The Origins of Freemasonry - Margaret C. Jacob

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new beliefs that were tolerant and endorsed practices ultimately at odds with traditional religiosity and monarchical absolutism. The Church’s condemnation only made the lodges more attractive to the secular-minded and the progressive. It is hardly surprising that by 1750 membership in a masonic lodge had come to denote enthusiasm for the new, enlightened ideas, although not necessarily for the materialism and atheism associated with some of the philosophes.

      Thanks to the records that came back from Moscow only in 2000, the evidence is now clear that in the 1740s in France women also belonged to lodges. A note on the bottom of one record mentions the local women’s lodge in Bordeaux. In The Hague in 1751 a lodge of men and women used French as its first language and left a list of its officers in both the masculine and the feminine, Le Maitre, La Maitresse, and so on. Local actors and actresses in the Comédie française housed in the town fraternized with nobleman and wealthy merchants.29 They were even attacked for doing so by a local abbé. Traditionally we see eighteenth-century women as less attracted to the heresies associated with the Enlightenment than men. But the masonic ceremonies we can trace to them suggest an ability to be just as secular as their brothers. We will learn more about these women in Chapter five.

      But the lodges were about more than social and intellectual life. The self-governance of lay elites outside of confraternities or town councils, and operating in local groups joined on a national scale, was rare in continental Europe during the eighteenth century. Within the masonic lodges as they spread first to the Dutch Republic and France, then as far east as Prague and Moscow, and as far west as Philadelphia and Cap Français (Haiti), secular-minded, affluent men, and some women, began governing themselves: in colonial settings as part of their empires, at home as part of their localities and through the Grand Lodges, their nations. Lodge membership became a symbol of independence from clerical authority and a sign of political maturity. It also became one means of insuring cultural cohesion among Europeans in their colonies, an expression of imperial status just like that offered by the churches and scientific societies.

      Government ministers, state employees, liberal professionals like lawyers, doctors and teachers, as well as merchants, flocked to join the lodges. In Sweden the entire court from the king and his ministers on down joined lodges that were feted at the royal palace.30 There, as in Britain and the American colonies, the lodges paraded in public, a sign of their acceptance. In Paris and The Hague British ambassadors played a role in spreading the fraternity. We know about the French connection because in the 1730s the police raided the Paris home of the British ambassador, Lord Waldegrave, in part because a lodge was meeting there.31 In Berlin by 1750 Frederick the Great used the lodges to enhance his own cultlike following. In Vienna in the 1780s Joseph II’s influence permeated the lodges where Mozart sought out his musical commissions.

      Everywhere they spread, the lodges also denoted relative affluence, drinking, and merrymaking. Despite their conspicuous consumption, the lodges were also places that sought to instill decorum, at least before dinner. Modifying the behavior of men helped to internalize discipline and manners. In London lodges would sometimes take over the theater for a performance, and there is evidence that brothers behaved better than audiences did typically. The habits of listening and silence in theaters and concerts developed only slowly, largely by the second half of the eighteenth century and as part of a general growth of decorum, politeness, and interiority. The masonic lodges played a role in that self-disciplining process. The Enlightenment needs to be seen as a complex mix of new ideas as well as habits: public discussion, sociability, private, uncensored reading. All required a new, more commonplace sense of an inner self that took pride in discipline and decorum. Lodges, like other forms of sociability, helped to instill it.

      In every European country masonic dues were substantial (although graded by ability to pay), and each lodge came to possess a social persona and to give loyalty to a national Grand Lodge. Some lodges spurned anyone but the noble-born; others were entirely for students or doctors. Some lodges admitted lowly merchants, even actors; others banned them. Dues varied according to the means of the brothers and the relationship between the lodge and a brother was partly contractual, based upon dues paid, and partly filial.

      In the 1780s, when the French Grand Lodge was dispensing charity to brothers, widows, and aged women freemasons, their letters tell much about being caught between two worlds: one modern and based upon contract, the other essentially feudal and based upon birth and deference. As we will see in greater detail in chapter 4, in the same letter freemasons could beg and supplicate while noting that in their youth or wealth they had paid their dues, feted their brothers, and been good citizens in their respective lodges. They were owed assistance, they implied, yet they knew that it had to come from the aristocratic leadership of the Grand Lodge—hence they pleaded.

      Lodge membership could begin to resemble citizenship in a state, a presumed right to participate or even to govern. We can see this forward-looking aspect of lodge membership most clearly in the Austrian case. In the very Catholic Austrian territories after 1750 lodge membership signaled support for enlightened reform against the traditional privileges of the clergy. Men in the secular professions were drawn into such lodges. By the 1780s the Grand Lodge in Vienna worked with the government, in one instance to suppress lodges in the restless western colony of the southern Netherlands, Belgium. The Viennese Grand Lodge authorized only three lodges, closed down all others and drew up lists of appropriate members. In July 1786 the Vienna lodge proudly informed Joseph II that “the General Government of masonry is now in conformity with your edicts.”32 As we shall see in greater detail in Chapter 3, on this occasion a fraternal organization, commonplace in European civil society, assisted the state in remaking the contours of another colonial society under its jurisdiction.

      The masonic instinct for governance fueled identification with the center, with national institutions. In 1756 when Dutch freemasons organized their national system of authority and governance, the Grand Lodge of the Netherlands, they adopted “the form” of the Estates General of the Republic. Furthermore they recommended it to German lodges that were having difficulty arriving at a comparable system of national cohesion. An Estates General, the Dutch said, could work as “the sovereign tribunal of the Nation.”33 They meant the masonic nation. Just like the Estates General where each province retained a high degree of sovereignty, in the Dutch lodges decentralized governance permitted independence. In the 1750s the Grand Master in The Hague, the Baron de Boetzelaer, spoke about the freemasons holding a “national assembly” there. At these assemblies the ceremonies placed brothers standing in rows, the first row symbolizing the “Staten van Holland,” the legislative body of the province of Holland.34 After a detailed symbolic arrangement, they affirmed national unity. By the 1750s nationalism was rising throughout western Europe, possibly aided by masonic practices.

      Identity with the nation did not inhibit masonic cosmopolitanism. We see it in every major city where lodges might have regular visitors from anywhere in the Western world and its colonies, correspond likewise throughout the world, and yet, simultaneously, see the nation as a site where virtue and merit should be rewarded. In the early 1780s the lodge in Amsterdam entertained a brother from Philadelphia.35 We may easily imagine that the American Revolution, which the Dutch had partly financed, was high on the list of topics under discussion. The Enlightenment initiated reforming impulses that were felt in many areas, but its assault on privilege and corruption also suggested to secular-minded elites that new men were needed in government service. More than any other new form of sociability, the lodges became schools of government, places where the reformist impulses of the Enlightenment could be focused on one’s immediate surroundings, potentially on one’s immediate province or state. They were also places where brothers could hear a firsthand account of revolutions on distant shores as models for their own revolutions. In the late 1780s these broke out in Amsterdam and Brussels, most spectacularly in Paris.

      The masonic gestures imitative of national government can also be seen in the records of French freemasonry. In 1738 in Paris a Jacobite refugee from Scotland, the Chevalier Ramsay, gave what became a famous oration, in which he said that freemasonry attempts to create “an entire spiritual nation.” Copies of the oration turn up in Reims,

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