Continued from Chapter 11 Architects of The Grand Design.

SECOND GREAT FREEMASONIC CONVENTION PRODUCED FRENCH REVOLUTION

It was on 16 July 1782, that the second Great Masonic Convention was held at Wilhelmsbad, Germany, attended by representatives of Masonic bodies from all over the world. Now that the American Revolution was behind them and Freemasonry had gathered sufficient strength, the “Concealed Superiors” attempted to unite them all under one supreme sway; namely that of Illuminism. This second Convention effectively produced the French Revolution. The Freemasonic purpose for the American Revolution was to establish a Republic that would guarantee the ‘equalization’ of all religions. In the next stage, using the French Revolution, under the pretense of equalization of all peoples, or as was implied, the “sovereignty of the people” — through them, the divine right of the Monarchy was to be toppled and abolished. It was graphically accomplished with lobbing off the heads of both the French King and his Queen.

It is also well established that French Freemasonry was strongly represented at the Wilhelmsbad Convention. Just how many Frenchmen there who actually became ‘Illuminized’ is something we shall never know. Certainly it is not the intentions of this benevolent Society to reveal their inner-most secrets to us. And when considering that much has been written about the history and grisly scenes of the French Revolution, that deliberately ignores the masterminding and involvement of Freemasonry and the Illuminati — this alone shows their awesome ability to carry out their sinister designs, then historically, cover it up through censorship and silence. Yet through sketchy records, deliberate leaks, memoirs left behind, disgruntled members, and sometimes, even nature will accidentally co-operate, such as the Illuminati courier being struck dead by a lightning bolt and his classified papers finding their way into government hands, all help to put together a fairly good picture.

One such source comes from, you won’t believe, a Jesuit himself, named Augustin Barruel, who supposedly, according to his story, fled France from the September massacres to England. In London, in 1797, he brought out a four-volume exposition of the French Revolution and Jacobinism. Now if we properly understand his motives and carefully weigh his devious intentions, which was to give a record of the events, while at the same time divert history from implicating the Jesuits, then perhaps his writings can be judged with some historical integrity. But when dealing with the darkest of all conspiracies, that hides behind master deceptions, out-right lies, and complete contradictions, there will be things we will never know about. So whether we know all the whos, the whens and wheres or not, it does not void the fact that every cause has its effects. The Jesuits energized the Illuminati ‘cause’, and certain Frenchmen who we know that were “illuminized”, produced its horrible ‘effects’.

FREEMASONRY AND ILLUMINATI — COVERS FOR ROME AND HER JESUITS

One of the most common tactics resorted to in order to cover up one’s tracks in a crime, is to scoff at the very idea that they were even involved. And in order to divert attention in another direction, it has been insistently proposed for us to believe, if we are so naive, that revolutions spring “spontaneously” from embittered and oppressed peoples. It sounds good, almost convincing; but I dare say, try to start one on your own sometime. Societies have always been well governed by laws that respond quite promptly and most effectively to any uprising. Also, successful revolutions cost money, lots of money; to organize, gain sympathizers, and for weapons. Common people just do not have access to these means. Revolutions then, is a game of the rich; the super wealthy and powerful. Common people are nothing more than their puppets; dumb animals to be controlled, regulated, and herded into corrals. And to view the external mechanisms of the French Revolution only as an explosion of a suppressed people, as its perpetrators wish us to do, and not understand the inner workings of Freemasonry, the Illuminati, and Rome, is to form an utterly distorted and false picture. Something similar to watching an engine working on the outside without any knowledge, that on the inside, there are pistons, fuel, and that tiny ‘spark’ that explodes everything into motion.

Rome has very cleverly and masterly painted a picture of sweet innocence of having any involvement in the French Revolution. She, as a Church, is described as having been persecuted during the time, where her churches were closed or misused and priests terribly harassed. This one-sided truth which makes her appear as a victim of the times, along with being well hidden behind Freemasonry and the Illuminati, covers up her crimes with a near perfect alibi against any accuser. And not only does Rome walk away from the French Revolution atrocities not being suspected, but Freemasonry and the Illuminati as well. Today, those who are ‘intellectual’ smugly ridicule and smirk at the idea of an Illuminati existence or that there ever was a malicious Freemasonry. That kind of thinking is for radicals.

The state religion of France, without dispute, has always been the Roman Catholic Church. As such, the Roman Church strongly domineered the French government. It was her ‘divine’ right. Indeed, during the years which King Louis XVI reigned, nearly all of the twenty-six million who populated France were Catholic; from the king down to the lowest peasant. The Church as an institution, being very powerful, not only influenced the policies of government, but nearly all schools were in the hands of the Church. In addition, its own courts of law. It also controlled most sources of information, since it had taken upon itself the responsibilities of censorship. For those who could not read, the clergy were the means by which Government decrees and intentions became known; and by which the liberal ideas and trend of the ‘philosophies’ also became known. France, at the time, was the perfect role model and stronghold of Catholicism, in which ecclesiastical approval was necessary for just about every function in life. To court the idea that the French clergy leadership was not active in guiding France into its impending Great Revolution would be absurd.

THE PLAY OF SUN WORSHIP OCCULTISM

When ‘new’ knowledge lights up or illumines a student’s mind, it is said — they can now “see”. Therefore a student is also referred to as a ‘pupil’. This ‘pupil’ is quite significant in the Occult world. The Sun, the great light and illuminator of the world, also became representative of Horus, Osiris resurrected, the great god of the Egyptians. The Egyptians, when seeing the first rays of the Sun in the morning would say, Horus- is-risen. These words have come down to us today condensed in our one word, “hor-iz-on”. Horus, like the Sun’s rays, that dispels darkness and is ‘seen’ to penetrate into every crevice of the natural world, was represented by an ‘eye’ or pupil that also had the ability to ‘see’ and penetrate into all things; dark secrets and knowledge that was unperceivable to the average person. As the Sun’s rays are universal, so the religion of Horus is also universal; ruled with its god-king, Pontifex Maximus head. And as each that are initiated and illumined into the Brotherhood, they become a pupil or an ‘eye’ for the Brotherhood. So this occultic “all seeing eye” of Horus became also the same symbol of Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati — which now is displayed as Big Brother’s ‘eye’ watching over us under the Novus Ordo Seclorum — New World Order system — on the back of every American one dollar bill.

It is no mere coincidence that the clergy of Rome, Freemasons, and initiates of the Illuminati when reaching the higher ranks of their orders, also find themselves overlapping each other in their pursuit of their common bond of occultism. The possibility, (especially the rich and powerful, who have always looked down on those beneath them as sub-human) of becoming ‘truly’ superior by occult magic, so to have direct intercourse with God, speak to the dead, heal, foretell the future, or turn base metals into gold, has excited and intrigued man’s mind for millenniums. Even Ignatius Loyola was not exempt. Long before he founded the Jesuit Order he had participated in the Spanish Illuminati, called the Alumbrados, and had been brought before the Inquisition as a suspect. Likewise, numerous popes enchanted by the magic of Egyptian religion, have raised up obelisks brought from Egypt to glorify their courtyards and gardens. It was not that the Church did not believe and practice the occult, but to be approved, it had to be first ‘christianized’, Roman style. And individuals communing directly with disembodied entities or higher angelic realms was worthy only of hell and the stake. The priests of Rome wished to keep for themselves alone the sole right to deal with the beyond.

During the Catholic Counter-Reformation, spearheaded by the Jesuits, witches, sorcerers, and magicians, along with Protestants were burned by the thousands. Strangely, those who taught and practiced the occult were being savagely persecuted by the world’s center of Occultism — Rome. During those brutal years, the occultic Hermetic wisdom of Egypt disappeared from sight, going under-ground to find succor with the strangest of all strange foster mothers — the very organization devoted to its destruction — the Society of Jesus. It was Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who under the sanction of two popes, Innocent X and Alexander VII, (both popes who raised in their own honor forgotten obelisks brought from Egypt by earlier Romans) became highly reputed for his life long work, research, and written volumes on Egyptian obelisks, hieroglyphs, language, religion and mythology. He died in 1680, becoming regarded years later as the founder of Egyptology. The Jesuits ‘unofficially’ insinuated themselves into this Egyptian wisdom, while ‘officially’ condemning it as damning heresy. As the tack of Rome and the Jesuits turned a different direction, the century which followed Kircher’s, the so called Age of Enlightenment, was to see a flourishing of the Egyptian Hermetic tradition in the ranks of Freemasonic orders — and especially in the Bavarian Illuminati.

THE ROLE OF THE GREAT MAGICIANS — COMTE DE SAINT – GERMAIN

Official history has never disputed the part played by magicians during those years before the French Revolution. They quite adequately contributed to all the hype, agitation, and fervor of the time. Of the many who appeared in Europe, two of the most mysterious, Comte de Saint-Germain and Count Alessandro Cagliostro, seemed to move in the twilight between history and legend. Widely known for their psychic powers, they awed and mystified those who met their acquaintance. To add to their mysteriousness, they seemed to be without means of support, yet were free with their money and also gave generously to those in need. Both being aristocrats and high ranking Freemasons, they were perfectly comfortable in king’s courts or any other circle of society where aristocrats gathered. Their records become important to us when we consider their wide occultic and Freemasonic associations that greatly influenced those in top levels of government and the clergy of France. They both preached a timely message; the message of a coming ‘change’.

Saint-Germain was born about year 1706 and lived till 1784. An accomplished musician, he could play and compose with equal ease. More fascinating, he could write a love letter with his left hand while composing a poem with the other, or compose the same text with both hands so alike they appeared identical when superimposed. After falling into a trance for hours or days, he would describe having visited the remotest comers of the planet, or even the stars. He described his past lives and recounted historical events as if eye-witnessed. He was said to have discovered the elixir of life, and his rejuvenating pomades were much in demand by the ladies. He also had a deep understanding of reincarnation, hypnosis, pharmacology, clairvoyance, levitation, arid the Tantric (Hindu / Buddhist) arts. He was as great an alchemist as chemist, and a series of impressive laboratories were placed at his disposal by the aristocracy and royalty of Europe. A personal counselor to kings and princes, (of particular interest, he was close adviser of Prussia’s King Frederick II, the Great) Saint-Germain served as intermediary between prime ministers in England, France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia. His adventures took him to Russia to help Catherine II seize the throne from her impotent husband Paul III, and to Charles of Hesse, son-in-law of King of Denmark, who became a student of alchemy and the magic of evoking spirits, and Saint- Germain’s truest friend and admirer.

It becomes quite obvious if you take note, that the instigators and promoters of the conspiracy that was agitating Europe during the time, were all friends and associates of each other, acting out their parts like in some grand mystery drama. The Jesuits, Jacobites, Philosophes, Roman clergy, Freemasons, Magicians, the Illuminati, and Jacobins all performed marvelously to the direction of Rome. In other words, birds of the same feather flock together. Saint-Germain the great magician, was adviser to Frederick the Great, and was also an active Jacobite. Interestingly, in 1745 we find him in London, confined to the Tower, suspected of being on a spying mission for the King of France, Louis XV, who had mounted a fleet to help the Pretender. His predicament became worse by the discovery on his person a letter of thanks from the Pretender. But after the invasion failed, he was released and allowed to leave England, presumably, thanks to his connections in the British aristocracy and Freemasonry.

Another bit of information that will illustrate dramatically just how far the French Revolution ‘plot’ had advanced among Freemasons by year 1758, over thirty years before it actually erupted, was an incident that occurred during that year. Saint- Germain, being invited to dine with French King Louis XV, fascinated the king with his ability to eliminate flaws from gems, rendering them more valuable, or to conjure visions of the future. However, he frightened the king with a vision of his grandson, Louis XVI, ‘decapitated’, admonishing the monarch that “reform” was essential not only in the Church, but his government if he wished to avoid revolution, urging him to move toward a constitutional monarchy such as in England.

MAGICIAN COUNT ALESSANDRO CAGLIOSTRO

Cagliostro, a younger man than Saint-Germain, was born about 1743 and died 1795. He became Saint-Germain’s student, and as a magician far eclipsed his master. Like Saint-Germain, he also traveled extensively throughout Europe and England, and was welcomed everywhere from one Masonic lodge to the next. Always traveling with his stunningly beautiful wife, where in Prussia, they were cordially received by King Frederick the Great. Entering into a city, and as news spread that the great miracle healer had taken a house in town, rich and poor flocked to his door, on crutches, on stretchers, in every state of disease. In all of these Cagliostro took a benevolent interest, soothing, restoring confidence, and healing. The record is abundant, precise, and incontrovertible as hundreds of cures were attested to by official statements and reports. As famous as he became being a magician, there were two other factors that greatly contributed to him being notorious. One was his founding of the Masonic Order of Egyptian rite. The other was his involvement in the diamond necklace scandal. Both, were ingredients by which the Conspiracy furthered the French Revolution cause.

Magicians are the visible Public awareness and propaganda agency of the occult. By means of their deceptions, sleight of senses, and cleverness, they arouse and stimulate curiosity to induce public involvement. This is easy enough to achieve, for every level of society seems to become gullible and excited when it comes to the allurements of magic. But it was the wealthy and powerful mostly who indulged their leisure time by delving into the secrets of nature and the supernatural making it into a science. That science, originating with the Babylonian and Egyptian priesthoods, those self proclaimed demigods, became a system worthy to imitate. Unraveling and unlocking the mysteries of the invisible world of nature to produce material technologies that benefit and marvel mankind becomes a powerful credibility tool to also convince mankind of their spiritual abilities. Certainly by holding audiences spellbound with their magical and material accomplishments is ample proof of their divine attributes as well. And so the Egyptian system of initiation into this mysterious Brotherhood became Cagliostro’s pet project.

That all the ‘heads’ of the Conspiracy were working together, there is no doubt. Cagliostro, Saint-Germain, Frederick the Great, Adam Weishaupt, and many others, always in touch one with another and each serving in the capacity that best suited his talents. Cagliostro the magician, was encouraged, or probably directed, to bring to Masonry the esoteric principles of ancient Egypt with a purified and regenerated ritual. For this, Cagliostro began to formulate his new Egyptian Rite of Masonry based on the ancient Hermetic wisdom as well as on the later Alexandrine Rites of Memphis. We find Cagliostro making his rounds, first, in a castle in Holstein placed at Saint-Germain’s disposal by Prince Charles of Hesse, to Berlin, then to Leipzig. In Leipzig, at the lodge of Minerva of the Three Palms, Cagliostro learned from Dom Permety, a Catholic Benedictine alchemist who had developed a Hermetic Rite of Perfection, to convoke “the entities that revolve in heaven.” Permety was later made a member of the Academy of Berlin by Frederick the Great, then curator of his Royal Library. Eventually he formed the lodge of Illumines of Avignon. On the basis of these various techniques, and what he claimed to have learned in his travels in Egypt, Cagliostro fashioned his rite for summoning angels.

In Ingolstadt, Cagliostro met Adam Weishaupt who claimed interest in using celestial intervention as achieved by Cagliostro for the furtherance of a program of worldwide religious reform. As a place to settle, Cagliostro chose the Rhineland city of Strasbourg. There he became friends with the bishop of Strasbourg, Louis Rene Edouard, Cardinal de Rohan, Prince of the Empire, Landgrave of Alsace, Headmaster of the Sorbonne, Grand Almoner of France, a descendant of the ancient kings of Brittany. As scion of one of the most important families of France, he held vast lands, and resided at his sumptuous Chateau de Saverne, where he was attended by fourteen butlers and twenty- five valets. The cardinal, who, like Cagliostro, cherished a passion for alchemy. Inviting Cagliostro to stay at his chateau, he put a laboratory at the magus’s disposal where he attested to seeing Cagliostro produce before his eyes not only gold, but diamonds. “In my place, in my presence,” said the cardinal, “he has made five or six thousand pounds worth of gold.” However, all that so called gold making did not prevent both of them from being central figures in the diamond necklace scandal.

In Lyons, center of Illuminism, and of interest in the occult, lived numerous followers of the clairvoyant philosopher who explored the spirit world in vision — Emanuel Swedenborg. There were also the followers of the so called “unknown philosopher,” Claude de St. Martin, and of Martinez de Pasqually’s Elus Cohens who had returned to the Gnostic concept of the universe as a living divine organism in which man could rise through the cabalistic spheres to his true and divine self. Received with great enthusiasm by the Masons of Lyons, Cagliostro believed he had found the true setting for building a Central Masonic Lodge devoted to his Egyptian Rite.

The citizens of Lyons were happy to contribute to the creation of a Lodge of Triumphant Wisdom of which Cagliostro would be Grand Cophte. Started in 1784, the splendid temple was ready in 1785. From all sides, says Cagliostro’s biographer, Francois Ribadeau Dumas, adherents flocked to Cagliostro’s Egyptian rite, “drawn by the beauty of its sentiments, the loftiness of its ideals, its central rule of love.” In the lodge, the neophyte was to be put through the grades of initiation, when upon reaching the seventh, says Masonic historians, Yarker and Hall, all the great mysteries were explained. But Cagliostro could not tarry with his adepts in Lyons. He was summoned to Paris by his friend Cardinal Rohan, who, anxious to return to royal favor, and hopeful of becoming the king’s first minister, pleaded with Cagliostro to use his wonder-working powers to help him regain the favor of the Queen Marie Antoinette.

Cagliostro and his wife, Serafina, arrived in Paris in January of 1785 as guests of the Cardinal. French Masons there were quick to welcome Cagliostro, inviting him to join the Lodge of the Nine Sisters, grand-mastered by Benjamin Franklin. Urged by fellow Masons to open an Egyptian-rite lodge in Paris, Cagliostro installed himself as Grand Cophte of the Temple of Isis in the rue de la Sourdiere. There he admitted women to “the mysteries of the pyramids,” attracting such high-ranking ladies as the queen’s favorite, Madame de Lamballe, who was initiated at the vernal equinox of 1785. Cagliostro then formed a supreme council with the duc de Montmorency as Grand Protector, Jean-Benjamin de Laborde, farmer-general of France as Grand Inspector, and Beaudard de Saint-James, wealthy treasurer general of the French navy as Grand Chancellor. His Royal Highness the duc de Chartres, shortly to inherit his father’s title of Duc d Orleans, and become one of the richest men in France, and who wasat the time Grand Master of French Masonry, attended an Egyptian-rite ceremony, declared his confidence in Cagliostro, and announced his official recognition of the rite. Another grand seigneur with equally liberal tendencies, fresh from aiding the Americans in forming a republic, also joined Cagliostro’s Egyptian rite and proclaimed his absolute confidence in the powers of its Grand Cophte; Marie Joseph Paul Ives Roch Gilbert Motier, Marquis de Lafayette.

Of all the prestigious names listed as being actively involved in occultic Freemasonry and the goal it was rushing its members toward, only through censoring history does the general public lose sight of the true conspirators. Certainly these things were not done in a closet. Cagliostro confidently estimated the followers of his own rite to amount to a million members. But better than that, France had twenty-six Masonic lodges that were presided over by Catholic priests, and members of the clergy of all ranks constantly frequented Masonic rituals. Catholic lodges had been founded in Paris under the protection of the marquises de Girardin and de Bouille, both royalists and friends of Saint- Germain, whose goal was to “establish communication between God and man by means of intermediary beings.” Soon so many priests were attending the Egyptian ceremonies, declaring themselves highly satisfied with the rite, that Cagliostro, whose dream was to effect a union of his Egyptian science of magic with the fundamental beliefs of Catholic Christianity, was moved to hope his order might at last be recognized by the pope, as had been the order of the Knights of Saint John. Cardinal de Rohan promised Cagliostro his support and appealed to the archbishop of Bourges, to whom Cagliostro explained his rite. This resulted in a favorable report being sent to Rome. But an unexpected Parisian scandal was to pit the pope’s dutiful acolyte Louis XVI against the forces of Freemasonry and accelerate the French Revolution.

CAGLIOSTRO, CARDINAL DE ROHN, AND THE DIAMOND NECKLACE SCANDAL

With two strikes against her, the court of Louis XVI was hostile to Queen Marie Antoinette, first, because she was an Austrian, not French, and second, because of her extravagant spending sprees in times when France was considered to be in a financial crisis. The Queen, attached to an impotent husband, cheated of romance, amused herself with costly dresses, gems, and palaces, with operas, plays and balls. Her longing for jewelry became almost a mania. She lost fortunes in gambling, and gave fortunes to favorites in reckless generosity. The King, always willing to please his Queen, indulged her because he admired and loved her, and because he was grateful for her patience with his impotence. Giving birth to a second son 25 March 1785, the King was so pleased he bought and gave her the Palace of St.-Cloud. The court condemned this indifferent extravagance and the public never forgot her intemperate expenditure of its taxes, nicknaming the Queen, “Madame Deficit.” The stage was set…

Then there was a string of 647 diamonds, allegedly weighing 2,800 carats, that two court jewelers, Charles Bohmer and Paul Bassenge, who had bought diamonds from half the world to make a necklace for Mme. du Barry, were confident that Louis XV would buy for her. But Louis XV died. Who now would buy so fabulously expensive an adornment? The jewelers offered it to Queen Marie Antoinette, who wanted it, but the king, considering the economic condition of the country, refused to buy it for her, or so the story goes as confessed by an enterprising lady of the court.

Jeanne de Saint-Remy de Valois, who called herself Countess de la Motte, was an attractive and ingenious lady with an extraordinarily vivacious personality. Flitting and fluttering around Paris and Versailles, she charmed with her radiance and soon became mistress to Cardinal de Rohan. Pretending to have high intimacy at the court, she offered to win the Queen’s approval of the Cardinal’s aims to become chief minister, convincing him that she had access to the Queen, whose favors she could obtain, if only, with his large fortune, he would guarantee a financial transaction. Telling him of the Queen’s great desire for the diamond necklace and her terrible disappointment in not being able to have it, but could, if the Cardinal would merely act as guarantor to the bankers who owned the necklace. Then the Queen could acquire it immediately and pay for it in installments from her own private funds. In return, she would grant the Cardinal her “favor”, and even meet him clandestinely in the park of Versailles.

The Cardinal, swept away by this lady’s sexual attractions, was even more delighted and infatuated by the prospect of becoming a lover of the reputedly sensuous Queen, fell completely for the scheme. De la Motte worked hard, having had forged letters from the Queen authorizing the Cardinal to buy the necklace in her name, even disguised a prostitute to meet the Cardinal in the park impersonating the Queen. When the Cardinal presented the letters of the Queen promising to pay in installments with his written guarantee to the bankers, the gems were surrendered to him. Rohan took the necklace, at de la Motte’s request, and turned them over to an alleged representative of the Queen. That was last seen of the diamonds.

It did not take long, when the first installment came due and the Queen did not pay up, for certain people to realize that they had been ‘had’. The bankers going to the Queen, the shocked Queen going to the King, the King summoning the Cardinal to give an account of his actions, and de la Motte had skipped. When de Rohan related his story showing the forged letters, the King and Queen were outraged. The King suspected at once that Rohan and others of the faction hostile to his wife had plotted to discredit her. He ordered the Cardinal, Cagliostro, who was thought to have masterminded the whole intrigue, his wife, and de la Motte, who was found and apprehended, all be sent to the Bastille. As months wore by, the King believing that an open trial was necessary to convince the public of the Queen’s innocence, foolishly ordered an investigation by those considered enemies, the Paris Parliament. Cagliostro, also outraged at the horrible injustice of a system which allowed a king to imprison in the Bastille anyone he chose, for as long as he chose, even for a lifetime, without access to a lawyer, to be tortured at the pleasure of his jailers, wrote and prophesied the brutal death of the Bastille’s governor, the Marquis de Launay, and predicted that stone by stone the Bastille would be demolished till the people of France could dance on its site.

At the trial, which was intended to be the trial of the century for France and was, Madame de la Motte accused Cagliostro of stealing the necklace and selling the stones, piece by piece, in England — which in reality she had done herself, with the help of her husband. The judgment of the Parliament, after due deliberation, was pronounced 31 May 1786, finding Madame de la Motte to be the guilty party, condemning her to be publicly whipped naked, branded, and to life in prison. Cagliostro, Serafina, and Rohan were found guiltless and released. But the governor of the Bastille fearing a daylight demonstration, waited till midnight to let the Cagliostros out. But even then a tumultuous crowd of almost ten thousand Parisians were there to greet him as their hero and benefactor against a king who was unjust, and his innocence as a victim of the hated Austrian, Marie Antoinette, whom Parisians believed to have been guiltily involved in the affair of the necklace. So intense was the hatred for the King and Queen, brought to a climax by this affair, that later Napoleon said, “the Queen’s death must be dated from the Diamond Necklace Trial.”

After a year in prison, Madame de la Motte conveniently escaped and joined her husband in London, wrote an autobiography, and died in 1791. The King and Queen banished Cagliostro from France, declaring him, and recorded by many historians, to have been an impostor and petty crook who lived during the time by the name of Giuseppe Balsamo. Afterwards, we find him wandering from one country to another, but always chasing his cherished dream. It was 17 May 1789, the year the French Revolution erupted, that the Cagliostros set off by carriage for Rome to obtain from Pius VI approval for his Egyptian rite of Masonry, a move intended to ‘officially’ unite Catholic Christian and Mason, and fulfill his treasured ambition. But it was not to be, for this pope also was preoccupied with the inauguration of another obelisk raised in his honor. Cagliostro was seized by the Inquisition, and died in 1795 mysteriously at their hands.

ECONOMIC STRAITS — PRESSING ISSUE TO LAUNCH FRENCH REVOLUTION

Marvelously, all the components designed to produce the French Revolution did its intended work, with attitudes and opinions successfully molded well in advance. The one component that could always be counted on to effectively touch everyone and result in an abundance supply of choice opinions was ‘economic straits’, which became the pressing issue used to get the Revolution’s wheels in motion. In 1789, the year of the Revolution, the population of France was about twenty-six million. Of these, about twenty-one million lived by farming. But although over a quarter of the land in the country was owned by peasants, few possessed more than the twenty acres or so which were necessary to support a family. So the vast majority of Frenchmen were not only forced into poverty conditions, with many being abject, but their grievances were aggravated by their liability for most all the taxes from which the privileged nobility were exempt. However, it meant nothing that the humble peasant was poor, miserable, and hungry, but now, the king himself was having serious financial problems.

As a result of the King’s extravagant spending, his indulging of his two extravagant brothers and his beloved Queen, whose debts the King always paid, the increasing expense of government and public works, and the cost of the country’s wars — in particular France’s participation in the War of American Independence which involved expenditure of about two-thousand-million livres made the collection of further and more burdensome taxes inevitable, unless the state were to slide ever deeper into bankruptcy. The mind of the nation now, was well programmed and conditioned by the propaganda agents of Rome, bristling for a “change” as the nation’s money problems worsened. But more wonderful, the problem was aggravated during the summer of 1789 by a prolonged drought that rendered millers unable to grind grain due to an acute shortage, and as a consequence, a shortage of bread that brought on an increase in outbreaks of violence. The perfect setting for those plotting a revolution.

At the beginning of his reign, Louis XVI had called upon the services of the clever, witty Comte Jean-Frederic de Maurepas. With the guidance of Maurepas, and of Maurepas’s intimate friend and confessor, the Abbe Joseph Alphonse de Veri, Louis had gradually and nervously replaced his grandfather’s Ministers with others, including Anne-Robert Turgot, Baron de Laune, whom in 1774 he appointed Controller General of Finances. He also decided, or more accurate, was counseled, to recall the parliaments, including the ancient Paris parliament.

This Paris Parliament, quite unlike the British Parliament, was one of thirteen appeal courts which had assumed the right of registering laws, principally royal edicts connected with taxation, but which aspired to the right of veto as well. Its jurisdiction covered about ten million people in northern France and since its influence was so much greater than the other provincial parliament, which were inclined to follow its lead, it was usually referred to simply as ‘parliament’. Its members, being far from representative of the people as a whole, granted hereditary nobility, and the principal offices had come to be held by some of the most renowned and wealthy dynasties in France. Proposals for the admission of commoners were always strongly resisted.

Although parliament was far more concerned with its own interests than those of the nation at large, it had come to be regarded in the people’s mind, largely as a result of its own propaganda, as their champion. It did indeed, its members being aristocrats, do quite as much to promote and publicize liberal political theories as the ‘philosophies’, whom both were bent on the eventual destruction of royal absolutism, while in the meantime, resisted any encroachments upon their privileges. These privileges were extensive: only they could become ambassadors; only they could reach the highest offices in the Church; only they could command regiments in the army. Indeed, since 1781 it had become virtually impossible to obtain a commission in the army at all unless four generations of aristocratic birth could be proved. And of course, they were privileged to be exempt from paying most all the burdensome taxes.

King Louis XVI was aware of all of this and knew he was asking for trouble when he recalled the exiled parliament and spoke to the reconvened members on 12 Novembers 1774. Being guided as a pawn in Rome’s game of chess, he chose instead to follow the advice of Maurepas and his Roman confessor, who argued that he must listen to public opinion and follow it; that a monarch who recalled parliament would be ‘considered a friend of the people’. ‘I should like to be loved’, he had once declared. With the recall of the parliament and the appointment of fresh Ministers, the people began to hope that a new age might be dawning. In reality, it did little to alleviate the plight of a nation whose fundamental grievances remained without a remedy.

To demonstrate the involvement and participation and the effectual influence of the priests and prelates of the Roman Catholic Church during the time just prior to the French Revolution eruption, we will briefly follow events and those names that are so famous in leading France into its Great Revolution of 1789. As stated, France had its overwhelming financial problems that were taking the nation to the brink of utter collapse with the monarchy collapsing with it. Seeking solutions and a remedy, France went through numerous Finance Ministers with the hope that each could provide a miracle that would save the nation. Turgot, being appointed in 1774, was dismissed two years later in May 1776, having lost the confidence not only of the King and Queen and the Court, but of the financiers, the Church and parliaments as well. Next Jacques Necker was appointed, who was considered a financial genius. When he came to study the country’s inequitable tax system, Necker was faced with complicated and intractable problems which he was quite incapable of resolving. He was forced to resign.

Necker was succeeded as Director-General of Finance by Charles-Alexandre de Calonne who realizing the perilous state the country’s finances were in, took the only practical step but hazardous, drew up a detailed program that would reform the whole tax system. Calonne proposed a new tax on land which was to be imposed without regard to the status of its owners and which would accordingly fall most heavily upon the privileged classes. The apprehensions of the nobility and the clergy that this new tax would prove not only financially burdensome, but also the first step towards the extinction of their privileged positions, aroused immediate opposition in all the high places. The King’s brother, the Comte de Provence, and the King’s cousin, the Duc d’Orleans, Freemasonry’s Grand Master of the Grand Orient, both voiced their disapproval of him. So did Etienne d’Aligre, one of the leading magistrates in the Paris parliament. So did the adherents of Necker who chose to believe their hero’s assertion that France had been solvent at the time of his enforced resignation. So did Lomenie de Brienne, the sickly, ingratiating and scarcely less than agnostic Archbishop of Toulouse, who hoped to succeed him. So did the influential Archbishop of Narbonne who declared, ‘Calonne wishes to bleed France to death. He is merely asking us whether to make the incision on the feet, the arms or the jugular vein’. And so did the Queen.

Obliged to listen to these voices in condemnation of his Minister, the King at first supported him, then wavered, asking constantly for advice, “What can I do? What should be done?” In the end Calonne was dismissed and exiled to his estates in Lorraine, whence threatened with proceedings against him by the Paris parliament, he fled to England. Now Archbishop Brienne of Toulouse replaced him; but when he presented to the special Assembly of Notables, (a convention nominated by the King whose 144 members included mayors and magistrates as well as nobles and prelates) a shadowy version of the proposals made by Calonne, of which he had just rejected, the Notables were in no mood to accept from the Archbishop even so mild a concoction of the medicines that they had refused to take from Calonne. The Assembly of Notables was dissolved and they went home, having demonstrated the firm determination of most of their number to prevent the King’s Ministers tampering with their privileges.

The King was desperate to find a source for fresh money, so the land tax and other measures which the Notables had rejected were now presented to the Paris parliament. The parliament, among whose members were several who had sat with the Notables were equally determined, refused to let them pass, protesting that any new taxation required the assent of the ‘Estates General’, a consultative body of clergy, nobles, and representatives of the Commons or Third Estate, which had not met since 1614 in the reign of Louis XIII. Confronted by an uncompromising parliament and worried by a crisis in foreign affairs, the King and Brienne decided to use force. They dispatched troops as the King invoked his right to enforce various edicts to which parliament had objected, depriving the Paris parliament and all the provincial parliaments of their power of opposing the monarch’s will. That summer of 1788 violence erupted all over France, with no taxes whatever being collected. In protest that they were acting in defense of the parliaments, nobles and magistrates came together to block any attempts the Government had to impose equality of taxation.

As the prospect of national bankruptcy grew more alarming, Brienne turned in desperation to the clergy. But they, in an extraordinary meeting of their own Assembly, also condemned the Government’s reforms and granted only a small proportion of the money for which they had been asked. Forced to accept defeat, Brienne announced on 5 July that the ‘Estates General’ would be summoned to Versailles in May the following year of 1789. A few weeks later he handed in his resignation. The King had no alternative but to reappoint Necker, and recall the parliaments.

ESTATE GENERAL SUMMONED

Just when there was a general satisfaction being felt by the announcement that the ‘Estates General’ were to be reconvened, it was soon overcast by a further declaration by the Paris parliament that they should be composed as they had been in 1614 — which was to say, that the three orders whose representatives were to meet in Versailles, the clergy, the nobility, and the Third Estate or Commons, were to have an equal number of delegates. This meant that, if each order were to vote separately, the clergy and nobility could always combine in defense of their privileges to thwart the aspirations of the Third Estate. This announcement jolted the Third Estate, and the popularity of parliament, which the middle class had formerly been inclined to view as a bulwark against despotic government, collapsed overnight. Thus it was that, in the autumn and winter of 1788, the struggle between the monarchy and the aristocracy was transformed instead into a social and political conflict between the privileged and unprivileged classes. Thus also, by moves and counter-moves in Rome’s chess game, the pieces were jockeyed into position to escalate the plotted Revolution.

It was during this interval of time, from the autumn of 1788 through the summer of 1789, that politics became an all- consuming interest. As the issues broadened, the solidarity of the privileged orders weakened. A split appeared even in the ranks of the parliament of Paris between the conservative magistrates and those with liberal inclinations. The Third Estate also found champions of its claims among the lay and clerical aristocracy. Also in these months was formed, in opposition to the coalition of the conservative aristocracy, a combination of liberal theorists and politicians who assumed the role of the “patriotic” or “national” party. It was during these months that political tracts and pamphlets flooded France and Paris by the hundreds of thousands, supplied each day with numerous new titles. It became a war between the Third Estate and the other two orders, as a stream of freshly printed pamphlets propounded the ideas of a new declaration of rights, new conceptions of national sovereignty and France’s need of a constitution. And nearly all the leaders of the movement were members of a secretive body known as the “Society of Thirty”, which acted as an organizing group for liberal measures.

The Society of Thirty, founded in November 1788, usually met at the house of the rich magistrate and parliamentaire, Adrien Duport. Many of its members were equally rich, able to finance the authorship and distribution of pamphlets, the circulation of lists of grievances which were intended to serve as models for others, and the dispatch of agents to the provinces. They included the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt and the Duc d’Aiguillon, the Marquis de Condorcet and the Vicomte de Noailles. Among their number were also three men whose influence on the course of events during the next few months was to become quite profound. One of these was the Roman Catholic Abbe de Talleyrand-Perigord, who became Bishop of Autun in January 1789 and lived to become known to the world as Prince Talleyrand. Another was the Marquis de Lafayette, who had fought with distinction in America under George Washington. The third was the Roman Catholic Abbe Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes.

While the great political debate raged in the cafes, clubs and salons of Paris, fired up by the liberal sentiments expressed in the ‘patriot’ pamphlets and tracts bombardment, Joseph Sieyes wrote one of his own that ignited a fire in its readers and was to become one of the most famous and powerful pamphlets of the time. With its arresting title that asked the question, “What is the Third Estate?”, the pamphlet turned it into three questions that soon half of France was asking. To its questions, it also gave its explosive answers. — “What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been up till now in the political order? Nothing. What does it desire to be? Something.” That ‘something’ included the rights to have as many representatives as the other two orders combined, as well as to have its votes counted by head rather than by order. It also included the right to share in the framing of a constitution free from interference by any outside force.

Of the twenty-six million souls in France, Sieyes pointed out, at least twenty-five million belonged to the Third Estate — the untitled laity; in effect the Third Estate ’was’ the nation. If, in the Estates General, the other classes should refuse to sit with it, it would be justified in constituting itself the “National Assembly”. That phrase stuck. It was Finance Minister Necker, who recognizing the great problems the forth coming convocation of the Estates General posed, set about persuading his fellow Ministers and the royal family to issue an edict granting what had become known as ‘double representation’ to the Third Estate. There were heated discussions at Court where both the King and Queen, as well as the Comte de Provence, were eventually persuaded to support Necker’s views, and on 27 December it was announced that the Third Estate would, indeed, have ‘double representation’.

Take notice that each calculated step prepared the way for the next in the progression to attain their ultimate goal, which was to arouse, inflame, and energize the whole populous of France, especially the masses of commoners. For example, France’s financial distress, whether real or exaggerated, compelled a need for a competent Finance Minister. After the services of several, one finally presents a plan that offered an honest solution, but from the very outset knew that his proposal would be like poking a stick in a hornet’s nest. So did everyone else. His reward was disgrace and criminal charges. In sheer desperation the King ramrodded the ‘tax plan’ through. In just as haughty determination the aristocracy opposed it, demanding the broader consulting body of the Estates General. This opened wide the flood gates of commoners, who as ninety- six per cent of the population of France, demanded to be heard as the ‘true’ voice of the nation. From the plotters viewpoint, things now were on a roll.

REHEARSING REVOLUTION — COMMONERS STAGE RIOTS

As a country facing famine and rehearsing revolution, it began early in the New Year of 1789 to elect deputies from each class group for the upcoming Estates General convocation. In all, 1214 representatives were elected; 285 nobles, 308 clergy, and 621 for the Third Estate. From the time of the election, the mood of the nation turned ugly and intensified as the meeting of the Estates General approached. In several districts there were repeated revolts against taxes and the cost of bread. In Lyons the populace invaded the office of the tax collector and destroyed his registers. At Agde, near Montpellier, the people threatened a general pillage unless the prices of commodities were reduced; they were reduced. Villages fearing a shortage of grain forcibly prevented the export of grain from their districts. At Montlhery the women, hearing that the price of bread had been raised, led a mob into the granaries and bakeries, and seized all available bread and flour. Here and there the populace took matters into its own hands; it threatened to hang at the nearest lamppost any merchant hiding grain or charging too much for it. Similar scenes were almost everywhere in France. In town after town orators aroused and excited the people by telling them that the King had postponed all tax payments. A report ran through Provence in March and April that “the best of kings desires tax equality; that there are to be no more bishops, nor seigneurs, nor tithes, nor dues, no more titles or distinctions. After 1 April 1789, feudal dues were no longer paid. In Paris, the center of agitation, the excitement mounted daily as pamphlets poured from the press, and orators lifted their voices at the cafes and clubs.

In these angry mobs, the Duc d’ Orleans saw a possible instrument for his own greedy ambition. His all consuming desire to be king, played wonderfully into the hands of his ‘confessors’, who encouraged, nurtured and benefited from the savory idea. Being the King’s cousin, and the richest man in France, he, himself, became an instrument used by the Revolution’s plotters. When his role had served its purpose, even though he was Grand Master of all French Masonry, it was as nothing to send him to the guillotine to have his head chopped off, just like thousands of others during the time. Prompted by his ‘hidden superiors’, he determined to make himself an idol of the people. He gave to the poor, recommended nationalization of ecclesiastical property, and threw open to the public the garden and some rooms of his Palais-Royal in the very heart of Paris. The money of the Duke became an irresistible temptation and incentive, when offered in return for ‘special favors’ by his secretary Choderlos de Laclos, who acting as his agent, organized public demonstrations and revolts, and kept the soldiers in pay to refuse to act; throwing France into a virtual mob violence frenzy. It was in these gardens, cafes, gambling houses, and brothels near his palace, that the pamphleteers exchanged ideas and formed plans; here thousands of people, of all classes, joined in the agitations of the hour. The Palais- Royal, as a name for all this complex, became the hub of the Revolution. The Duc d’ Orleans unlimited services and all his wealth, and I mean all, was given without reservation for the promised “kingship” pot of gold that was dangled in front of him at the end of the rainbow. Treachery and violent death became his only reward.

Riots springing up all over France became an easy enough accomplishment when it was learned you could vent your frustrations and actually get paid for it too. And being in a superior’s pay gave participants the feeling of having authority’s backing that gave license and ease to perform their criminal acts, especially when there was little fear of retribution from soldiers who were also in pay to look the other way. Intermittent mob violence electrified the air. It hastened in persuading the decision to give the Third Estates or Commoners the right to elect representatives for the Estates General that equaled the amount of both the nobles and clergy. That being accomplished, the next step was to get all three orders, instead of working separately, to come together and cooperate as one unified body. To accomplish this feat and other marvelous achievements for the cause, Abbe Joseph Sieyes rose to the occasion and did his work splendidly.

ABBE JOSEPH SIEYES — LEADER OF CLASS STRUGGLE

Joseph Sieyes, priest of Rome, wrote pamphlets that could excite the populace, but as a member of his own order of the clergy was rejected as a deputy for the Estates General. This worked very well, for the commoners welcomed him with open arms as one of their own delegates who then became their leading influence in guiding them through the early stages of the Estates General meetings. Was this mere coincidence? Honored with the presence of the King and Queen, deputies of all three orders of the Estates General came together on Monday, 4 May 1789, for a procession through the streets of Versailles to hear Mass of the Holy Spirit at the Church of Saint Louis. Members of each order conspicuously separated and distinguished by their dress, moved ina stately procession while the townspeople crowded the streets, the balconies, and the roofs. They applauded the commoners, the King, and the Duc d’ Orleans, and received with silence the nobles, the clergy, and the Queen. The next day the King opened the first session of the convention with a brief address frankly confessing the financial distress of his government, attributed to “a costly but honorable war”, (the American) asking for an “augmentation of taxes”, and deploring “an exaggerated desire for innovation”. Necker followed with a three-hour speech admitting a deficit of 56,150,000 livres (it was really 150,000,000) and asked sanction for a 80,000,000 livres loan. The deputies were overwhelmed by his brain-taxing statistics; most of them had expected the liberal minister to expound a program of reform.

The struggle of the classes began the day after, when the nobles and the clergy went to separate halls. The Third Estate refused to acknowledge itself a separate chamber. It waited resolutely and urged the other estates to join it and vote man by man. The nobles replied that to merge the three classes in one and allow individual voting would be to surrender the intelligence and character of France to mere number and bourgeois dictation. The clerical delegates, divided between conservatives and liberals, took no stand; waiting to be guided by events. A month passed. Meanwhile the price of bread continued to rise despite Necker’s attempts to regulate it, and the danger of public violence increased as the flood of pamphlets continued to agitate touchy feelings.

On June 10 the deputies of the Third Estate sent a committee to the nobles and clergy again inviting them to a joint meeting, and declared that if the other orders continued to meet separately the Third Estate would proceed without them to legislate for the nation. The break in the contest came on June 14, when nine parish priests came over to the commoners. On that day the Third Estate elected Jean-Sylvain Bailly its president, and organized itself for deliberation and legislation. Encouraged by this break in the privileged orders’ ranks, Sieyes now proposed that, as the Third Estate represented ninety-six per cent of the nation, they should immediately start the work the country was waiting to see performed. As a first step the name of Estates General should be officially abandoned and the Third should confer upon itself title that implied its unique authority; which was to appropriate complete sovereignty to itself — “the people”. Sieyes also proposed the simple and explicit name ‘National Assembly’. It was approved by 491 votes to 89. This declaration automatically changed the absolute monarchy into a limited one, ended the special powers of the upper classes, and constituted, politically, the beginning of the Revolution.

CLERGY VOTES TO JOIN COMMONERS

Almost as if on cue, when hearing the news that the Third Estate had adopted a new title, those of the clergy who wished to join them as an order pressed harder than ever for union. A vote was taken: a priest threw open one of the windows, and the cry went out to the waiting crowd, — ‘Won! Won’ Instantly this development destroyed the coalition between the privileged orders. It also drove home the fact that the priests of Rome were in full sympathy with the proceedings taking place. Cleverly though, as a protective buffer against any idea that Rome was the instigator of these unruly revolts, many prelates and priests remained loyal to the ‘old regime’. When the new constitution had been drawn up, and it was required to take an oath to show public support of it, the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia’ volume XIII, page 11, under the subject “Revolution”, has this to say…

In actual fact, a number of bishops were leaders in the movement, such as Talleyrand of Autum, Brienne of Sens, (who became Finance Minister) Jarente of Orleans, and Lafond de Savine of Vivers, as well as assistant bishops such as Gobel, Coadjutor Bishop of Bale, Martial de Brienne, Coadjutor of Sens, and Dubourg-Miraudet, Bishop of Babylon. At the festival of the Federation, in commemoration a year after the fall of the Bastille, we find on 14 July 1790, Bishop Talleyrand and three hundred priests officiating at the altar of the nation who besought the blessings of God on the Revolution. (Taken from the same Catholic Encyclopedia and subject “Revolution”, page 11.)

Events now quickened their pace. Alarmed by the strides and revolutionary behavior of the Third Estate, the King, pressed by the Queen and his Court, announced that he would hold a meeting 23 June 1789, presided over by himself, and address the Estates to declare that the actions of the Commons were illegal. And to prevent anymore meetings, the building of the meeting halls were locked. Undeterred by this action, and at the suggestion of Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin, (the gentleman for which the decapitation machine was named) the members of the National Assembly hurried to a nearby indoor tennis- court to continue their deliberations. It was here on 20 June, that every delegate except one took their famous oath and signed their names, vowing ‘never to separate’ until an acceptable constitution was established ‘on solid foundations’. To deny them again a meeting place, the King’s brother, Comte d Artois, booked the tennis court for a game. This time the parish priest opened to them the doors of the Church of Saint Louis and here they welcomed the majority of the clergy into their new meeting place. Two nobles from Dauphine also joined them, followed by a group of nobles from Guyenne, who were greeted with enthusiastic applause.

On the 23 June 1789, the King arriving with great pomp and fanfare, escorted by cavalry and a company of Household Guards, delivered his speech to the assembled Estates. There were certain concessions the monarchy was prepared to make, but he made it clear that the ‘ancient regime’ was not to be dismantled. As to emphasize this, the wording of the King’s speech was more threatening than conciliatory, and pointed out that if any reforms were to come they would be granted by himself and not won by demand. He said, “None of your plans or proceedings can become law without my express approval… command you to disperse at once and to proceed tomorrow morning to the separate rooms set aside for your orders so that you may resume your deliberations”. With these words he walked out of the hall, followed by the contented nobles and some clergy who had been assured of their continuing privileges. Comte de Honore Gabriel Mirabeau seized his opportunity. ‘Gentlemen’, he called, rising to his feet, his powerful voice echoing round the walls while trumpets sounded outside as the royal coach rattled away. ‘We are being dictated to in an insulting manner…I demand that you assume your legislative powers and adhere to the faith of your oath. It allows us to disband only after we have made the Constitution’. By 27 June, most of the clergy and forty-seven of the nobles led by the Duc d’ Orleans had joined the National Assembly. The victory of the assembly seemed secure. Only force could dislodge it.

KING CALLS IN TROOPS

Force was exactly what the King had in mind. By the first weeks of July he had summoned in ten regiments of troops, mostly German and Swiss, with six thousand occupying Versailles and ten thousand around Paris. It set the nation aflame. The Assembly and the people believed that the King was planning to disperse or intimidate them. Multitudes gathered around the Palais-Royal and swore to defend the National Assembly at whatever cost. The municipal authorities were unable to maintain order, for they could not rely upon the local French Guards; some pledging to obey no orders that were hostile to the National Assembly. The 407 men who had elected the deputies of the Third Estate for Paris met and substituted themselves for the royal government of the capital. The old council abandoned to them the task of protecting life and property. It was this group of men who appointed Jean-Sylvain Bailly Mayor of Paris and Lafayette commander of the citizens’ militia, which was shortly to become the ‘National Guard’. The ferment at Paris was beyond conception; ten thousand people expressing their fury of liberty. Mirabeau, that awesome and eloquent speaker, stirred up his listeners in a violent speech on 8 July declaring, “A large number of troops already surround us. More are arriving each day. Artillery are being brought up…These preparations for war are obvious to anyone and fill every heart with indignation”. Anger and fear were now at a boiling point. Only a word was needed to arouse and ignite the populace into a violent response.

That ‘word’ just happened to be supplied by a Jesuit educated gentleman named Camille Desmoulins, who on the afternoon of 12 July, being near the Palais-Royal, leaped upon a table and cried out, “The German troops in the Champ de Mars will enter Paris tonight to butcher the inhabitants!” Then brandishing both a pistol and a sword, he called to the mob, “To arms!” He climbed down from the table into the swirling crowd who then loudly repeated his call ‘To arms!’, that reverberated on every side. He fastened a green ribbon to his hat and urged everyone else to wear some sort of green cockade in token of their support for the ‘common cause’. They did so until it became dangerous to be seen out of doors without a hat garnished with green. A crowd of eight thousand people marched off to search and ransack the town for weapons. In two days fifty thousand pikes had been forged, twelve pieces of artillery, and thirty-two thousand muskets had been found and captured; but very little powder. By the 14th of July the crowd had surged to 60,000 people. It was said that the Bastille contained a great store of arms and ammunition, especially powder. The cry went out, “To the Bastille!” The crowd had become an irresistible force.

The rest is history. The Bastille was stormed on 14 July and fell as predicted by Cagliostro. The Bastille’s governor was butchered; his head whittled off by a pocket-knife and as a gruesome trophy stuck on the end of a pike, the crowd marched with it through Paris in a triumphal parade. As for the Bastille being torn down as was also predicted, the next morning, a contractor and patriot by the name Palloy, specializing in the demolition of buildings with a thousand workmen, began stone by stone, to bring the prison down. The fortress, as old and dark as the feudal system it symbolized, had hung like doom over the poor inhabitants of the East End of Paris. It’s stones now flung upon the ground, were used into a new bridge built over the Seine and into the stairways of private houses, so that they could be trodden under foot by patriots. A key of the Bastille was presented by Lafayette to George Washington, the foster- parent of the French Revolution. With its destruction, a ‘new age’ was hoped to come into being. Patriots dated their letters from July 14th as ‘the first day of the first year of liberty’. The King, when told of the news, had to face the fact that it was not just a revolt — but Revolution, and that his only safety lay in immediate cooperation with the National Assembly. Making an informal entry, he announced to the deputies that he had given orders for the withdrawal of the troops. The deputies cheered, but when popularity can only be won by concessions to violence, or by appeals to sentiment, the end is near. And as predicted by the magician Saint-Germain, the King’s head was also to topple.

FRENCH NEW AGE BECOMES LICENSE TO MURDER

The French ‘new age’ of liberty became a license to murder — whether by bands of insurgents armed with sabers, pikes, and axes that stabbed, hacked, and beat to death their victims or by the operations of what the deputy J.A.B. Amar, called the ‘red Mass’ performed on the ‘great altar’ of the ‘holy guillotine’. The shrieks of death were blended with the yell of the assassin and the laughter of buffoons. Under the rallying call of unity, liberty, equality, fraternity, or death, it became dangerous to be considered less revolutionary than your neighbor. Thousands upon thousands became victims to where an accurate account became impossible. The time came which was foretold by Madame Roland, ‘when the people would ask for bread and be given corpses’. ‘For a citizen to become suspect’, said Georges Couthon, President of the Convention, ‘it is sufficient that rumor accuses him’. Marat had declared, ‘In order to ensure public tranquillity, two hundred thousand heads must be cut off’. ‘Liberty must prevail at any price’, cried Saint Just, who like Robespierre, ‘regarded all dissidents as criminals…You must punish not merely traitors but the indifferent as well…Liberty, cannot be secured unless criminals lose their heads’. ‘In heaven’s name’, cried one, ‘sick of blood’, ‘when will all this bloodshed cease?’

Whole families were led to the guillotine for no other crime than their relationship: sisters for shedding tears over the death of their brothers; wives for the heinous crime of weeping at the execution of their husbands; innocent peasant girls for dancing with the German soldiers; and a woman giving suck, and whose milk spouted in the face of her executioner at the fatal stroke, testify of the worst excesses ‘in a kind of fever’ committed in the name of “liberty”. Madame Roland, arrested and led to the guillotine uttered her famous apostrophe, ‘Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name’. As the Revolution escalated and was wrenched from the hands of the original revolutionaries into the hands of the Jacobins with Robespierre their leader — the King was guillotined, the Queen was guillotined, and most of Robespierre’s antagonists were guillotined; atheists who argued that there was no Supreme Being were guillotined; Danton was guillotined because he thought there was too much guillotine; day by day, week by week, this ‘holy’ machine chopped off heads and more heads and more. The reign of Robespierre lived, it seemed, on blood, and needed more and more, as an opium addict needs more and more opium. But the day came, when Robespierre’s head too was claimed by the guillotine.

There is no need to go much further into the Great Revolution of France. History has all too well supplied us with an untold amount of books that make us shudder at the almost inhuman, senseless and grisly scenes during that time. No one was safe; either you performed with gusto your acts of butchery, which certified your sentiments, or become suspect. To become suspect, meant death; but not always instant. In comparison to many unfortunates who were mutilated alive, the guillotine, that detached the head and allowed blood to profusely flow, was dreadful and terrifying, but in reality, was merciful — so it was claimed. But however you want to consider it, wholesale murder, death and blood became a routine daily sight in France. This was the “Liberty” and “Freedom” offered and sponsored by the Illuminati and its Jesuits who acted through their agents of the Jacobin Club. But it did not stop here. With the death of Robespierre, the Revolution had about run its course in France. It now turned its fury instead upon Europe. Under the leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte, also a member of the Jacobin Club, deaths were not counted in the thousands, but millions. The architects of all this carnage must have thought…truly the design was grand.

The Jacobins, not to be confused with the Jacobites, was a political club like so many other political clubs that sprung up in France during the Revolution, with two exceptions. First, from its founding its political views were recognized as being extremely radical; and second, from which the first was a natural product, it was the fountain through which the Jesuit and Illuminati waters directly flowed. After the assembling of the States-General the deputies from Brittany formed the Club Breton. This soon widened its membership to include non- Bretons like Mirabeau, Sieyes, and Robespierre. In October, 1789, it moved its headquarters to Paris where it met at the Dominican convent inheriting the nickname of the monks of the rue Saint- Honore to become famous as the Jacobin Club. In the formulation of radical opinion its influence spread all over France where the number of similar clubs in the provinces grew month by month until there were over three thousand of them. At the end of March, 1790, Robespierre was elected President of the Jacobin Club, who supported terror and ultimately became completely identified with it during his dictatorship reign. It should not come as a surprise that Robespierre received his Degree after nine years at the famous Jesuit College Louis- le-Grand, where also one of the masters included Jean le Rond d’Alembert, a contributor to the Encyclopedia.

PARTICIPANTS IN THE “GREAT WORK”

At every turn, we see the guiding hand of Rome; influential archbishops, bishops, and Roman clergy leading and stirring up their people into the “spirit” of the Revolution. Rome always ‘officially’ excuses the conduct of these wayward prelates as being mavericks or renegades, but ‘unofficially’ they perform marvelously in the “Great Work”. No better example could be given than the Archbishop of Paris, Jean Baptiste Gobel, who was a sworn leader of the Revolution. Quoted from the 1911 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia, volume eleven, page 484, under the topic Paris: “At the beginning of 1793 he (Gobel) was at the head of about 600 “sworn” priests, about 500 of whom were employed in parishes. On 7 November, 1793, he solemnly declared before the Convention that his subordinates and he renounced the duties of ministers of Catholic worship, whereupon the Convention congratulated him on having “sacrificed the grotesque baubles of superstition”.

Bishop Perigord-Talleyrand and Abbe Joseph Sieyes are another two examples of direct Roman Catholic influence. Both men working together openly guiding the Revolution, they also worked together to bring about the ‘coup’ that set up Napoleon Bonaparte as the First Consul of the French Republic. They assisted the First Consul in the drafting of the Concordat with Rome. There was also Champion de Cice, Archbishop of Bordeaux, champion of the Jesuits; Jean de Pompignan, Archbishop of Vienne; La Luzerne, Bishop of Langres; and again Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun, who were all presidents of the National Assembly. When you have this kind of prestigious religious leadership, whom the people so highly venerated and even hallowed, then nothing less could be expected of the great masses except they be their obedient followers.

The evidence of a vigorously working conspiracy becomes overwhelmingly abundant when you examine the names and the overlapping lives of the leaders involved in the French Revolution. We have previously mentioned Frederick II, the Great, the great Prussian war King and his key role as the Supreme Head of Freemasonry’s Scottish Rite. We know he greatly favored the Jesuits and sheltered them when their order was dissolved. He also made the Jesuit educated encyclopedist Denis Diderot and encyclopedist Jesuit educator, Jean d’Alembert, members of his Royal Academy of Prussia and offered d’Alembert the presidency of the Academy, which he refused. D’Alembert in 1755 and again in 1763 visited Frederick in Germany and received his pension regularly from Berlin. Frederick the Great’s brother-in-law and military pupil, Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, as has already been quoted from the Catholic Encyclopedia, became Illuminati and was “the foremost leader of European Freemasonry and the princely representative of the illuminism of his age”.

Now in the service of the Duke of Brunswick was a Frenchman, Lieutenant Colonel Mauvillon, who had been most active during the formal existence of the Illuminati Order, and had contributed much to its reception in the Protestant states of Germany. He remained long concealed. It was through the inter-medium of this man Mauvillon, that Adam Weishaupt communicated the honor of becoming an Illuminati to another Frenchman, Count Gabriel Mirabeau.* Mirabeau came into the Order from the beginning, apparently as one of its founders, and went under the “Illuminated” name of Arcesilas and later under that of Leonidas. The Memoir found at his house outlined the program of the Illuminati evolved by him in collaboration with an inner ring of Freemasons belonging to the Lodge Theodore. Mirabeau stood out as one of the most noted figures during the early stages of the French Revolution.

Without exception, every chief actor in the French Revolution was either Jesuit educated, a Catholic prelate, or a member of the Illuminati Order where within the Jacobin Club they would come together to conspire and carry out the “Great Work” — which in the open system of the Jacobins was the reflection of the complete hidden system of the Illuminati — and in back of the Illuminati were the hidden Jesuit ‘masters’. As faithfully as the ‘terrorists’ carried out the plan of the Illuminati, they themselves were not initiated into the innermost secrets of the conspiracy. In other words, behind the National Assembly, behind the Convention, behind the clubs, behind the Revolutionary Tribunal, there existed that “most secret convention” which directed everything; an occult and terrible power of which the other Convention became the slave. This “Power” was above Robespierre and the committees of government, above Danton, Marat, Desmoulins, and Louis Saint-Just, above the Duc d ‘Orleans, and even above the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. It also had something much greater in mind than just the triumph of a Revolution confined to France.

WORLD REVOLUTION — ROME’S TICKET TO WORLD DOMINATION

From the very beginning the French revolutionaries repeatedly declared in their manifestos and demonstrated by their conduct, that the ‘Revolution’ must inevitably lead to “the ruin of all thrones…Therefore we must hasten among our neighbors the same revolution that is going on in France”. The diplomatic committee, who were commissioned to deliberate on the conduct which France was to hold with other nations, decreed on the 15 December 1793, “The Committees of Finance and War asked in the beginning, What is the object of the war which we have taken in hand? Without all doubt the object is THE ANNIHILATION OF ALL PRIVILEGES, WAR WITH THE PALACES, PEACE WITH THE COTTAGES. These are the principles on which your declaration of war is founded. All tyranny, all privilege must be treated as an enemy in the countries where we set our foot…We must therefore declare ourselves for a revolutionary power in all the countries into which we enter”. So at the point of the bayonet France administered her ‘Liberty’ to her surrounding nations. Then by way of compensating to France for the trouble she had taken, they were plundered of all they had. No French General excelled in the “Great Work” more than Napoleon Bonaparte.

The sober reality is that the perpetrators of the French Revolution used France as a prototype and launching pad aimed to bring their revolution worldwide. A simple illustration of this ‘World Revolution’, in fact, being extended down to our own times and enhanced with a touch of ‘French’ that most can understand and are familiar with, is the controversial word ‘communism’. Communism comes from the French word commune, which means the inhabitants of any place who are bound together by common interests and administration, especially in a town with a municipality. During the times of the French Revolution the word les communes came to be used of ‘the common people’, or their representatives — ‘the Commons’. Clearly, by their own declarations, world revolution is the very aim of the Illuminati. And to perfection, it also serves Rome in her aims to govern the world and achieve what her very name implies — universal domination.

In the two hundred years since the French Revolution, there has been two world wars, the so called Communist Revolution, and all the other wars in between that has provided time and much experience to whip and mold the world into Rome’s “Grand Design” goal. The Illuminati motto is — ‘Out of chaos comes order’. By that, it is meant: by war, revolution, and devastation the world will be reduced to such a state of chaos that whatever is left will have to submit to their utopian New World Order. But who is that nation that Rome has chosen to play its main super star role in her final ‘Great Work’ thrust — that will administer all this devastation and destruction upon the world? Grieving sadly, with deep felt emotion, it has been revealed, designed, and prophesied that our beloved nation — the United States of America — will commit these terrible end time acts.

Continued in Chapter 13 England’s Religious War Expanded To New World

All chapters of The Grand Design Exposed

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