"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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