The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies by Jon E. Lewis Read Free Book Online Page A

armies occupied the country?
The sect would be much less formidable if this were its doctrine, on the one hand because it would inspire in most of the “Illuminés” a feeling of horror which would triumph even over the fear of vengeance, on the other hand because plots and conspiracies always leave some traces which guide the authorities to the footsteps of the prime instigators; and besides, it is the nature of things that out of twenty plots directed against sovereigns, nineteen come to light before they have reached the point of maturity necessary to their execution.
The “Illuminés” line of march is more prudent, more skilful, and consequently more dangerous; instead of revolting the imagination by ideas of regicide, they affect the most generous sentiments: declamations on the unhappy state of the people, on the selfishness of courtiers, on measures of administration, on all acts of authority that may offer a pretext to declamations as a contrast to the seductive pictures of the felicity that awaits the nations under the systems they wish to establish, such is their manner of procedure, particularly in private. More circumspect in their writings, they usually disguise the poison they dare not proffer openly under obscure metaphysics or more or less ingenious allegories. Often indeed texts from Holy Writ serve as an envelope and vehicle for these baneful insinuations …
By this continuous and insidious form of propaganda the imagination of the adepts is so worked on that if a crisis arises, they are ready to carry out the most daring projects.
 
Another Association closely resembling the “Illuminés”, Berckheim reports, is known as the “Idealists”, whose system is founded on the doctrine of perfectibility; these kindred sects “agree in seeing in the words of Holy Scripture the pledge of universal regeneration, of an absolute levelling down, and it is in this spirit that the sectarians interpret the sacred books.”
Berckheim further confirms the assertion I made in “World Revolution” – contested, as usual, by a reviewer without a shred of evidence to the contrary – that the Tugendbund derived from the Illuminati. “The League of Virtue,” he writes, “was directed by the secondary chiefs of the ‘Illuminés’ … In 1810 the Friends of Virtue were so identified with the ‘Illuminés’ in the North of Germany that no line of demarcation was seen between them.”
But it is time to turn to the testimony of another witness on the activities of the secret societies which is likewise to be found at the Archives Nationales. This consists of a document transmitted by the Court of Vienna to the Government of France after the Restoration, and contains the interrogatory of a certain Witt Doehring, a nephew of the Baron d’Eckstein, who, after taking part in secret society intrigues, was summoned before the judge Abel at Bayreuth in February, 1824. Amongst secret associations recently existing in Germany, the witness asserted, were the “Independents” and the “Absolutes”; the latter “adored in Robespierre their most perfect ideal, so that the crimes committed during the French Revolution by this monster and the Montagnards of the Convention were in their eyes, in accordance with their moral system, heroic actions ennobled and sanctified by their aim.” The same document goes on to explain why so many combustible elements had failed to produce an explosion in Germany:
The thing that seemed the great obstacle to the plans of the Independents … was what they called the servile character and the dog-like fidelity [“Hundestreue”] of the German people, that is to say, that attachment – innate and firmly impressed on their minds without even the aid of reason – which that excellent people everywhere bears towards its princes.
 
A traveller in Germany during the year 1795 admirably summed up the matter in these words:
The Germans are in this respect [of democracy] the most curious people