comedic-Francaise had joined with local Dutch gentlemen to create a mixed lodge welcomed by the other, male lodges. Officers could be both men and women, and as the 1751 record was written in French, the gendered nouns made the point: "Le Maitre" and "la Maitresse," and so on. The Dutch grand lodge approved of what was known as lodges of adoption, namely the creation of masonic social spaces into which women had to be adopted as they were not naturally born to inhabit them. In Bordeaux, by contrast, the issue of women's membership became instantly contentious. (GODF, MS 113.2-96, 6 February 1746. "Le f .... denonce au R. Atel des Loges de Franche Maconnes ditte des Soeurs de I'Adoption, qui se tiennent en ville; La Loge decide dans san sagesse de prevenir:' All quotations about the lodge's meetings are from this source.)
Clearly some brothers,thought that mixed lodges were a good idea; a majority disagreed. Thus began a controversy about the public role of women in civil society that continued until well into twentieth century. Lodges for women signal an important social moment in the history of gender relations. These, like their male counterparts, were not simply social clubs. Voting in elections, dues collection, orations, officer ships were an inherent and formal part of the public life of any lodge. By the 1740s in Western Europe women wanted to do such governing-like things, and some men approved, while others vehemently disliked public roles for women and the independence that went with them. Bear in mind that the freedom of women in public remained a fraught issue in the West until well into the nineteenth century. It was only then in Britain that the need even for public lavatories for women, ‘was generally recognized’. Late in the eighteenth century women's lodges became all the rage in France, and while both men and women had voting rights, at least one lodge demanded that women could not meet without men being present and those pregnant women not be allowed to attend.
Another ‘brother’ had been frequenting "la loge Batarde de cette ville tenue par Ie S. Martin Pasquales, et sur l'affirmation, on lui a refuse l'entree du temple" (28 February 1764). The Loge Anglaise not only excluded the errant brother who had been attending "a bastard lodge in this city held by S. Martinez de Pasquals, and by acclimation, he had been refused entrance into the [masonic] temple." The lodge had even asked the mayor to look into the disruption in the life of the lodges caused by Pasquales. (See above.)
The reference to Martinez de Pasquales gives entree to the secret within the secrecy (the occult), to the curious turn toward the mystical that gripped many a masonic lodge late in the eighteenth century. Martinez de Pasquales was a masonic reformer of shadowy, but it was believed at the time, Portuguese Jewish origins who preached an occult form of masonry that was highly ritualized and mystical in its _expression. He had lived for a time in Bordeaux and promulgated his version of masonic wisdom that long after his death in 1774 made deep inroads in the life of French freemasonry, indeed it could be found as far east as St. Petersburg. He preached the hierarchy of created beings capable of transcending their place by spiritual union with the Divine. (see Bibliotheca philosophia hermetica, Bloemstraat, Amsterdam, MS c 1780, "Traite de la reintegration des Etres"; d. Gerard van Rijnberk, Martines de Pasqually, Lyon, 1938).
Brothers and sisters of the 1780s found his teachings alluring, possibly because they were personally troubled in ways that we do not fully understand but that signal a discontent with the cosmopolitan experience inherited from an earlier age. Quarreling became endemic to the French lodges. Indeed French society in the 1780s, as seen through the prism of its lodges, displayed a degree of social unrest far in excess of what can be seen in other Western countries.For example, in Bordeaux a "red lodge" was set up, and it brought an interest in the Rosicrucianism fermenting in the German-speaking lands. After the start of the Revolution in 1789 royalists specifically blamed the red lodges as "clubs de la propagande." (pamphlet at Bibliotheque historique de la ville de Paris, La Loge Rouge devoilee, new ed., July 1790, 16.)
At the same moment a masonic priest in the Loge Anglaise was brought up on charges that go unspecified in the minutes. The following week seventeen brothers simply left the lodge and another five or six were excluded from it. Members from another lodge, the Etoile flamboyante aux Trois Lys, were refused admission. The very cosmopolitanism at the heart of the lodge had come apart, with English and French brothers at odds, and with the grand lodge in Paris largely powerless to heal the rift. Within the national masonic temple lay deep divisions between the Grand Orient in Paris and many provincial lodges.
Freemasonry and Political Radicalism in Ireland.
In the 1790s long after the French Revolution, the practice of secrecy-within the domain of cosmopolitan civil society-gave it new meaning. Its political potential was quickly recognized by reforming groups, paradoxically located in the vanguard of political change. After 1800 subversive societies, often employing secrecy to prevent detection, would vie with conventional ones for the loyalties of citizens. The anarchists led by Babeuf used masonic forms to organize their secret cabals. Where secrecy protected voluntary associations, the potential existed to unhinge the state or to engender in it the paranoid fantasies that fueled-and still fuel-dangerous and inhuman regimes. We have seen in Bordeaux that only personal, private beliefs render people truly tolerant and cosmopolitan, as well as watchful against arbitrary state power, or the prejudices that lurk in the heart. Clustering among the like-minded could promote enlightenment-or, as Les Philalethes would have said, human perfectibility-only if personal belief in enlightened principles animated the assembled. Secrecy shrouds inner beliefs and in the final analysis, they will prevail over all publicly articulated decrees, even over legally sanctioned freedoms. At best, the brothers in Bordeaux should be seen as reluctant revolutionaries and cosmopolites who struggled to survive with their basic prejudices intact. For the most part they were private men who dipped their toes into the cosmopolitanism that freemasonry offered.
In other settings the importance of secrecy and masonic practices could also inspire. Their virtues dawned on reformers of the late eighteenth century, particularly on people caught in the grip of traditional, nearly feudal forms of belief and authority. On the edges of Europe landed elites and privileged clergy ruled largely unchallenged, and this was nowhere truer than in Ireland. Yet it was also there that enlightened principles of religious toleration were put to their severest test, and masonic forms appeared as the model that would transform the sectarian into the cosmopolitan. From Elizabethan times onward English Protestants had been given strips of land in designated plantations, largely in the northern part of the island. Most of those settlers were Presbyterians, many from Scotland. Lording over them and the entirely Catholic peasantry stood the old Anglican elites with their vast landed estates.
Far from the commercial vitality of a place like Bordeaux or Paris, we think of eighteenth-century Ireland as poor and Catholic, and its countryside was often just that. But Dublin with its expanding population of about 180,000 was nearly the size of Amsterdam, and in the 1790S the cities and towns of Ireland-places like Newry, Belfast, and Derry-became hotbeds of agitation that took on the might of the British colossus and the Anglo-Irish ruling elite. The central issue faced by Irish reformers lay in the gap between Protestants and Catholics, between the privileged and the openly discriminated against. Within the structure put in place largely in the seventeenth century, only Anglican, and not Presbyterian, Protestants enjoyed ascendancy. Not surprisingly, discontent festered among Presbyterians, who were often educated, the backbone of the professional classes. Only Catholics fared worse; they were denied the right even to be educated, and the elite among them sent their children to the Continent for schooling. If Presbyterian and Catholic leaders could forge a meaningful alliance, a mighty and dangerous force would threaten British control over the colony. But how to do this?
Inspiration for reform came directly from America in 1776, and then from France in 1789. Irish republicans avidly participated in the international republican conversation of the 1770s and beyond. In the early 1790S large demonstrations erupted in Belfast as they did in Manchester and Edinburgh in support of the French revolutionaries. As one shrewd and alarmed Belfast observer of events in France and their worldwide political implications put it, "if we follow without restriction, the theory of human rights, where will it lead us? In its principle it requires the admission of women, of persons under age, and of paupers, to suffrage at elections; to places of office and trust, and as members of both Houses of Parliament!' Speaking at an assembly to support human rights for all citizens regardless of religion, the Rev. William Bruce was clearly alarmed and urged caution against moving too quickly on behalf of Catholics, lest a transfer occur in "every power of government, from the most to the least tolerant, from the most to the least enlightened part of the state.” (Henry Joy and the Rev. William Bruce, Belfast Politics, Belfast, 1794, 16.)
Bruce echoed the widespread uncertainty in Presbyterian circles about Catholics, and assumed with prejudice that Protestants were the more enlightened, tolerant, and cosmopolitan. They had more right to their rights. Other Presbyterians in Bruce's acquaintance were electrified by the principles of the American and French revolutions and sought to carry them to their logical conclusion-none more so than William Drennan , and his sister and brother-in-law, Martha and Sam McTier. The Drennans belonged by faith and family to the circles of Dissent to be found throughout the English-speaking world.
Dissenters-Protestants who were generally Presbyterians but never Anglicans-were systematically and legally excluded from the citadels of power, from government offices, from attendance at Oxford and Cambridge, even from local government, unless they were willing to take communion once a year in an Anglican church. Overwhelmingly, they showed a partiality to the American side in the Revolution that began in 1776, and the Drennans were no exception. Partly encouraged by the British government, Dissenters often made their way abroad, to America and to Ireland.
By 1750 in some northern Irish cities Presbyterians like the Drennans had become the majority, and they coexisted uneasily with the indigenous Catholic population and the so-called Anglo- Irish landowners who operated as the governing class throughout the colony. In the circles of Dissent little affection could be found for that "great empire that has thus outlived itself and is now degenerating into a state of political dotage. Great Britain in her dotage forgets her children." (Jean Agnew, ed., The Drennan-McTier Letters, 1776-1793, Dublin, 1998, 29, letter of 1777.)
Families like the Drennans believed that the future lay in their having access to governance and in granting Catholic emancipation. For much of the eighteenth century all Irish Catholics had been stripped of their land, denied education, and held under a set of rules known as the Penal Laws. These constricted their freedom to worship or to trade. Bitterness between Catholics and Protestants, particularly in northern Ireland, was endemic; remarkably a few liberal and enlightened Presbyterians like the Drennans sought a way out of this predicament. As an educated doctor with growing political interests, William Drennan ventured forth into more cosmopolitan circles than chapel life normally afforded. Finding himself practicing medicine during the 1780s in the market town of Newry, Drennan sought out masonic membership. (Patrick Fagan, "Infiltration of Dublin Freemason Lodges by United Irishmen and Other Republican Groups;' Eighteenth-Century Ireland 13,1998, 68.)
He told his sister that Newry was "a contemptible place:' and boredom may have led him to the lodge door as did a growing disaffection from the many reform clubs that kept springing up and getting nowhere in the business of political reform-at least in his view. He may also have longed for the cultural life available in Belfast, where scientific lectures and plays were common. Sister and brother shared many affections, but none were more compelling for her than politics. In 1789 she wrote to him about the need to "establish Ireland in her fullest rights." In the same letter she noted the social snubs offered her by the local aristocracy from whose grand balls she was firmly excluded, and confessed, "I do feel it." The Drennans were troublemakers, and William had an established reputation as a pamphleteer intent upon augmenting Irish self-governance. Fatefully given the year, in 1789 William Drennan moved to Dublin and almost instantly joined the circle of Irish radicals including give us some enjoyment and not to protract anything too long in this short span of life." In the early 1790s, all over Europe, time seemed to move more quickly and to be moving inexorably in the direction of reform, if not revolution. (See Agnew, ed., Drennan-McTier Letters, from the mid-1780s)
Drennan thought he had the formula for political success: publications "always coming from one of the Brotherhood, declarations, symbols and international communication." The oaths taken, like their masonic counterparts, would be "solemn and religious compact[s] that must be signed by every member. Then a symbol had to be devised worn by everyone of them round their body next the heart. Finally, communication must begin with leading men in France, England and America so as to cement republicanism." Secrecy lay at the essence of Drennan's plan, and he self-consciously told his brother-in-law why it was so important, "it gives greater energy within & greater influence abroad. It conceals members whose professions etc. make concealment expedient until the trial comes. I therefore think and insist on your not even mentioning it." When Drennan wrote those lines he almost certainly desired only reform in Ireland, not revolution. His brotherin-law worried that these ideas would "do mischief in the hands of hot headed people" nor did he want the Secretary of State on their case.Many Presbyterians were by no means as fired up and confident as William Drennan. Acquaintances, like the cautious William Bruce, were even firmly opposed to the use of secrecy precisely because of the radical associations that by 1791 might be put to it. But Drennan, like Tandy and others, believed that some way had to be found to conciliate "the interests of Catholics and Protestants at present.” The aim of the United Irishmen would be to bypass those "aristocratical Catholics who think that the government will take care of them and to galvanize the democratic part of the Catholics in a deeply social alliance with Protestants." (Idem.)
In Dublin, the United Irishmen began to take shape, but within a few years the authorities in Britain and Ireland shifted into high alert. Even the hierarchy of the Catholic Church feared the republicans, while at the same time many ordinary priests sided with the cause of reform. (See Lian Swords, ed., Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter: The Clergy and 1798, 1997.)
Faced with the possibility of imprisonment, men like William Drennan drew back. He sat on the sidelines as Irish radicalism, spurred on by the possibility of an assisting hand from the French, became increasingly more vehement. Secrecy became ever more necessary, an essential part of the political fabric of opposition. The landed took fright and saw "the progress of democracy ... indeed all through the North [of Ireland] ... [as accompanied by] the systematic plans & resolutions of the committees & affiliated societies." (National Library of Dublin, MS 13176 (2), Frances Edgeworth to Dr. D. Beaufort, 17 April 1797, writing from Ireland to her father in London.)
The authorities in turn added vengeance and martyrdom to the list of republican grievances, and by 1794 the secrecy imagined by Drennan as bonding had become life-saving. The violence of 1798-99 claimed over 30,000 lives and the forces of repression were swift and bloody. Both sides experienced "universally the terror of being massacred." Yet others, like Mary Ann McCracken, saw hope for both women and men: "the reign of prejudice is nearly at an end." (National Library, Dublin, MS 13176 (2), Frances Edgeworth to Dr. D. Beaufort, Cork, 18 September 1798.)
Out of the crucible of rebellion, led by the United Irishmen, came the bigotry of the newly formed and equally secret Orange Order and a profound retreat from reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics. The implications of that post1800 retreat from the cosmopolitan haunt northern Irish history to this day.
Yet more than failure is to be learned from the experiences of the Drennans in Ireland and their less famous lodge brothers in Bordeaux. Secrecy, ceremony, symbol, and ritual belong to the story of the birth pangs of democracy and political resistance. Already in 1766 a masonic orator in Amsterdam told his brothers, "The main reason why freemasonry was so well received among the enlightened: the Natural state of humanity is therein restored perfectly, no disguise will be tolerated." (Library of the Grand Lodge of the Netherlands, The Hague, MS 41:8, f. 26.)
The dilemma presented by secrecy lies surely in our seeing only disguise, and not transparency, in its practice, especially when combined with arcane ceremonies and expensive rites of passage. Yet the evidence suggests that late in the eighteenth century the lodge had become a place where social egalitarianism could be proposed, the democratic sampled, even fostered. The key to the experiment lay in forms of behavior that blended the assembled, made them curiously anonymous in their aprons, robes, and badges. Esoteric symbols conjured up the universal, passwords whispered from ear to ear made differences give way to a cosmopolitan transparency. Once experienced, democracy could be, and often was, spurned. But its power could not be forgotten. For some people, just as Bruce feared and Drennan hoped, the theory of democracy would seize hold of the imagination and never let go. In their hearts they could secretly imagine themselves to be as good as their betters. Yet the habits of secrecy left another, but sinister legacy. In the hands of those who hate, or who would foster terror-witness Northern Ireland up to 1998-the practice of secrecy became the sine qua non of political and military activism with terrorist associations. Secret and radical political organizations may not be an exclusively Western invention, but in places like Ireland they first showed the world how powerful and dangerous they could be.