"Synarchy"
was the name given in the late Nineteenth Century (by Joseph-Alexandre
Saint-Yves, called D'Alveydre, 1842-1909) to the
occult Martinist freemasonry formed a century
earlier, in the 1770s.
Politics of ocultism as in the case of Martinism
and d'Alveydre's Synarchy, likely conjures up images
of the Ariosophical cults that Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke has described as constituting "the
occult roots of Nazism."1 With regard to the French fin de siecle however, Willa Silverman has written that
"occultism emerged as part of the ideological and literary language of the
nationalist right in the last decades of the nineteenth century ... a protean
revolt against the late nineteenth century's secular dogma, scientific materialism."2
In fact while Clarke
attempted to do in the case of Guido von List’s Ariosophy,
we will instead investigate if the French occult revival ever included
Fascist roots. (See also Pierre-André Taguieff ” La Foire
aux illuminés: Esotérisme, théorie du complot, extremism,”2005).
First, however, we
will attempt at least a cursory definition of fascism and examine the case that
has been made for a link between occultism and fascism in German-speaking
Central Europe. Furhtermore of course scholars today
still disagree where precisely fascism originated, and whether it should
be considered a movement originating from the traditional Right or from the
Left. (For this see World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia, 2006).
These difficulties of
definition are compounded by the fact that the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini
differed from one another, whereas those regimes of Eastern Europe or of the Ibero-American world that are often called fascist differed
significantly from both. The problem is particularly complex in the case of
France, where no fascist movement succeeded in taking power but integral
nationalism had been a powerful force since the fin de siècle. Opinions range
from Ernst Nolte, whose Three Faces of Fascism argues that the phenomenon
originated in France with Charles Maurras and the
Action Francaise, to Rene Remond
and other French writers who deny that fascism had any significant place in the
history of the French Right. Robert Soucy, whose twovolume
survey of French fascist movements is the most complete and balanced
examination of this contentious topic, has argued that fascism emerged in
interwar France as a response to middle-class fears of socialism, that it drew
upon earlier traditions of integral nationalism but was also ideologically
indebted to Mussolini, and that it coexisted and cooperated with the
traditional Right in multiple and disturbing ways. (*Created for a more popular
readership there is of course “World Fascism” published in the USA last year
and edited by C.P. Blamires, however while presented
an excellent overview of the theories in English, it omits studies in other
languages like for example the just mentioned path breaking work of Stefan
Breuer, plus many others)
But to address the
question of whether French fascism had occult roots, we must reach at least a
provisional working definition of what fascism is. It is perhaps easiest to
begin with a negative definition. Fascist regimes and movements reject
liberalism, socialism, and parliamentary democracy, and advocate a reorganization
of society along hierarchical, often military models. They reject the class
conflict and materialist orientation of modem industrial society and offer a
vision of an idealized, interdependent organic community, although this is
often little more than a fig leaf to cover the continued existence of
capitalist structures under the guise of corporatism. They define the national
community in exclusive, often racial or ethnic terms, and direct social
tensions away from the community itself toward both external and internal
enemies. Fascism may thus be seen as antidemocratic, antisocialist,
corporatist, militarist, and broadly chauvinistic (whether in racial, ethnic,
or simply in cultural terms). Next we will examine to what degree Martinism and its variants can be described as fascist or
protofascist in this sense and whether any of the constitutive elements of
French fascism may be ascribed to occult influence. We will begin, however,
with an examination of the case for the "occult roots of fascism"
argument in Germany, discussing why this model is inapplicable to the French
case.
Perhaps one of the
greatest differences in occultism, from one fin de siecle
to another, as it were, is in the cosmopolitan character of eighteenthcentury
Illuminism compared to the more nationally particularist
occult revivals of the late nineteenth century. As we have seen, influences
flowed freely back and forth across the Rhine during the late Old Regime. JeanBaptiste Willermoz imported
the mysticism of the German Rite of Strict Observance into French esoteric
Freemasonry and then transmitted the Martinist
reworking of that system back to Germany at the Wilhelmsbad
conference of 1782. Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, arguably the most influential
of French Illuminist philosophers, spent several formative years in Strasbourg,
where he was introduced by the Alsatian journalist Rudolf Salzmann to the work
of the German mystic Jakob Boehme, whose thought would, through Saint-Martin,
become a major component of the French esoteric tradition. In the years
following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, however, French and
German traditions parted ways, so much so that the German Ariosophical
movement that Goodrick-Clarke has identified as a
major influence on Nazi ideology bears little resemblance to its neo-Martinist French counterpart.
Spiritualism and
Theosophy, the only truly international esoteric movements of the nineteenth
century, were both products of the Englishspeaking
world, though both generated, at least for a time, widespread enthusiasm and
interest in continental Europe during the 1850s and 1880s, respectively. The
fin de siecle occult revivals of France and Germany
could, rather simplistically but not entirely inaccurately, be described as
nationalistic reactions against the internationalist and Indophile
characteristics of English-speaking Theosophy. Papus
(Gerard Encausse) began his exploration of the occult
within the Theosophical Society, as did Rudolf Steiner, one of the most
influential of the fin de siecle occultists of
German-speaking central Europe. Occultism in both societies, therefore,
combined a universal quest for secret and ancient gnosis with a search for
autochthonous national traditions The doctrines, foundational myths, and
programs that were adopted on opposite sides of the Rhine and of the Alps, not
surprisingly, differed considerably, and the differences between French and
Austro-German occultism not only tell us about the dreams and ideas of a small
number of esoteric thinkers but also are broadly reflective of larger differences in French and German self-understanding and national identities.
France has,
throughout most of its premodern history, been a crossroads and melting pot for
many different cultural and ethnic groups, with successive waves of Celtic,
Roman, and Frankish invaders occupying the land, subdUing
its prior inhabitants, and imposing their cultures and institutions. This
complex history has made the creation of a foundational myth for the French
nation particularly difficult. The modern French state, derived from one of the
oldest centralized monarchies in continental Europe, encompasses whatever the
various kings of France were able to conquer and was not the product of any
preexisting cultural or ethnic community. Some of its outlying provinces, such
as Languedoc and Provence, were culturally related to, but distinct from, the
culture of the He de France, while others, such as Brittany and Alsace, were
entirely unrelated to it, and other territories more closely related to the
French heartland, such as Wallonie and French
Switzerland, were not incorporated into the French state. It is therefore not
surprising that French identity has come to be defined not by race or
ethnicity, but by common consent, famously expressed in Ernest Renan's
statement that the nation is "a daily plebiscite." German national
identity, on the contrary, has been both simpler and more explosive. Beginning
with the awakening of German nationalism in the Romantic era and in the
struggle against Napoleon, Germans have looked with pride on the exploits of
the ancient Germanic tribes, and tribal leaders such as Hermann the Cheruscan (known to the Romans as Arminius), who defeated
three Roman legions under Varus and kept the greatest empire of the world at
bay, were incorporated into the pantheon of national heroes. It is therefore
not surprising that, whereas French occultists sought to recover a universal esoteric tradition (in which, however, France had a central and unique
role to play), German occultists instead looked back to a glorious, particularist past, characterized (in their eyes, at least)
by racial purity and the essential virtues of the ancient Germanic warrior.
This racialized and particularist branch of
occultism, which became known as Ariosophy, or the
wisdom of the Aryans, was most clearly articulated by the Austrian Guido von
List (1848-1919), a scholar of Nordic runes and mythology, who offered a vision
of an ancient golden age under the Armanenschaft, an
ancient Germanic theocracy of priests of the sun, whose power was broken by the
spread of Christianity and the domination of the Latin races over the Germanic
ones. These theories were further elaborated byJorg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954),
who presented the Templars (a mysterious medieval order already popular among
modem occultists) as the descendants of the Armanenschaft
and considered the order's suppression, according to Goodrick-Clarke,
to represent the "triumph of the racial inferiors who had long sought to
remove the chief advocates of the eugenic cult." Lanz
von Liebenfels founded his own Ordo Novi Templi in 1907 to spread his mystic-eugenic cult, and
several of his followers would exercise a cultural influence over the National
Socialist German Workers' (NSDAP, or Nazi) Party in its formative years,
notably Rudolf von Sebottendorf14 whose Thule Society transmitted the swastika
as symbol to the NSDAP, and Karl Maria Wiligut, at
one time favoured by Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi
leader most interested in Nordic mythology.4
Although the work of Goodrick-Clarke (as well as that of a legion of less
scrupulous, sensationalist authors) proVides an
illuminating look into the origins of some of the symbols and foundational
myths of Nazism, it would be erroneous to attribute too much influence to
figures such as List, Lanz von Liebenfels,
and their followers. Although some prominent Nazis, notably Himmler and Alfred
Rosenberg, attached great importance to Nordic myth, many others did not, and
Hitler himself was wary of the strongly anti-Christian overtones of the
neo-paganism of the Ariosophists, though more out of
fear of antagonizing the German churches than any personal beliefs. More
important, as Ian Kershaw's extensive research on popular opinion under the
Third Reich has clearly demonstrated, the esoteric myth and symbolism of the
Nazi Party was not a major component of its public image and was not a factor
in attracting the loyalties of most ordinary Germans to the regime. Kershaw
observes that "admiration for Hitler rested less on bizarre and arcane
precepts of Nazi ideology than on social and political values-if often
distorted or represented in extreme form-recognizable in many societies other
than the Third Reich."s The roots of Nazism,
Kershaw concludes, lay elsewhere, in political and economic antagonisms that
were in no way unique to Germany. Furthermore, the recent work of Corinna Treitel has cast increasing idoubt
on Goodrick-Clarke's thesis by demonstrating that Ariosophy was in fact quite marginal in the world of
Wilhelmine German occultism, which was made up of a diverse spectrum of groups,
ranging from mainstream Theosophy and Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy to
spiritualism, psychical research, and homeopathy. Rejecting what she calls the
"teleological framework" that has dominated the study of German
occultism, Treitel argues that German Theosophists
were as likely to be liberal universalists as voelkisch
nationalists and remarks that only eight of the dozens of occult groups and
circles active in Germany can be identified as Ariosophist.
These universalist tendencies, Treitel notes, made
occultism anathema to the Nazis, who suppressed occult groups and publications
soon after their rise to power in 1933.6
With regard to French
occultism, it should be obvious to the reader at this point that, despite
certain commonalities such as the belief in ancient, secret gnosis and a shared
admiration for the Templars, Martinism and Ariosophy had very little in common, because both their
ideals and their ultimate goals were quite different. Indeed, the observation
of Rogers Brubaker that "French nationalism has been state-centered and
universalist, while German nationalism has been Yolk-centered and differentialist," seems strikingly appropriate to
describe the difference between the two strands of occultism.7 The Ariosophists, Goodrick-Clarke has
written, "described a prehistoric golden age, when wise gnostic
priesthoods had expounded occult-racist doctrines and ruled over a superior and
racially pure society." This vision was a fundamentally exclusive one, in
which the Germans stood in fundamental opposition to other peoples
Qews, Latins, Slavs, and others) who "had sought
to ruin this ideal Germanic world by emancipating the non-German inferiors in
the name of a spurious egalitarianism."8 The Martinists
and other writers of the French occult tradition, by contrast, offered visions
of prehistory and theories of society that were global in scope and universal
in relevance. Neither the principles of social order sought by Court de Gebelin, the ancient theocracy imagined by Antoine Fabre d'Olivet, nor the cosmic process of reintegration theorized
by Saint-Martin were the exclusive preserve of the French, though all three
authors attributed a place of prominence to their native land in the
realization of the plans of divine Providence.
This is not to say,
however, that Martinism or other variants of French
occultism were color-blind; indeed, in light of the prejudices of the age, and
in particular the almost universally accepted racist consensus of late
nineteenth-century European society, it would have been truly remarkable if
they had been. One of the most striking developments one can observe in
surveying the unfolding of the French esoteric tradition from the late
Enlightenment to the eve of the twentieth century is the growing centrality of
race, which is almost entirely absent as an analytical category in the late
eighteenth century, makes an ambivalent appearance in the early nineteenth
century, and develops into an obsession by the late nineteenth. We will now
examine the growing racialization of French occult thought, from one fin de siecle to another. The growing centrality of race in Martinist and other branches of French esoteric thought is
inseparable from the strange trajectory of the race concept in French
intellectual history more generally. In the eighteenth century, French
discussions of race tended to focus on the composition of French society
itself. Defenders of the nobility and its customary privileges, such as the
count of Boulainvilliers, stressed the racial
distinction between the conquering Franks, who had established the French
monarchy and from whom the nobility claimed descent, and the conquered Gauls, ancestors of the commoners of France, whose
subordination was justified by the right of conquest. Although this argument
was accepted by those political philosophers, such as Montesquieu, who favored
a strong aristocracy as a barrier against despotism, the critics of noble
privilege did not hesitate in rejecting them. Voltaire dismissed the ancient
Frankish warriors as "ferocious beasts" and asked rhetorically,
"Are the House of Lords and of the Commons or the Court of Equity to be
found in the forest?"9 Rousseau decisively dismantled the argument of the
right of conquest in The Social Contract, denying that any lasting moral
obligation could derive from it.10 On the eve of the Revolution, the abbe
Sieyes turned Boulainvilliers on his head, accepting
his argument that the nobles formed a separate, racially defined caste within
France and using that distinction to argue that the nobility was a foreign and
parasitic body within the French nation, which would be strengthened rather
than weakened by its expulsion. Sieyes's argument was later incorporated into
the republican narrative of French history by nineteenth-century scholars such
as Augustin Thierry.11
The Enlightenment
did, however, contribute to the growth of racial thought in France in other
ways. Prior to the eighteenth century, Virtually all Europeans accepted the
biblical creation narrative as historically accurate, dated the age of the
world at no more than about six thousand years, and assumed that all human
beings were descendants of Noah through his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
Thomas Trautmann has demonstrated that what he
describes as the "Mosaic ethnology" remained widely accepted in
Britain well into the nineteenth century and influenced the development of
philology and ethnography in deep and unacknowledged ways, as scholars sought
to trace the newly discovered languages of Asia, and the peoples who spoke
them, back to one of Noah's sons, taking the similarity of Indo-European
languages as proof of common biological origin. The concept of a common
"Aryan" identity was first suggested by linguistics, and, despite its
later abuse by anti-Semites and white supremacists in Germany and elsewhere in
Europe and North America, Trautmann argues that, in
the works of early Orientalists like Sir William Jones, Aryanism had an
inclusive function, making Britons and Indians part of a larger family.12
The more skeptical
French, however, had generally rejected the Mosaic ethnology by the
mid-eighteenth century, leaving an explanatory void to be filled by the
developing sciences of man. The rejection of the story of Noah, and that of
Adam and Eve as well, raised the question of where man originated and, indeed,
whether different races of men were in fact the product of a common creation.
There were earlier precedents for these discussions. Leon Poliakov
notes that the discovery of the Americas had raised the question of the common
origins of the inhabitants of the old and new worlds and that the
sixteenth-century debate between Sepulveda and Las Casas over indigenous rights
hinged on the question of whether the native inhabitants of the Americas were
part of the same creation as Europeans.13 The development of natural science
and the rise of secularism raised new questions previously settled by the Bible.
Voltaire, in a Traite de metaphysique,
written in 1734 but not published until after his death, used racial difference
as an argument to undermine the biblical creation narrative. Voltaire has his
narrator, supposedly an extraterrestrial visitor to the earth, inquire of a
priest whether black parents ever produce white children or white parents give
birth to yellow children. When told that this never happens, the narrator
concludes that the story of Adam and Eve, which the priest had previously told
him, must be false, declaring that "bearded whites, Negroes with wooly
hair, the long-maned yellow races and beardless men are not descended from the
same man."14 The Swedish scientist Linnaeus, who established the most
definitive taxonomy of the animal kingdom in the eighteenth century, divided
humanity into four racially defined subspecies. The white race, or Europaeus
albus, was defined as "ingenious and inventive," while the red race,
Americanus rubesceus, was described in keeping with
the legend of the noble savage as "happy with his lot" and
"liberty-loving." In contrast to these admirable types, Linnaeus
presented the yellow race, Asiaticus luridus, as
"proud, avaricious" and "melancholy," and at the lowest
rung of humanity, the black race, Arer niger, which he described as "crafty, lazy,
careless" and "governed by the arbitrary will of his master."15
Despite its theorization of universallaws of society
and of human rights, the Enlightenment was well on its way to developing a new,
racist science of man.
Nevertheless, while Poliakov is surely correct to remind us that racist ideas
have a long, if not distinguished, history in Western thought, scientific
racism coexisted with other paradigms of the human sciences in the eighteenth
century and did not yet enjoy the clear upper hand. A long tradition, dating
back to Renaissance scholars such as Niccolo
Machiavelli and Jean Bodin, maintained that the
differences between nations and cultures were primarily the result of climate,
which, according to this argument, made the peoples of the Mediterranean,
especially the Turks and Arabs, sensual, indolent, and hot-tempered, while the
peoples of the frozen north were cold, taciturn, and melancholy. This argument
was still thriving in the eighteenth century, as Montesquieu still attributed
Oriental despotism and European liberty partly to the effects of climate, while
the naturalist Georges Buffon speculated that blacks taken from Africa to
Scandinavia would, over many generations, eventually turn white.16 Buffon further
asserted, in his Histoire naturelle, that "in
the human race, the influence of climate is only noted by rather light
variations, for this species is one, and is very distinctly separated from all
other species. Man, white in Europe, black in Africa, yellow in Asia, and red
in America, is but the same man dyed the color of the climate."17 An early
eighteenth-century writer, the abbe Dubos, in a passage singled out for
ridicule by Voltaire, had written in 1719 that "the difference is great
between a Negro and a Muscovite. However, this difference can only come from
the different air in the countries where the ancestors of today's Negroes and
Muscovites, both descended from Adam, went to settle."18 The question of
heredity versus environment in the shaping of human difference was, therefore,
still an open one to the thinkers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. Fabre d'Olivet was perhaps the first
writer of the French esoteric tradition to make race a central factor in his
discussions of man and history. Race is, however, absent from his first work of
metahistory, the 1801 Lettres
a Sophie sur ['histoire, and it does not appear as a
causal factor in his works on linguistics and poetics. For his last and most
ambitious work, Histoire philosophique
du genre humain, Fabre d'Olivet
drew heavily on the work of the British Orientalists who worked at the Asiatic
Society in Bengal and for whom race, at the time seen as defined by lingUistics, was becoming an ever-more-important analytical
category. It may therefore be said that race enters French esoteric thought
through the medium of postEnlightenment Orientalism.
The new science of
linguistics, which was in many ways born out of the Orientalists' study of
Sanskrit, soon revealed that the languages of northern and central India formed
part of an Indo-European language family, which was sometimes called Aryan,
while those of southern India belonged to an unrelated language family often
called Dravidian. Although these discoveries concerned the realm of language
and not that of ethnicity, they contributed to the development of what Trautmann has called "the racial theory of Indian
civilization," according to which the civilization of ancient
India, widely
believed to be the oldest in the world, was the creation of white Aryans, who
invaded and conquered the original inhabitants of the subcontinent, the black
Dravidians. Although this theory was not fully elaborated until the late
nineteenth century, elements of it were already present in Orientalist scholarship
from the late eighteenth century on; Francis Wilford, for example, had written
in 1792, JIlt cannot reasonably be doubted that a
race of Negroes formerly had preeminence in India."19 This increasing
racialization of Indian prehistory would have a powerful impact on the
development of occult metahistories, when race became
a causal factor in world history, tentatively in Fabre d'Olivet's
Histoire philosophique, and
much more centrally in the work of Fabre d'Olivet's
imitators and successors. Fabre d'Olivet begins his
discussion of world history with an eighty-page dissertation on human nature,
without which, he argues, the laws of history and politics cannot be
understood. This exposition echoes central themes of the esoteric and Martinist traditions, particularly the contention that man
should not be defined as an animal (in fact, Fabre d'Olivet
invents a separate category, the regne hominal, which he defined as separate from the regne animal or animal kingdom), but rather as a partly
divine, partly material being, with a triple nature that Fabre d'Olivet defined as body, soul, and mind. Fabre d'Olivet thus asserts a common, diVinely
created, human nature that is not distinguished by race. In fact, Fabre d'Olivet explicitly asserts that the laws of human nature
he expounds in the introduction to Histoire philosophique are to be understood as applying to lithe
totality of men."20 Nevertheless, Fabre d'Olivet
qualifies this statement by declaring that different peoples are at different
stages of the development of their higher (spiritual and intellectual)
capacities, writing, This development does not belong to all men; it does not
even belong to the greater part of them; it is but the quality of a small
number. Nature does not create men equal; souls differ even more than bodies
.... Equality is no doubt present in the essence of will (essence volitive) of
all, because that essence is divine, but inequality developed in the faculties
through the differing use and exercise of them; time has not been measured equally
for all, and positions have changed, the paths of life have shortened or
lengthened, and, while it is certain that all men, departing from the same
principle, should arrive at the same goal, there are many, the greater number,
that are far from arriving, while others have arrived, or are about to do so,
while others, obligated to recommence their path, have barely emerged from the
nothingness which would have enveloped them had their existence not been
guaranteed by the eternity of their creator .... The equality of souls is
therefore, in the present state of things, a greater chimera even than the
equality of instinctive bodily force. Inequality is everywhere, and in
intelligence more than elsewhere, for there are among humanity, especially
among those which civilization has not yet reached, many whose intellectual
center has not even begun to develop.21
Fabre d'Olivet's vision of humanity is therefore elitist, because
only a small number of individuals can fully develop their God-given faculties
and become fully human. It must be repeated, however, that this model, true to
its Enlightenment origins, is an evolutionary rather than an essentialist one,
in which human beings rise progressively, through civilization, toward their
full potential, and that it is not explicitly racialized. Superior individuals,
for Fabre d'Olivet, may be found among all peoples at
all times, though his assumption is clearly that their number will increase
with the level of civilization. Immediately following his discussion of human
nature in the preface to Histoire philosophique
du genre humain, Fabre d'Olivet
opens his discussion of world history with the statement that, at the beginning
of time, there were four races in the world, associated with the four cardinal
directions. The oldest civilization of the world was that of the red race of
the west, the inhabitants of the continent of Atlantis, some of whom escaped to
the Americas following the natural disaster that destroyed their ancestral
home, after which they lost their civilization and degenerated into barbarism.
The next stage of civilization, Fabre d'Olivet
writes, belonged to the black race of the south, which emerged from Africa to
colonize Asia, home of the yellow race, and Europe, the home of the white
race.22 Fabre d'Olivet thus uses race as a
descriptive category and an ordering principle in narrating the lost prehistory
of mankind, but it is worth stressing that, in his account, there is no
explicit or implied superiority of one race over another. On the contrary, Fabre
d'Olivet presents the ancient Hyperboreans,
the ancestors of the white race, as the most backward of the peoples of the
prehistorical world, who were conquered and enslaved by the more civilized
"Sudeans" from Africa. One of the strangest
and most interesting parts of this account is that Fabre d'Olivet
presents racial mixing to have occurred along the Mediterranean frontier, not
as the violent spoils of conquest, but at the initiative of white women, who
voluntarily left their people to cohabit with black men. It is difficult to
know how this rather surprising assertion should be read, because it is very
much against the grain of early nineteenth-century assumptions of proper
orderings of gender and race. In any case, Fabre d'Olivet
neither stigmatizes this process of racial mixing as miscegenation nor argues
that it led to the degeneration of the races involved. He does, however,
suggest that the wars which, he claims, raged between the black invaders and
indigenous whites of prehistorical Europe were largely driven by the
competition of black and white men for the affections of white women.23 (As
To escape the
colonial rule of the Sudeans, Fabre d'Olivet argues, the Hyperboreans,
or the Celts, as he begins to call them at this stage, escaped into the dense
forests of northern Europe, where they became increasingly savage and warlike.
Fabre d'Olivet argued that the need for constant
warfare against the invaders of the south led to the development of a
hierarchical, warlike society among the white race. "Here is the
much-debated origin of the inequality of conditions, established very early
among the northern peoples. This inequality was not the result of caprice or
oppression, but rather was the necessary result of the state of war in which
these nations were engaged. Fate created this state, and determined the
consequences. It irrevocably divided the people in two classes: the strong and
the weak. The strong were called to fight, and the weak to nourish and serve
the warriors . . . . From the very cradle of this race emerged the nobility and
the commoners with all of their privileges and attributes."24 This section
of the Histoire philosophique
reflects his consistently negative assessment of the ancient Celts, whom he
presents as under the domination of cruel and bloodthirsty druids, stigmatizing
especially the high priestess Voluspa, who demanded ever-increasing human
sacrifices to appease the gods. Ram (Rama), a wise young reformer, abandons his
people in protest against these cruelties, taking "the healthier part of
the nation" with him as he wandered eastward into exile. When Ram and his
followers arrived in Asia, India was under the rule of the black king Deriades, and when Ram prepared to meet the forces of the
latter in the battle of Isthakar, Ram "saw that
this was no ordinary conquest, but that the fight about to begin in Hindustan
was to decide the fate of the white race and the triumph of his cult. On the
shores of the Ganges the great question was to be decided: to which of the
great peoples, black or white, would belong the empire of the world."25 In
this battle, Ram's forces emerged victorious and established an empire that
encompassed all of the known world but the extreme north and south. "Asia
dethroned Africa," Fabre d'Olivet wrote,
"and took from its hand the scepter of the world, but Europe, which had
set this event in motion, was still nothing ... and rather than joining the
course of Providence, it sought to smother it." Only the Celts of northern
Europe remained outside of the world empire, where, "hiding their bloody
cult in their terrible forests, they became cruel and ferocious."26 It
should be obvious that Fabre d'Olivet's account of
the legend of Ram bears little resemblance to that presented in the Hindu
Ramayana, and much of Fabre d'Olivet's narrative
appears to have been invented simply by the imaginative metahistorian
himself .
Nevertheless, when
compared to other narrations of this story, Fabre d'Olivet's
discussion of the establishment of the universal empire of Ram is remarkably
pluralistic. Although he describes the battle between Ram and Deriades as a struggle between two races with universal
implications, he emphatically does not take the occasion to assert the
superiority of the white race. Rather than depicting the prior inhabitants of
India as an inferior race of barbarians, he declares that they "had
arrived at the highest degree of the social state/, arguing that the "Boreans" had adopted much of their culture, including
tools, weapons, and even systems of writing, from the "Sudeans,"
and attributing to the latter the construction of the world's oldest monuments,
including the pyramids of Egypt and the most ancient temples of India. Far from
being a theorist of white supremacy, Fabre d'Olivet
at times sounds almost like a forerunner of contemporary Afrocentrism! Fabre d'Olivet further praises what he presents as the racially
pluralistic structure of Ram's empire, declaring, "Just as two metals
strengthen one another in their amalgamation, the two races gave the materials
of the edifice more solidity, in becoming fused one in the other.27
In addition to race,
gender plays a very interesting part in Fabre d'Olivet's
work, as women and the advocates of the "feminine principle playa central,
and generally very negative, role in his narrative. Fabre d'Olivet
attributes the bloodlust of the ancient Celts, their desire for human
sacrifices, to the cruelty of the priestess Voluspa and suggests that the great
emperor Ram also would have fallen victim to her wrath had he remained in
Europe. Fabre d'Olivet invoked the abuse of power by
Voluspa and other primordial priestesses to explain and justify the subsequent
subjugation of women, writing, "She wished to dominate by ruse, and she
was crushed by force. She wished to take everything, and nothing was left for
her. Fabre d'Olivet further warned that a similar
fate might befall the assertive public women of his own day. "Europe is in
ferment. If you do not conduct yourselves Wisely, I regret to inform you, it is
certain that the fate of the women of Asia awaits you."28 The golden age
of Ram's empire also comes to an end over a gender-related issue, when the
rebel who would destroy it, Irshou, defied the
unitary cult of Ram with a dualistic heresy that championed the feminine over
the masculine principle. Fabre d'Olivet attributed to
Irshou's heresy the emergence of mother-goddess cults
throughout the ancient world, and he also declared it to be the origin of the
dualism of Zoroaster in Persia and even of the Chinese yin/yang duality. It is
surely significant that, according to Fabre d'Olivet,
Irshou's partisans fought under a red banner, whereas
those who remained loyal to Ram's principles followed a white banner.29 Women,
and the feminine principle that they represent, are in Fabre d'Olivet's magnum opus consistently the source of conflict
and disorder. When taken together, the use of race and gender in Fabre d'Olivet's work suggest a sort of karmic law of history.
White Europeans have colonized and enslaved black Africans in the modern era,
Fabre d'Olivet seems to imply, because in a distant
past, Africans colonized and enslaved Europeans. Women are subordinate in the
contemporary world because, in a distant past, they held power and abused it. Metahistory thus becomes, in Fabre d'Olivet's
hands, a powerful weapon in defense of the early nineteenth-century status quo.
It is nonetheless significant, particularly in comparison with the further
development of discourses of race and gender in the late nineteenth century,
that Fabre d'Olivet presents this state of affairs as
an entirely conditional outcome, which does not in any way imply the permanent,
biological inferiority of blacks or of women.
Fabre d'Olivet's Histoire philosophique du genre humain had
been all but forgotten in the decades follOWing its
author's death, and it was only rediscovered when Joseph-Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre plagiarized large sections of it for his 1884
work Mission des fuifs. Much had changed in European
racial thought in the sixty-two years between the publication of Fabre d'Olivet's work and that of its derivative copy by
Saint-Yves d'Alveydre. European scientific racism was
born, or at least redefined, with the mid-century publication of Arthur de Gobineau's treatise The Inequality of Human Races, and the
vulgarization of Darwin's theory of evolution contributed to a new vision of
history in which superior races overcame and supplanted their inferior
counterparts in an endless struggle for existence. Despite the changes of these
years, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's work maintains the
tone of its predecessor and presents the origins of the four races, and the
victory of the white over the black race with the establishment of Ram's empire
in India, in almost exactly the same way as Fabre d'Olivet
had done.
In the context of the
almost universal acceptance of the notion of the superiority of the white race
among late nineteenth-century Europeans, Saint-Yves d' Alveydre's
treatment of the racial question in his metahistorical narrative can only be
described as progressive. "Among humanity," Saint-Yves d'Alveydre wrote, "race is to souls what, in the
natural order, the field is to the seed, everything depends on cultivation.
Give me Lapps, Patagonians, Negroes of Central Africa; in less than a century
of education, I will make them physically, intellectually, morally, the equals
of the most cultivated races."30 He denounced British imperial rule in
India as "the greatest evil which, today, suppresses and retards the
possible resurrection of Indian civilization," and, in a later work, the
Mission de l'Inde, declared that, deep in the
mountains of India, the state of Agarttha still
preserved the principles of Ram's ancient synarchy and, with the help of a
Europe conscious of the greatness of Indian civilization, could spread them to
the rest of the world for its regeneration. Saint-Yves d'Alveydre
further condemned the legacy of European imperialism, declaring, "We have
behaved like ferocious barbarians toward all the other races and all the other
civilizations" and remarking bitterly that "we have committed all
these crimes as crucifiers of the entire earth, and not as adorers of the
Crucified."31 The general tenor of Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's
work suggests that, although Asia may lack the material advantages of the
modern West, it remains more in touch with true spirituality and with the
principles of synarchic government. He writes, for
example, that "this universal Synarchy lies in the memory and the hopes of
all the ancient Asian and African peoples ... all would be ready to second
Europe, when they see it modify in this sense its colonial regime, and help the
ancient nationalities of Asia and Africa remake themselves, instead of dividing
them by trickery and crushing them by violence, in order to exploit
them."32
On the other hand,
Saint-Yves d'Alveydre invokes the yellow peril to
demonstrate the urgency of European peace and reconciliation, fearing the
vengeance of the oppressed masses of Asia and Africa, "animated by our
spirit and armed by our destructive means" and laments that "it is
impossible not to view the future as a bloody twilight."33 Whether a
result of the growing racism and racial anxiety of the European world, or an
expression of the generalized sense of decadence and imminent danger that was
pervasive in fin de siecle France, there is a more
urgent tone to Saint-Yves d' Alveydre's work than is
present in that of Fabre d'Olivet, who in 1822 could
still confidently assert, "Asia is not at all in a condition to dispute
Europe's predominance .... Africa no longer has the right, and America will
only do so if Europe proves itself unworthy."34 Sixty years later, on the
eve of the colonial scramble for Africa, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre
wrote, "It is not a million, but twenty million men, armed and trained in
the European fashion, that the united peoples of Africa and Asia, supported by
Islam and the Chinese empire, can launch, in any given moment, against a Europe
divided against itself."35 Two years later, Saint-Yves d' Alveydre warned of "unleashed hordes" of Asians
and Africans launching a war of vengeance against Europe, in which "the
bloody fruits of this fanaticism and this international and colonial policy
will be cast underfoot in an abominable harvest."36
Although he uses race
as a historical, causal factor, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre
is nonetheless far removed from the Ariosophists of
Germany who put Aryan racial purity at the center of their metahistorical
narratives. Nor did Saint- Yves d' Alveydre see
Europe as the only source of wisdom and progress; on the contrary, he gives
great importance to Asia, albeit to an imagined, unchanging Asia largely
constructed to serve as a foil against secular, materialist European society.
Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's valorization of Indian
culture and wisdom is indebted not only to Fabre d'Olivet,
unquestionably the greatest single influence on his thought, but also to Helena
Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, which, as we have seen, provided the
impetus for the revival of occultism in continental Europe in the 1880s, even
if the neo-Martinist revival was, as has been argued
here, primarily a reaction against Anglo-Saxon Theosophy. Saint-Yves d'Alveydre was, however, the exception; most fin de siecle French occultists adopted the hierarchical model of
the races that was then dominant in the European intellectual world. In a
review of Histoire philosophique
du genre humain, printed in the Martinist
newspaper La Voile d'Isis on January 21, 1898, Papus highlights the elements of race theory in Fabre d'Olivet's work and adds his own racist gloss to Fabre d'Olivet's reveries. Noting how Fabre d'Olivet
had theorized the separate appearance and evolution of the four "root
races" on different continents and their succession of one to another in
the leadership of world civilization, Papus remarks,
"The apogee of the civilization of a race coincides with the birth, and we
may add, the childhood of the race which is to follow it." Neverthless, although in Fabre d'Olivet's
work this succession is purely cyclical, and does not imply any sort of racial
hierarchy, Papus invokes the former's work to argue
for the superiority of the white race to all others. "A preliminary remark
to make here," Papus wrote, "is that the
black and red races are races in decrepitude, and not races in evolution. This
is why the educated, civilized Negro has an atavistic tendency to return to the
savage state. Furthermore, nothing else explains the abrupt halt in the
intellectual evolution of the Negro at the age of sixteen. This race is
declining, it is extremely difficult to lift up its individual members.
"37
A fin de siecle work of synthesis, Edouard Schure's
(later co-worker of Rudolf Steiner) Les grands inities
(The Great Initiates), which, like the works of Fabre d'Olivet
and Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, sought to present a
unified esoteric tradition stretching back to the most remote prehistory,
applied late nineteenth-century scientific racism to offer an explanation for
the rise and fall of civilizations. Fabre d'Olivet
had traced the four Linnaean races of man (white, red, yellow, and black) back
to the most distant times, but he had not offered a definitive answer to the
question of whether these races once had a common ancestor. Schure,
on the other hand, declares categorically that they did not, writing, "The
four races which cover the globe at the present time are the offspring of
different earths and zones .... Stretching over thousands of years, each
continent gave birth to its own flora and fauna, crowned by a human race of a
different color."38 Having thus made the case (without offering any
biological or anthropological evidence) for the polygenesis of humanity, Schure goes on to state that "all human varieties
result from the blending, combination, degeneracy, or selection of these four
great races." Although, like Fabre d'Olivet, Schure argued that the red and black races had dominated
the world in a remote past, he placed all of recorded history under the rule of
the white race, claiming both Egypt and India as white civilizations, stating,
"In the present cycle the white is the predominating race, and if the
probable antiquity of Egypt and India be calculated, its preponderating
influence will be found to date back seven or eight thousand years."39
While adopting Fabre d'Olivet's model of the successive rise to predominance of
the different races, Schure leaves no doubt as to his
views of their relative merits. He celebrates the qualities of the white race,
declaring, "Its distinctive signs are fondness for individual liberty,
that reflective sensitiveness which creates the power of sympathy, and the
predominance of the intellect, giving an idealistic and symbolical turn to the
imagination."40 His evaluation of the black race is much harsher. Schure begins his discussion of the black race by telling
his readers, "The superior type must not be sought for in the degenerate
Negro, but rather in the Nubian and the Abyssinian, in whom is preserved the mould of the race, on reaching its highest point in
civilization."41 Although he grants a measure of civilization to the
ancient societies of East Africa, Schure's views on
that civilization are predominantly negative, as when he writes, "Their
social organization consisted of an absolute theocracy. Above were the priests,
dreaded as though they were gods; below were crawling tribes without any
recognized family, while the women were slaves .... Between the science of the
black priests and the rude fetishism of the masses, there was no intermediary,
no idealistic art or suggestive mythology .... Religion was indeed the reign of
might by terror."42 In this negative depiction of ancient theocracy, Schure breaks with Fabre d'Olivet.
His model appears rather to be the eighteenth-century scholar Nicolas
Boulanger, whose L'antiquite devoilee
par ses usages condemned primitive theocracy (or
"Sabianism," a term Schure
also uses) as oppressive and obscurantist.43
Schure
begins his discussion of ancient history with India and reproduces a racialized
version of the Aryan conquest of the Indian subcontinent, including a
discussion of the conflict between the reformer Ram and the priestess Voluspa
that is taken almost in its entirety from Fabre d'Olivet's
work. Schure, however, extends the racial argument
farther than Fabre d'Olivet had done, declaring that
Ram not only conquered the indigenous black inhabitants of India, but expelled
them as well, "for he wished a people of pure white race to inhabit the
center of India.44 Schure's discussion of the rise
and fall of Indian civilization clearly reflects the influence of Count Arthur
de Gobineau, who had made racial degeneration the
motor force of the decline and fall of world civilizations in his highly
influential study The Inequality of Human Races, the publication of which
opened a new era of pseudoscientific racism and contributed to the subsequent
development of eugenics. Gobineau declared, "The
inequality of the races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough to
explain the whole course of its destiny." Civilizations, Gobineau declared, were formed by superior races through
the conquest of inferior races but slowly declined as a result of
miscegenation. Any civilization, Gobineau declared,
"will certainly die on the day when the primordial race-unit is so broken
up and swamped by the influx of foreign elements, that its effective qualities
have no longer a sufficient freedom of action." Raising nineteenth-century
prejudice to the level of a timeless principle of history, Gobineau
declared that "the human race in all its branches has a secret repulsion
for the crossing of blood." Once the blood of the founders has become
diluted, Gobineau stated, "it becomes impossible
for them to live happily under the laws that suited their ancestors," and
once-great civilizations relapse into barbarism.45
Schure
presents Gobineau's insights as the key to the
previously unknown reasons for the collapse of Ram's empire and the decline of
Indian civilization. Schure writes, What the Hindu
epopee does not tell us is the profound mystery of the mixture of the races,
and the slow inculcation of the religious ideas which brought to pass profound
changes in the social organization of Vedic India. The Aryans, pure-blooded
conquerors, found themselves in the presence of considerably mixed and inferior
races, in which the yellow and red types were blended into a multiplicity of
shades on a dark background. Hindu civilization thus appears to us as a
formidable mountain, bearing a melanian race at its
foot, mixed nations on its sides, and the pure Aryans on its summit. Separation
of the castes not being rigorously insisted on in the early ages, great
mixtures took place among these peoples. The purity of the conquering race
diminished more and more as time went by, even though nowadays the predominance
of the Aryan type in the higher classes, and of the melanian
in the lower, may be noticed. From the turbid depths of Hindu society there was
always springing forth a burning vapour of passion, a
mixture of languor and ferocity, like the pestilential miasma of the jungles
mixed with the odour exhaled by savage beasts. The
superabundant black blood has given India a color special to itself. It has
refined the race, and rendered it effeminate at the same time. The strange
thing is, that in spite of their mixed blood the ruling ideas of the white race
have been able to keep themselves at the top of this civilization through so
many revolutions.46 Race, then, is for Schure as for Gobineau an inexorable and unchanging law of history. What
is perhaps most striking in the passage above is the prevalence of metaphors of
biological danger that are used to describe the impact of the black race, which
is likened at once to tropical disease and the beasts of the jungle. In this
formulation, the black race is associated with the most sensual, animalistic aspects
of human existence, while higher intellectual and spiritual functions are the
exclusive preserve of the white race and are endangered by racial mixing. This
assertion of the intellectual superiority of whites over blacks, however,
coexists discordantly in Schure's work with what can
only be described as a morbid fascination with black sexuality. This aspect of Schure's work is most apparent in his discussion of the
rituals of initiation to the mysteries of ancient Egypt. Schure
offers an elaborate description of the ceremonies, rituals, and symbolism of
the Egyptian mysteries, most of which appears clearly derived from esoteric
Freemasonry and Illuminism. Adepts who sought admission to the inner sanctum of
the temple had to demonstrate their knowledge of the twenty-two arcana that
formed "the alphabet of occult science" (that is, the trump cards of
the Tarot) and pass trials by fire and water. The final test, however, was a
temptation of the flesh, which Schure tellingly
represents by a black woman, of whom he writes, "She was of that Nubian
type whose intense and intoxicating sensuality concentrates all the powers of
the feminine animal: projecting cheekbones, dilated nostrils, and thick lips
resembling luscious, red fruit."47
According to Schure, if the novice accepted the cup this African
temptress offered him, he would become a slave of the temple, while if he
rejected it, he would pass the final test and be admitted to the order of
initiates. The same theme is repeated in Schure's
account of Exodus; here, while Moses is receiving the divine law from God on
the mountaintop, the Israelites below are drawn into idolatry by "the
women of Moab, who boldly seduced them with their ebony skins and flashing
eyes."48 In Schure's twisted mind, sexual
intercourse across racial frontiers was at once tremendously seductive and a
mortal danger to the integrity of the superior race. Schure
was not a member of the revived Martinist order, but
followed a different trajectory, which took him from Blavatsky's Theosophical
Society to the Anthroposophy of the Austrian occultist
Rudolf Steiner.49 lt would certainly be tempting to dismiss Schure's racism as an intrusion of the Germanic, Ariosophical tradition into French esoteric discourse.
Steiner was not, however, an Ariosophist, and Schure's indebtedness to French sources, particularly Fabre
d'Olivet and Gobineau, is
too clear to deny. Furthermore, the leading neo-Martinists
of the French occult revival endorsed Schure's ,
project, as Guaita wrote, "While our ideas
differ from those of M. Schure on certain points, we
do not hesitate to recommend his book as one of the strongest and most complete
of the works which propose a solution of these great problems. "SO
Nevertheless, although an ugly and exclusive racist undercurrent can be seen in
French occult discourse, particularly in the fin de siecle,
it would be fundamentally inaccurate to characterize the Martinist
tradition as a whole as racist or to argue that Martinism
introduced racism into broader French society. The influence, it appears quite
clear, flowed in the other direction. The latter half of the nineteenth century
witnessed not only the elaboration of a science of eugenics, which gave
academic sanction to white supremacy, but also saw the expansion and
radicalization of anti-Semitism in France, culminating in the Dreyfus Affair of
the fin de siecle. Although anti-Semitism had never
been completely absent from French society, France in 1791 had been the first
European state to grant full civil equality to Jews, and a relatively small,
though prosperous and influential, Jewish community, broadly assimilated to
French culture, had flourished for much of the nineteenth century. As the
integralist new Right emerged in the latter part of the century, however, its
rejection of capitalism and urban society increasingly found expression in
anti-Semitism, most notably in the writings of Edouard Drumont,
whose sensationalist expose La France juive asserted
that a handful of Jewish families had seized control of the French political
and economic system and whose newspaper La Libre parole was the most virulent
organ of the new anti-Semitism. Fin de siecle
anti-Semitism was not only more radical than what had preceded it but also of a
different character. Although traditional Christian anti-Semitism, which
centered on the condemnation of the Jews as the murderers of Jesus Christ, was
hardly an admirable feature of medieval and early modern European civilization,
it was culturally rather than racially exclusive and made exception for Jewish
converts to Christianity. The new anti-Semitism of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, by contrast, represented the Jew as biologically
distinct from and opposed to the "Aryan" race, a rigidly essentialist
position that left no hope of salvaging the Jewish population of Europe and, in
the eyes of some scholars, prepared the way for the mass extermination of the
Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe.51
Rather ironically, in
light of the role of Martines de Pasqually,
an Iberian Jew who converted to Christianity, in founding the Martinist Order in France, elements of anti-Semitism recur
periodically in the French esoteric tradition over the century following the
establishment of Martinism. This latent anti-Semitism,
which, it should be noted, tended more to link Martinists
to the surrounding culture than to distinguish them from it, was generally of a
traditional and religiously inspired character. For example, Guaita, who was a childhood friend of the integral
nationalist Maurice Barres, condemned the Jews in traditional terms, declaring
that "the land of Canaan of the modern Jews is usury, it is the rise and
fall of the market."52 AntiSemitism was not,
however, a major part of Guaita's work, and nowhere
in his massive compendium Le Temple de Satan, which denounced Satanic and
heretical doctrines from the middle ages to the present, does he make the
linkage between Judaism and satanism, which, as Norman Cohn has demonstrated,
was widespread in medieval Christian thought and was not uncommon to
nineteenth-century French Catholicism. 53 Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, the
second founder of Martinism, had an ambiguous view of
the Jews, whom he alternately praised as the chosen people of God and
castigated for their failure to fulfill their divine mission. "Israel
should have been the torch-bearer of nations, and therefore the ruler of
mortals .... But when the Jews themselves failed to recognize the one who was
sent to them, when they sacrificed him to their blindness and ignorance, then
the door was opened to the nations .... Then Paul was chosen to be the apostle
of the Gentiles, then the river described by the prophets overflowed its banks,
and all the nations of the world were nourished by it."54 The betrayal of
the divine mission of the Jews, Saint-Martin declares, was necessary to the
designs of Providence, for if the Jews had not rejected and crucified Jesus,
"the nations would not have received the heritage," and he insists
that "God wanted to suspend the Jews, and not to condemn them,"
implying that they, too, would ultimately find reintegration with the divine.55
Significantly, the hero of Saint-Martin's allegorical epic Le crocodile is a
Spanish Jew called Eleazar, who is clearly modeled on Saint-Martin's onetime
mentor, Martines de Pasqually,
although it should also be noted that Eleazar indicates in the text a desire to
convert to Christianity when the time is ripe.56
Fabre d'Olivet's Histoire philosophique du genre humain,
perhaps because of its purpose of de centering and deprivileging the biblical
creation myth, contains a few scattered anti-Semitic asides, mostly of a
traditional, religious character. The Jews, Fabre d'Olivet
wrote, were "covered with the blood of a divine messenger" and, as a
result, "took their hatred with them" wherever they went.57
Elsewhere, Fabre d'Olivet described the Jews as
"bearers of a tradition which they did not understand," who could
only offer "a book closed with seven seals, harder to open than that which
is described in the Book of Revelations."58 Anti-Semitism was not,
however, a fundamental part of Fabre d'Olivet's
thought, and though he argued that the wisdom of the ancient East should not be
rejected because it conflicted with the doctrines of "a poor and ignorant
little country called Judea," he praised Moses as one of the initiates who
preserved the ancient teachings of Ram after the collapse of the universal
empire.59 Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, who seized upon this
part of Fabre d'Olivet's argument and elaborated it
further in his Mission des fuifs, adopts a position
that, if anything, might be described as philo-Semitic.
Saint-Yves d'Alveydre praised ancient Israel, under
the Mosaic laws, as "a royal university of God, to save from the
destruction of the ancient institutions the science of the physiology of the
universe, or cosmogony, and its consequences, the science of the social
state."60 Most significantly, perhaps, Saint-Yves d' Alveydre
is almost alone among nineteenth-century French occultists in not only praising
the ancient Jews but also defending their modern descendants, arguing (in a
morally laudable but historically suspect way) that Jews and Christians had
suffered together from despotic political rule and that despotism (or Nemrodism, as he calls it) and not Christianity was to
blame for the persecution of the Jews of Europe. 61
Alphonse-Louis
Constant, the Christian socialist who would become the occultist Eliphas Levi, reflected in both stages of his career the same ambiguity
toward the Jews as did Saint-Martin. In one of his earliest works, La Mere de
Dieu, Constant declared, "Christianity emerged from Judaism like a child
from the cradle, and Judaism remained a dead form, it is true, but historical
and monumental in the story of divine progress."62 In La Bible de la liberte, Constant praised the Jews as "our elders in
the faith," but also called on them "to read your books and
understand that you have been a blind and hard people, as all of your prophets
have said."63 Years later, as the magus Eliphas
Levi, he wrote in Histoire de la magie
that the Jews "believed themselves an elite race, and thought that God had
given them the Truth as a patrimony rather than confided it to them as a
storehouse belonging to all humanity."64 Biological anti-Semitism, which
defined the Jews as an alien and dangerous race, the eternal enemies of the
Aryans, does not seem to have found r adherents among the exponents of the
French occult tradition. On the contrary, as they elaborated their theories
about the origins of the races and the rise and fall of civilizations, French
occultists explicitly denied that the Jews formed a people apart. For the most
part, as we have seen, French occultists discussed race in terms of skin color,
and the four-race theory that they generally adopted was inconsistent with the
new anti-Semitic myth of an eternal opposition between Aryans and Semites.
Fabre d'Olivet, who wrote before the theory of a
unified Aryan race had been fully elaborated, did not define the Jews as a
separate race, but rather asserted that they were a people of white Celtic
origin, who had become increasingly racially mixed as a result of their
wanderings from place to place.65 Fabre d'Olivet's
imitator, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, as on many other
points, unquestioningly repeated Fabre d'Olivet's
improbable assertion, declaring that "the Hebrews have in their veins the
same Celtic blood as do we Aryan Europeans."66 However improbable the
assertion of a Celtic origin for the Jewish people may have been historically,
in the context of a French society then being taught to revere nos ancetres les Gaulois (our ancestors the Gauls),
the assertion that the Jews were really a lost tribe of the Celts was an
assertion that the Jews were not a foreign and unassimilable race, as integral
nationalists like Drumont maintained, but rather
that, by virtue of a common heritage, they belonged in France.
Schure
offered his own novel interpretation of the distinction between Aryans and
Semites, which, in his formulation, was a cultural rather than a racial divide.
Following Fabre d'Olivet, Schure
imagined that the black race had once dominated the world in prehistoric times,
and that it had sought to colonize the northern shores of the Mediterranean,
the home of the (then more primitive) white race: Wherever the white colonists
submitted to the black nations, accepting their rule and receiving religious
instruction from their priests; there, in all probability, appeared the Semitic
nations, such as the Egyptians before Menes, Arabs, Phoenicians, Chaldeans, and
Jews. The Aryan civilizations, on the other hand, were formed where the whites
must have ruled over the blacks either by war or conquest, as, for instance,
the Iranians, Hindus, Greeks, and Etruscans. It must be added that, in this
naming of the Aryan peoples, we also include all the white nations which
remained in a barbarian, nomadic condition in ancient times, such as the
Scythians, the Getae, the Sarmatoie, the Celts, and
later on, the Germanic tribes.67 Schure's discussion
of the Aryan/Semitic dualism, and by extension his treatment of the Jewish
question, takes a broadly universalistic tone that is in sharp contrast to his
discussion of the mixing of peoples of different skin color:
The Semitic and the
Aryan currents are the two streams along which all our ideas, mythologies, and
religions, our arts, sciences, and philosophies have come to us. Each of these
currents bears with it an opposite conception of life, the reconciliation and
balance of which would be truth itself. The Semitic current contains the
absolute and higher principles; the idea of unity and universality in the name
of one supreme principle, which, in its application leads to the unification of
the human family. The Aryan current contains the idea of ascending evolution in
all terrestrial and supraterrestrial kingdoms, and in
its application leads to an infinite diversity of development in the name of
nature and of the multiple aspirations of the soul. The Semitic genius descends
from God to man, the Aryan reascends from man to God. The one is imagined as
the justiceloving archangel who descends to earth,
armed with the sword and the lightning bolt; the other as Prometheus, holding
in his hand the fire he has stolen from heaven, and encompassing Olympus with
his far-reaching gaze.68 For Schure, therefore, the
Aryan and Semitic currents were not irreconcilable foes, but rather
complementary opposites, whose conciliation would bring civilization to an
unprecedented level. In light of the tidal wave of anti-Semitism that engulfed
much of French political and social discourse in the 1880s and 1890s, this was
a remarkable assertion, as was Saint-Yves d' Alveydre's
declaration in Mission des Juifs that the Jews, alone
among modern peoples, retained the keys to Europe's regeneration and future
happiness. The leading Martinist journal of the fin
de siecle, L'Initiation,
avoided the topic of anti-Semitism and made no mention of the Dreyfus Affair.
The neo-Martinists and their fellow travelers were
not Dreyfusards, but neither were they anti-Semites.
The politics of the occult was amorphous, but not infinitely flexible.
Nearly all occult
thinkers and commentators shared certain common denominators, one of the most
important of which was contempt for electoral democracy and for Homo oeconomicus in all of his forms, whether liberal or
socialist. In part, this rejection may, of course, be explained by the sorry
record of French experiments with democracy for most of the century following
the capture of the Bastille in 1789. The popular violence and institutionalized
repression of the 1790s, the bitter social conflicts of 1848 and the rapid
collapse of the Second Republic, and the appalling brutality of the civil war
between Communards and Versaillais in 1871 could
certainly only strengthen the convictions of many observers that democracy was
an inherently unstable form of government or, in any case, one quite unsuited
to the French nation. The rejection of parliamentarism, however, with its
assumption of competing interests or parties that struggle over the spoils of
electoral triumph, goes deeper in French society and has been shared by Right
and Left alike. Sarah Maza has recently argued that,
out of rejection of the corporatism and particularisms of the Old Regime, the
revolutionary restructuring of French society placed a great emphasis on unity
and consensus and stigmatized all efforts to articulate a politics of separate
class or local interests. Similarly, James Lehning
has noted that faith in direct popular action as an expression of the general
will complicated the tasks of parliamentarians seeking to establish stable and
sovereign governing institutions in the early Third Republic. Both of these
authors are clearly influenced by Franyois Furet and
his thesis of the difficulties of "ending" the French Revolution.69
An emphasis on unity and consensus was, however, by no means limited to the
Jacobin Left and its heirs; it was also a fundamental component of the
historical imaginary of the Legitimist Right, which sought to restore the
organic unity of French society, as expressed in the filial bonds between the
king and his people that had been severed in the Revolution.
In addition to these
contributing factors to the development of antidemocratic and anti parliamentary sentiment, which were common to many
nineteenth-century French, there were other factors unique to the subculture of
Martinism and its intellectual heirs. As we have
seen, the Martinists saw man as a spiritual, rather
than material, being, whose purpose for existence was to be fulfilled in the
spiritual realm, through ultimate reintegration with the divine, rather than in
the world of the here and now. They also stressed the unity and harmony of
creation and condemned forces that, in their eyes, brought disorder or division
to society. For this reason, Martinists rejected all
those forms of politics, from revolutionary socialism on the Left to elite, juste-milieu liberalism on the CenterRight,
which assumed permanent divisions of class and status and focused on material
rather than spiritual ends. The growing secularism of French society, and
particularly the clashes between church and state that escalated steadily in
the latter part of the nineteenth century, were to the neo-Martinists
unmistakable signs of the decadence of fin de siecle
France. Finally, as we have seen, a fair amount of elitism was inherent in the
concept of esotericism, which assumes that only a small, select number within
society are capable of achieving gnosis, which must be concealed from the eyes
of the profanes. It is not difficult to find expressions of contempt for
democracy in the writings of occult thinkers and writers, especially in the
late nineteenth century, when the perceived decadence of French society and
venality and instability of its governing institutions clashed with the
occultists' hopes of spiritual renewal. Levi, the pivotal figure in inspiring
the occult revival of ........
the latter half of the nineteenth century, wrote that "the people will
always be the people ... that is to say the governable mass incapable of
governing itself .... A nation of sovereigns would necessarily be as anarchic
as a class of scholars or of pupils who consider themselves masters; no one
would wish to listen, and all would dogmatize and command at the same
time."70
Josephin Peladan, the extravagant
erstwhile collaborator of Guaita in the revived
Rosicrucian Order of the 1880s, glorified "the monarchical regime, in
contrast with ignoble democracy, which obligates the Magi to perform military
service."71 Guaita mocked the values of the
revolutionary tradition, declaring that they had led only to "all possible
license under the name of liberty, all misery under the name of equality, and
under the name of fraternity, all forms of egotism."n
This hostility was perceived by contemporary observers, as the more egalitarian
Revue spirite remarked in 1887 that "esotericism
and democracy cannot make a good menage."73 Much of the antidemocratic
rhetoric of occult commentators may appropriately be dismissed as the
embittered grumbling of the members of a selfproclaimed
elite, whose brilliance and talent go unrecognized by a blindly materialistic
society. Levi was born the son of a shoemaker, and he spent most of his life in
poverty. James Laver notes that Peladan, who fancied
himself a magus and adopted the title-Sar Merodach-of
an Assyrian monarch, "was almost penniless, and had to live on plates of
vegetables which he bought from the wine merchant at the street corner."74
Social resentment, which is not infrequently a pivotal factor of petty
bourgeois radicalization, certainly deepened the contempt that many French
occultists felt for the society of their age.
The most substantial
and defensible occultist critique of democracy is offered by Fabre d'Olivet in his metahistorical magnum opus, Histoire philosophique du genre humain. Fabre d'Olivet observed
that all republics, from ancient Athens and Rome to the modern Anglo-American
world, had depended on the institution of slavery for their labor force and
that therefore their claims to embody liberty were hollow and hypocritical.
Fabre d'Olivet coined the term emporocracy
to refer to merchant states, which he defined as signifying a greedy and
corrupt plutocracy, dominated by money and credit. In contrast to those
thinkers who would present slavery as an unfortunate corruption of the
democratic ideal, Fabre d'Olivet presents it instead
as an indispensable support for republican institutions, which alone allowed
them to overcome the obstacles of Fate (material constraints) and ensure their
own stability and prosperity at the expense of other peoples. "Any emporocratic republic in which slavery is not
established," Fabre d'Olivet wrote, "must
found its grandeur on the absolute misery of a part of the population. It is
only due to slavery that liberty may be sustained. Republics are oppressive by
their very nature. When oppression, that is to say, slavery or misery, do not
manifest themselves at home, as is the case with Holland, they manifest themselves
abroad, which all comes to the same thing."75
Fabre d'Olivet was dismissive of the newly established American
republic, arguing that "it owes its apparent stability only to the extreme
weakness of its Fate, which does not yet allow it to make exterior
conquests," and predicting that "when it is strong enough to do so,
[Fate] will inevitably cause it to collapse upon itself."76 This image of
America as an experiment destined to fail contrasted, however, within the same
work with an alternate image of America as a future menace, "a seed of emporocracy, destined to invade the entire hemisphere,
react boldly against its metropole, and threaten Europe with an entire
upheaval."?? The real object of Fabre d'Olivet's
critique of republican institutions, however, was not America but rather
England, which he dismissed, as Bonaparte had done, as a nation of shopkeepers,
incapable of true heroism or great deeds. Fabre d'Olivet
described perfidious Albion, France's longtime foe, as "a royal emporocracy, in which the king is the honorary sovereign
and Parliament the true master." Fabre d'Olivet
argued that the apparent prosperity of mercantile nations was ephemeral and
deceptive, arguing that "the bit of splendor which one observes in emporocracies, and which is taken for happiness, is but a
false adornment with which the luxury of commerce colors the cheeks of a
corpse. The excessive misery of the greater part of the population, and the
profound immorality which devours the rest, nourish within the heart of the
nation the seeds of hatred and impiety, which cannot fail to destroy
it."78
Although both Britain
and the United States would prove far more resilient than Fabre d'Olivet imagined, his indictment of exploitation,
inequality, and greed in both societies has much to justify it and led him to
seek his ideal social order according to very different principles. A common
assumption shared by all occultist critics of democracy is that material
self-interest and voluntary contractual association formed an insufficient base
for a lasting social order. The artificiality of the state as a "business
transaction" was contrasted with the harmony and resilience of an organic
society built on timeless principles. We are so accustomed to associating
organicist social thought with fascism that it is easy to forget that this
conceptualization was shared by all early nineteenth-century political
movements influenced by Romanticism and that the metaphor of state and nation
as living organism was not inherently exclusive or coercive. One aspect fascism
shared with other intellectual tendencies, such as social Catholicism, some
varieties of monarchism, and even some variants of non-Marxian socialism was
the effort to find a "third way" between capitalism and socialism,
and a tendency to look for that third way in an idealized past of feudal
estates and artisanal corporations. The general term most often used to
describe these proposals of a third way is corporatism, though corporatism has
been understood to signify such different things as hierarchical, neomedieval
guilds and "decentralized," neofeudal
provincial estates; autonomous producers' cooperatives; and state-directed
industrial cartels. There are significant echoes of corporatist thought in the
works of some writers of the occult tradition, most prominently the proposals
of Saint-Yves d'Alveydre. We now turn to examine
those elements of corporatism and their significance in both esoteric and more
mainstream social and economic discourses. One of the points of connection
between the old (monarchist) Right of the nineteenth century and the new
(fascist) Right of the twentieth was their common search for a "third
way" between socialism, with its revolutionary and egalitarian
implications, which threatened the interests of the elite, and capitalism,
which destabilized traditional hierarchies, created new extremes of rich and
poor, and threatened the lower middle classes with proletarianization. The
model of corporatism, which would combine private ownership of property with
extensive government regulation and coordination intended to ensure social
stability, was embraced by both the old and the new Right as the best means of
confronting the challenges of modernity while preserving an archaic social
structure founded on patronage and deference.
Steven Kale has
written that mid-nineteenth-century Legitimists, many of whom were provincial
aristocrats accustomed to relations of patronage with the peasants who lived on
their rural estates, sought to counter the revolutionary unrest they associated
with uprooted urban populations with a model of benevolent paternalism. Social
Catholics such as Count Albert de Mun advocated a "Christian social
order," which could provide what Kale describes as "permanent, and
often authoritarian, solutions to the problem of class conflict and social
disintegration." Kale further writes that, "in the 1870s, the
Legitimists became virtually obsessed by the mystique of the corporation. They
drew up plans for the corporate organization of the electorate, talked of prev6ts
and echevins, recalled the ordinances of Saint Louis
enfranchising the craft guilds, and publicized the idea of mixed associations
of patrons and workers."79 The past, particularly an idealized vision of
medieval society, would thus provide the blueprint for building a new and
better future. As we will see however, few of the writers of the Martinist tradition gave much attention to the actual
structure of governing institutions, preferring to focus instead on the spirit
and goals that such institutions were to serve. The most notable exception to
this rule was Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, who used the
medium of metahistory to advocate a specific
political and economic system that he called "synarchy." The synarchic government that Saint Yves d'Alveydre
advocated was to consist of three councils, addressing matters of education and
faith, administration and economics. We will return to the broader idea of the
synarchy in the next chapter, in which we will examine the variety of political
and social solutions French occultists proposed. In this section, we will limit
our discussion to the third council of the synarchy which Saint-Yves d' Alveydre explicitly advocated as an alternative to both
capitalism and socialism, neither of which} in his view, could ensure prosperity
and stability to the French state.
In one of his first
published works the Mission actuelle des ouvriers, first printed in 1882, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre denied that capitalism or socialism could solve
France's problems or resolve what he called the legitimate desires of the
working class. Of the former} Saint-Yves d' Alveydre
wrote, "Their doctrines focus on the free market, allowing riches to be
created and spread without limits. That is something for those who have the
means to be free, but for the poor} liberty is but a vain word, if they are
unable to use it." Saint-Yves d' Alveydre
decisively rejected socialism, however, declaring that "the only remedy
which has been proposed is worse than the disease," argUing
that it would lead to "Caesarism" and stating that "any dynastic
pretender, any ambitious revolutionary ... will play at socialism at your
expense, to arrive in power and suppress liberty to his own profit."sO
Saint-Yves d'Alveydre rejected "this pretended dualism of capital
and labor/' declaring that "this affair between you and the factory office
is but a family quarrel between two orders of capitalists and workers, the
laborer and the employer. Too bad for the employer, if he does not know how to
be, does not desire to be} or is not able to be, the father of the family of
his workers." Having stressed this ideal of benevolent paternalism,
Saint-Yves d} Alveydre declared that the state had no
role to play within "this dispute among brothers, purely economical, which
should lead to good treaties of peace, for in the end, you do not wish anything
else."81 Five years later, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre
presented the medieval Estates General as a model for a new corporatist order,
declaring that "France alone has, in her own tradition, the social law
which can preside over a new age," and he called for a "social
Concordat" for the good of the nation as a whole.82
The economic council,
unfortunately, is the least developed of the branches of the synarchy to which
Saint-Yves d'Alveydre always returns in his work.
Saint-Yves d'Alveydre devotes much more attention to
the balance between the councils of education and administration, asserting
that the political branch should be under the direction of the council of sages
and respect its dictates but that the latter should not seek to exercise power
directly. In light of the idealist tone of occult discourse more generally,
which tends to dismiss material concerns as secondary to spiritual and
intellectual ones, this relative neglect is not surprising, but it does
complicate the analysis of what economic system Saint-Yves d'Alveydre
was proposing in practice. It seems likely, however, in view of the tone of
Saint-Yves d' Alveydre's declarations on the subject,
that his vision is closer to a medieval model of craft guilds, characterized
(in theory, if not always in practice) by quasi-familial bonds of solidarity
and mutual interest and a strong, religiously inspired esprit de corps, than to
a modem, depersonalized system of institutionalized collective bargaining
between massive federations of workers and employers.
During the interwar
period, when communism appeared as a major threat and capitalism appeared to be
in a state of permanent crisis, a wide range of antidemocratic,
antiparliamentary political movements, in France and elsewhere in Europe,
advocated some form of corporatism as a "third way" between
capitalism and communism. Mussolini's Italy went farthest in institutionalizing
corporatist structures as part of a national economy of state-managed capitalism,
but, as Charles Maier and Richard Kuisel have
demonstrated, the shift toward corporatism, cartelization, and greater
government regulation was a broad response to the challenges of an increasingly
advanced and complex capitalist economy and was not necessarily limited to
authoritarian regimes.83 Robert Soucy has shown that most of the organizations
of the rather splintered French fascist "waves" of the 1920s and
1930s advocated some form of corporatism, often in explicit imitation of the
apparent successes of Mussolini's regime.84
Was Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's "synarchy," then, a precursor to a
fascist corporatist economic order? Despite their evident similarities, I would
argue that it was not. Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, like
most of his colleagues in the French occult revival of the fin de siecle and their predecessors earlier in the century, was
not primarily concerned with economic issues; indeed, the ways in which the
economic branch of the synarchy was actually supposed to work are never
addressed in his writings. The motivation and purpose of the synarchy,
moreover, is primarily spiritual rather. than material, and Saint-Yves d' Alveydre explicitly describes it as a biblically inspired,
Christian social order. Although the synarchy is certainly expected to lead to
greater material prosperity, this is never its primary purpose. By contrast,
Soucy has argued that, "although French fascists often waxed pious about
undertaking the 'spiritual' renewal of France, their basic goals were highly
materialistic," noting that "their party programs defended private
property, low taxes, and social hierarchy."85 Corporatism, especially in
the late nineteenth century, was a fairly hazy doctrine, better defined by what
it rejected than by what it advocated, and it could be used to advocate very
different systems, from the paternalistic Legitimism of Albert de Mun to the statedirected capitalism and dictatorship of Mussolini's
Italy to the primarily spiritual and moral vision of Saint-Yves d'Alveydre. The similarities of the terminology the
advocates of corporatism used should not overshadow the fundamental differences
between the solutions they proposed.
Perhaps the greatest
difference between Martinism and the diverse
varieties of fascism that emerged in interwar Europe lies in the consistent and
profound rejection of militarism that is sharply apparent in the writings of
nearly all Martinist thinkers. The flamboyant Josephin PeIadan (alias Sar Merodach) declared that the careers of soldier and initiate
were fundamentally opposed, writing in Comment on devient
mage, "As a soldier, you cannot be a magus; passive obedience makes
unworthy both those who impose it and those who endure it." PeIadan continued in the same work with a scathing
denunciation of militarism:
Thou shalt not kill.
Does the human collectivity not have the same duties as the individual? All the
public wealth is consecrated to maintain the national assassins, all scientific
activity tends to seek means of destruction. Does the foreigner force this defense?
Then the foreigner is barbaric and murderous like France, and I see no moral
progress made over the Goths, I see only variations in the means of homicide.
In what way does the
Corsican bandit who opened with his bloody hands the nineteenth century differ
from the other bandit who opened with his brutish triumphal march the
thirteenth century? Between Temugin called
Genghis-Khan and Bonaparte called Napoleon, what degree of infamy differs?86
PeIadan further declared that "the glory of
conquerors, the glory of soldiers is, for the magus, an opprobrium without
name, and the Vend6me column, for example, will be demolished by the initiate
as the names of warriors will be erased from streets and plazas. The true glory
is that of beauty and justice. "87
Peladan was a strange and extravagant character, and a
schismatic who qUickly split from his erstwhile
collaborators Guaita and Papus
to establish a rival order, the Catholic Rosicrucians.
His repudiation of militarism and conquest, however, is echoed throughout the
writings of prominent French occultists across the nineteenth century. Fabre d'Olivet condemned militarism throughout history in his Histoire philosophique du genre humain, denouncing Napoleon for creating a "military
tyranny" and calling the Spanish conquest of the Americas a "national
crime" that must be expiated by the Spaniards.88 Saint-Yves d'Alveydre went even further, condemning the spirit of
military conquest, which he called "Nemrodism"
after the biblical conqueror and empire-builder, as the antithesis of the
divinely inspired synarchy, writing that "Caesarism or Nemrodism
have been engendered and will always be engendered wherever the three social
powers are confused in a single political power. "89 For Saint-Yves d' Alveydre, Nemrodism was not only
base and brutal, but ultimately self-defeating, as he wrote that many societies
had fallen from "pursuing this materialist chimera: the establishment of a
king of kings through politics separated from universal morality. Woe to the
victors in such an attempt: this is the cry of the experiences registered in
the great laboratory called the history of humanity. For such a victory is but
apparent, and has for immediate consequence the defeat in the germ of the
society that thus takes on the Caesarian institutions of madness, iniquity, and
ruin."90
Schure
echoes Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's condemnations of
militarism in his magnum opus, Les grands inities,
though he focuses not on the biblical conqueror Nemrod,
but on the empires of Babylon and Rome, as well as the "ferocious military
oligarchy of Sparta." In opposition to the diVinely
ordered states of ancient India and Egypt, Babylon was, for Schure,
the "tyrannical center of universal anarchy." Schure
reserves his greatest venom, however, for the Roman Empire, which he denounces
as the source of militarism and despotism in the Western world, personified in
its symbol of "the brazen She-Wolf, with tawny hair erect ... the image of
this government, the demon which will take possession of the Roman soul to the
very end .... Under the Caesars, Rome, inheritor of Babylon, extends her power
over the whole world. What has become of the Roman state? Conquering Rome feeds
like a vampire on the corpse of a worn-out system. And now the Roman orgies are
freely and publicly paraded with all their bacchanalia of vice and
crime."91 "What is the origin of Rome?" asks Schure.
"The conspiracy of a greedy oligarchy, in the name of brute force .... She
pretends to worship the gods, but the only object of her veneration is the She-Wolf!
And now, away on the blood-stained dawn, there appears the final offspring of
this ravenous creature, the embodiment of the genius of Rome-Caesar! Rome has
conquered all the nations of the earth, Caesar, her incarnation, arrogates to
himself universal power."92
A few exceptions and
qualifications should be noted in this otherwise solidly antimilitarist
consensus. As we shall see in the next chapter, Hoene
Wronski, a Polish exile who lived and wrote in France
in the early to midnineteenth century and who had a
strong, if momentary, influence on Levi, idolized Napoleon and accorded him the
status of divine messenger and harbinger of a new world. Other writers of the
period, such as Fabre d'Olivet and Levi, briefly
admired the emperor as an instrument of Providence, though in both of these
cases the admiration proved to be short-lived. Schure
set Alexander apart from the other military conquerors whom he condemned,
praising him instead for bringing about a synthesis of the wisdom of the
ancient east and west, which generated the Hellenistic culture through which
Christianity was to pass to the western world.93 In all of these cases,
however, Napoleon and Alexander are admired not for their military exploits but
for what is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as their role in the spiritual
development of mankind and their creation of universal empires that more or
less approximated the ideal societies imagined by the writers in question.
There is no French equivalent to the German Ariosophists'
glorification of the martial valor and racial purity of the ancient Germanic
warrior.
We have observed that
French occultism, as it developed over the course of the nineteenth century,
shared certain characteristics with later fascist:- movements and doctrines,
such as elitism and the rejection of democracy, racism and (to a much lesser
degree) anti-Semitism, and the search for a corporatist "third way"
between capitalism and socialism. Other aspects of Martinism,
however, are less akin to fascism, such as Martinism's
universalism, its rejection of violence and condemnation of military
conquerors, and its distaste for the mass movements and street agitation that
Carl Schorske has called "politics in a new key.!!94 We return, therefore,
to the question with which this chapter began: does French fascism have occult
roots?
In a now-classic
essay, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,!! Quentin
Skinner criticized what he called "the mythology of doctrines,!! or
"a form of non-history which is almost entirely given over to pointing out
earlier 'anticipations' of later doctrines, and to crediting each writer in
terms of this clairvoyance." Skinner has correctly observed that this
approach is profoundly ahistorical, because it praises or blames earlier thinkers
for their role in foreseeing or articulating later doctrines in incomplete
form, thereby attributing to them ideas that they did not, and logically could
not, have held, as if "the fully developed form of the doctrine was always
in some sense immanent in history.!!95 Skinner has further criticized the
rather haphazard attribution of "influence!! from one thinker to another
he perceived in much traditional intellectual history and elaborated a set of
conditions under which such influence could legitimately be attributed,
writing, "(i) that there should be a genuine
similarity between the doctrines of A and B; (ii) that B could not have found
the relevant doctrine in any writer other than A; (iii) that the probability of
the similarity being random should be very low. "96
By Skinner's
standards, it is clear that French fascism does not have occult roots. First,
although some features of occultist political and social thought bear a certain
resemblance to fascism, other features are quite different, making it difficult
to assert that there is a genuine similarity between the two. Second, there are
far more obvious and probable sources than the rather obscure and decidedly
idiosyncratic theorists of Martinism for the
antidemocratic, corporatist, and racist ideas of interwar French fascism. The
scientific racism of Arthur de Gobineau, the vulgar
anti-Semitism of Edouard Drumont, the neoroyalism of Charles Maurras,
the antirationalism and celebration of violence of
Georges Sorel, and the integral nationalism of Maurice Barres form a much more
plausible genealogy; if a long genealogy is indeed appropriate, for some
scholars point to the unique circumstances of the First World War and the
crises of the interwar era as the essential preconditions for the emergence of
fascism.97 Third, the similarities that do exist between fascism and Martinism are, if not quite random, better explained by
their common belonging to a shared cultural heritage and a generalized
discourse of decadence and national decline in fin de siecle
France, and cannot reasonably be taken to imply direct, or even indirect
filiation. In his f study The Prophets of Paris, Frank Manuel dismisses the
possibility of a link connecting the early nineteenth-century utopian thinker
Henri de Saint-Simon and his followers to twentieth-century fascism, writing,
True, the Saint-Simonian political formulae emphasized emotion rather than
reason, plus the hierarchy, an elite, the organic, and in this respect their
theories bear superficial resemblance to the lucubrations
of twentieth century fascism. The ecclesiastical nonsense of the cult, however,
should not obscure the fact that their image of society was founded first and
foremost upon the expectation that there would be an upsurge of Eros in the
world, that men would become more loving .... The Saint-Simonians were
committed to the winning of coverts solely through preaching and persuasion. To
relate all the images of "authoritarianism" and
"totalitarianism" to these tender failures of the 1830s entails
driving their ideas to conclusions they never entertained.98
In fact we will argue
that the same defense could be made on behalf of the Martinists
and their fellow travelers, whose ideal society, though imagined as an organic
community, was fundamentally different from the Nazi vision of
Volksgemeinschaft. The relationship between occultism and fascism in France
seems much more tenuous than the case which Goodrick-Clarke
has presented for Germany. French fascist theorists and organizers got their
ideas and symbols elsewhere than in the occult tradition, and their schooling
in methods of organization in other circles. Although the French occultists'
elitism, antimaterialism, and rejection of democracy
brings them in many ways close to protofascism, other
vital aspects of their thought, particularly their universalism and rejection
of violence, push them away from it. Nevertheless, although a direct, causal
link between the occult revival and the emergence of fascism in fin de siecle France cannot be established, it would be overly
indulgent to let the occultists off the hook entirely. Insofar as the neo-Martinist revival had an impact on the political culture of
the Third Republic, that impact was an almost entirely negative one,
contributing, albeit in a limited way, to the growing strength of nationalism,
racism, and antiparliamentarism that, over the years,
sapped the strength of the increasingly beleaguered regime. The Martinist vision of the good society, therefore,
corresponds to neither parliamentary democracy nor fascist authoritarianism and
militarism. If the fin de siecle occultists scorned
the venality and banality of the early Third Republic and lamented the
perceived decadence of their age, they did not call for a restoration of the
ancient alliance of throne and altar or for the creation of a new fascist
order.
1. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (New York: New
York University Press, 1992).
2. Willa Z.
Silverman, "Anti-Semitism and Occultism in Fin-de-Siecle France: Three
'Initiates,'" in Barbara T. Cooper and Mary Donaldson-Evans, eds.,
Modernity and Religion in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 1992), 155.
3. The literature on
fascism is far too vast to list here. A good introduction to the subject may be
found in the historiographical essay on fascism and totalitarianism in Ian
Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation
(London: Arnold, 2000). Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Fran(:aise, Italian Fascism, National Socialism (New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston, 1965); and Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in
France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) are provocative and
highly influential, if also problematic works. For French fascism and its roots
in the fin de siecle, see William Irvine,
"Fascism in France: The Strange Case of the Croix de Feu," Journal of
Modem History 63:2 (1991): 271-95; Eugen Weber, Action Fran(:aise: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1962); and esp. Robert Soucy's
two-volume survey of French fascist movements, French Fascism: The First Wave,
1924-1933 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986) and French Fascism:
The Second Wave, 1933-1939 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995).
4. Goodrick-Clarke, Occult Roots of Nazism, 56-57, 108, 151,
177-78.
5. Ian Kershaw, The “Hitler
Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987), 10.
6. Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis
of the German Modern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 84,
103, 211.
7. Rogers Brubaker,
Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1992), 1.
8. Goodrick-Clarke, Occult Roots of Nazism, 2.
9. Quoted in Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and
Nationalist Ideas in Europe, trans. Edmund Howard (New York: Basic, 1971), 25.
10. Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin, 1968),
57.
11. For the
development of the Frankish-Gallic myth, see Poliakov,
Aryan Myth, esp. 17-36.
12. Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997), esp. 41-61.
13. Poliakov, Aryan Myth, 135.
14. Voltaire, Traite de metaphysique (1734),
Reproduced from the Kehl Text (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1937), 5.
15. Poliakov, Aryan Myth, 161.
16. Montesquieu, The
Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne Kohler (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1989), 278-84; Poliakov, Aryan Myth, 168.
17. Georges-Louis, comte
de Buffon, Pages choisies (Paris: Larousse, 1934),53.
18. Cited in Voltaire,
Traite de metaphysique, 6.
19. Quoted in Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 170. For the
development of the Aryan theory, see Trautmann,
Aryans and British India; and Poliakov, Aryan Myth.
20. Antoine Fabre d'Olivet,
Histoire philosophique du genre humain, Vol. 1, 81.
21. Fabre d'Olivet,
Histoire philosophique, Vol. 1, 61-62.
22. Fabre d'Olivet,
Histoire philosophique, Vol. I, 80-81.
23. Fabre d'Olivet,
Histoire philosophique, Vol. I, 122, 128.
24. Fabre d'Olivet,
Histoire philosophique, Vol. I, 125.
25. Fabre d'Olivet,
Histoire philosophique, Vol. I, 222.
26. Fabre d'Olivet,
Histoire philosophique, Vol. I, 232.
27. Fabre d'Olivet,
Histoire philosophique, Vol. 1,243.
28. Fabre d'Olivet, Histoire
philosophique, Vol. 1, 117, 119.
29. Fabre d'Olivet,
Histoire philosophique, Vol. 1, 253-55.
30. Joseph-Alexandre
Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, Mission des fuifs (Paris: CalmannLevy, 1884), 495.
31. Saint-Yves
d'Alveydre, Mission des fuifs, 117, 8-9; Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, Mission de
l'Inde en Europe, Mission de l'Europe en Asie: La question du Mahatma et sa
solution (Paris: Dorbon Aine, 1910).
32. Saint-Yves
d'Alveydre, Mission des fuifs, 117, 900. Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's most
extended (though entirely fantastic) account of contemporary Asia was Mission
de l'Inde, published by his disciples the year after
his death.
33. Saint-Yves
d'Alveydre, Mission des fuifs, 8-9.
34. Fabre d'Olivet,
Histoire philosophique, Vol. 2, 222.
35. Joseph-Alexandre
Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, Mission actuelle des souverains, par l'un d'eux (Paris:
E. Dentu, 1882), 21-22.
36. Saint -Yves d'
Alveydre, Mission des fuifs, 11.
37. Papus, La Voile
d'Isis, January 21, 1898, 4.
38.Edouard Schure, The Great Initiates: Sketch of the Secret History
of Religions, trans. Fred Rothwell (Philadelphia: David McKay Company, 1922
[1895]), Vol. 1, 4.
39. Schure, The Great Initiates, Vol. 1, 5.
40. Schure, The Great Initiates, Vol. 1, 9.
41. Schure, The Great Initiates, Vol. 1, 8.
42. Schure, The Great Initiates, Vol. 1, 8.
43. Nicolas Boulanger,
L'antiquite devoilee par ses usages (Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1766).
44. Schure, The Great Initiates, Vol. 1, 40.
45. Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, trans. Adrian
Collins (New York: Howard Fertig, 1967), xiv, 25, 29,
42.
46. Schure, The Great Initiates, Vol. 1, 68-69.
47. Schure, The Great Initiates, Vol. 1, 184.
48. Schure, The Great Initiates, Vol. 1, 221, 278-79.
49. Jean Saunier, La
synarchie (Paris: Grasset, 1971), 125.
50. Stanislas de Guaita,
La clef de la magie noire (Paris: Guy Tredaniel, 1994), 391.
51. On this point,
see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European
Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1967), 3-4.
52. Stanislas de Guaita,
Au seuil du mystere, (Paris: Niclaus, 1963), 166.
53. Norman Cohn, The
Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). For the
persistence of this view in nineteenth-century Catholicism, and the persistence
of belief in a "Judea-Masonic" Satanic conspiracy, see W. R. Jones,
"Palladism and the Papacy: An Episode of French
Anti-Clericalism in the Nineteenth Century" Journal of Church and State
12:3 (1970), 453-73.
54. Louis-Claude de
Saint-Martin, L'homme de desir (Paris: Union Generale des Editions, 1973), 321.
55. Saint-Martin,
L'homme de desir, 37.
56. Louis-Claude de
Saint-Martin, Le crocodile, ou la guerre du bien et du mal arrivee sous Ie
regne de Louis XV (Paris: Triades Editions, 1962 [1799]), 44.
57. Fabre d'Olivet,
Histoire philosophique, Vol. 2, 56.
58. Fabre d'Olivet,
Histoire philosophique, Vol. 1,219.
59. Fabre d'Olivet,
Histoire philosophique, Vol. 1, 31.
60. Saint-Yves
d'Alveydre, Mission des Juifs, 209.
61. Saint-Yves
d'Alveydre, Mission des Juifs, 838-40.
62. Constant, "La
Mere de Dieu," excerpted in Frank Paul Bowman, Eliphas Levi, visionnaire
romantique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), 111-12.
63. Alphonse-Louis
Constant, La Bible de la liberte (Paris: A. Le Gallais, 1841), 95-96.
64. Eliphas Levi
(Alphonse-Louis Constant), Histoire de la magie, (Paris: Guy Tredaniel, 1996
[1859]), 50.
65. Fabre d'Olivet,
Histoire philosophique, Vol. 1,256-57.
66. Saint-Yves
d'Alveydre, Mission des Juifs, 131.
67. Schure, The Great Initiates, Vol. 1, 18.
68. Schure, The Great Initiates, Vol. 1, 20-21.
69. Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the
Social Imaginary, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003);
James Lehning, To Be a Citizen: The Political Culture
of the Early French Third Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001);
Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1981)
70. Levi, Histoire, 25.
71. Oswald Wirth,
Stanislas de Guaita, l'occultisme vecu: souvenirs de son secretaire (Paris:
Editions du symbolisme, 1935), 110-11.
72. Stanislas de Guaita,
Le Temple de Satan (Paris: Librairie du Merveilleux, 1891), 16-17.
73. Quoted in Nicole
Edelman, Voyantes, guerisseuses, et visionnaires en France, 1785-1914 (Paris:
Albin Michel, 1995), 155.
74. James Laver, The
First Decadent, Being the Strange Life of f. K.
Huysmans (London: Faber & Faber Ltd., 1954), 129-30.
75. Fabre d'Olivet,
Histoire philosophique, Vol. 2, 173.
76. Fabre d'Olivet,
Histoire philosophique, Vol. 2, 302-3.
77. Fabre d'Olivet,
Histoire philosophique, Vol. 2, 179.
78. Fabre d'Olivet,
Histoire philosophique, Vol. 2, 355.
79. Steven D. Kale,
Legitimism and the Reconstruction of French Society, 1852-1883 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 148, 181.
80. Joseph-Alexandre
Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, Mission actuelle des ouvriers (Nice: Belisane, 1979
[orig publ 1882]), 5-6.
81. Saint-Yves
d'Alveydre, Mission actuelle des ouvriers, 8-10.
82. Joseph-Alexandre
Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, La France vraie (Paris: Calmann Levy, 1887), 39-41.
83. Charles Maier,
Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade
after World War I (Princeton, N.].: Princeton University Press, 1975); Richard Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France:
Renovation and Economic Management in the Twentieth Century (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1981).
84. Soucy, French
Fascism: The First Wave, 1924-1933.
85. Soucy, French
Fascism: The First Wave, 1924-1933,234.
86. Josephin Peladan,
Comment on devient mage (Paris: Robert Dumas, 1975), 31,45.
87. Peladan, Comment on
devientmage, 243.
88. Fabre d'Olivet,
Histoire philosophique, Vol. 2, 285, 160.
89. Saint-Yves
d'Alveydre, Mission des Juifs, 774.
90. Saint-Yves
d'Alveydre, Mission des Juifs, 610.
91. Schure, The Great Initiates, Vol. 2, 251-53.
92. Schure, The Great Initiates, Vol. 2, 5; Vol. I, 216; Vol.
2, 250-52.
93. Schure, The Great Initiates, Vol. 2, 249-50.
94. Carl Schorske,
Fin de Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York:
Knopf, 1979).
95. Quentin Skinner,
"Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and
Theory 8:1 (1969), 10-12.
96. Skinner,
"Meaning and Understanding," 26.
97. In an anthology
of the works of these theorists of the radical Right, ]. S.McClelland,
The French Right: From De Maistre to MaurTas (New York: Harper, 1970), the editor makes a
persuasive case for this genealogy of French fascism. More recently, however,
Soucy, in French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924-1933 and French Fascism: The
Second Wave, 1933-1939, makes the case for the pivotal importance of the First
World War and the anxieties of the interwar period, which he presents as the
crucible for the emergence of fascism in France. Both arguments clearly have
merit, and it is beyond the scope of the present study to engage the debate in
any detail.
98. Frank Manuel, The
Prophets of Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 184.
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