Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum

by eco umberto foucault

  The good Barruel accepted the idea that the plot was not only Masonic but also Judeo-Masonic. Further, this satanic element allowed him to attack a new enemy: the Alta Vendita Carbonara, and later the anticlerical fathers of the Risorgimento, from Maz-zini to Garibaldi.

  "But this all happens in the middle of the nineteenth century," Diotallevi said, "whereas the big anti-Semitic campaign gets under way at the end of the century, with the publication of the Protocols of the Learned Elders ofZion. And the Protocols appear in Russia. So they are an initiative of the Paulicians."

  "Naturally," Belbo said. "It's clear now that the Jerusalemite group had broken up into three branches. The first branch, through the Spanish and Provencal cabalists, went on to inspire the neo-Templar camp; the second was taken over by the Baconian wing, and they all became scientists and bankers. They're the ones the Jesuits oppose so fiercely. But there is a third branch, and it established itself in Russia. The Russian Jews are generally small tradesmen and moneylenders, and for that reason are hated by the impoverished peasants; but since Jewish culture is a culture of the Book, and all Jews know how to read and write, they eventually swell the ranks of the liberal and revolutionary intelligentsia. The Paulicians, in contrast, are mystics, reactionaries, hand in glove with the landowners, and they have also infiltrated the court. Obviously, between them and the Jerusa-lemites there can be no traffic. So they are bent on discrediting the Jews, and through the Jews¡Xthis they learned from the Jesuits¡Xthey cause trouble for their adversaries abroad, both the neo-Templars and the Baconians."

  92

  There can no longer be any doubt. With all the power and the terror of Satan, the reign of the triumphant King of Israel is approaching our unregenerate world; the King born from the blood of Zion, the Antichrist, approaches the throne of universal power.

  ¡XSergei Nilus, Epilogue to the Protocols

  The idea was acceptable. We had only to consider who had introduced the Protocols in Russia.

  One of the most influential Martinists at the end of the century, Papus, dazzled Nicholas II during his visit to Paris, then went to Moscow, taking with him one Philippe Nizier Anselme Vachot. Possessed by the Devil at the age of six, healer at thirteen, magnetizer in Lyon, Philippe fascinated both Nicholas II and his hysterical wife. He was invited to court, named physician of the military academy of St. Petersburg, made a general and a councilor of state.

  His enemies decided to diminish his influence by setting against him an equally charismatic figure. And Nilus was found.

  Nilus was an itinerant monk who, in priestly habit, wandered in the forests (what else?) displaying a prophet's great beard, two wives, a little daughter, an assistant (or lover, perhaps), all hanging on his every word. Half guru, the kind that runs off with the collection plate, and half hermit, the kind that yells that the end is near, he was in fact obsessed by the Antichrist.

  The plan of Nilus's supporters was to have him ordained, and then, after he married (what was another wife, more or less?) Elena Alexandrovna Ozerova, the tsarina's maid of honor, to have him become the confessor of the sovereigns.

  "I'm anything but a bloodthirsty man," Belbo said, "but I begin to feel that the massacre of Tsarskoye Selo was perhaps a justifiable extermination of vermin."

  Anyway, Philippe's supporters accused Nilus of leading a lewd life, and God knows they were right. Nilus had to leave the court, but at this point someone came to his aid, handing him the text of the Protocols. Since everybody got the Martinists (who derived from Saint Martin) mixed up with the Martinezists (followers of Martfnez Pasqualis, whom Aglie so dislikes), and since Pasqualis, according to a widespread rumor, was Jewish, by discrediting the Jews the Protocols also discredited the Martinists, and with the discrediting of the Martinists, Philippe was booted out.

  Actually, a first, incomplete, version of the Protocols had already appeared in 1903, in Znamia, a St. Petersburg paper edited by a rabid anti-Semite named Kruscevan. In 1905, with the approval of the government censors, a complete text anonymously appeared, under the tide The Source of Our Evils, edited by one Boutmi, who with Kruscevan had founded the Union of the Russian People, later known as the Black Hundreds, which enlisted common criminals to carry out pogroms and extremist right-wing acts of violence. Boutmi later published, under his own name, further editions of the work, with the title The Enemies of the Human Race: Protocols from the Secret Archives of the Central Chancellery ofZion.

  But these were cheap booklets. An expanded version of the Protocols, the one that was to be translated all over the world, came out in 1905, in the third edition of Nilus's book, The Great in the Small: The Antichrist Is an Imminent Political Possibility, Tsarskoye Selo, under the aegis of a local chapter of the Red Cross. The scope was broader, the framework that of mystical reflection, and the book ended up in the hands of the tsar. The metropolitan of Moscow ordered it read aloud in all the churches of the city.

  "But what," I asked, "is the connection between the Protocols and our Plan? We keep talking about these Protocols. Should we read them?"

  "Nothing could be simpler," Diotallevi said. "There's always someone who reprints them. Publishers used to do it with a great show of indignation, purely out of a sense of duty to make available a historical document, then little by little they stopped apologizing and reprinted it with unrepentant pleasure." "What genteel gentiles."

  93

  The only society known to us that is capable of rivaling us in these arts is that of the Jesuits. But we have succeeded in discrediting the Jesuits in the eyes of the stupid populace, because that society is an open organization, whereas we stay in the wings, maintaining secrecy.

  ¡XProtocols, V

  The Protocols are a series of twenty-four declarations, a program of action, attributed to the Elders of Zion. To us, these Elders' intentions seemed somewhat contradictory. At one point they wanted to abolish freedom of the press, at another they seemed to encourage libertinage. They criticized liberalism, but supported the sort of thing today's leftist radicals attribute to the capitalist multinationals, including the use of sports and visual education to stultify the working class. They analyzed various methods of seizing world power; they praised the strength of gold; they advocated supporting revolution in every country, sowing discontent and confusion by proclaiming liberal ideas, but they also wanted to exacerbate inequality. They schemed to establish everywhere regimes of straw men they would control; they fomented war and urged the production of arms and (as Salon had said) the building of metros (the underground world!) in order to have a way of mining the big cities.

  They said the end justified the means and were in favor of anti-Semitism both to control the population of Jewish poor and to soften the hearts of gentiles in the face of Jewish tragedy (an expensive ploy, Diotallevi said, but effective). They candidly declared, "We have unlimited ambition, an all-consuming greed, a merciless desire for revenge, and an intense hatred" (displaying an exquisite masochism by reinforcing, with gusto, the cliche of the evil Jew that was already in circulation in the anti-Semitic press, the stereotype that would adorn the cover of all the editions of their book). They called for abolishment of the study of the classics and of ancient history.

  "In other words," Belbo said, "the Elders of Zion were a bunch of blockheads."

  "Don't joke," Diotallevi said. "This book was taken very seriously. But there's something that strikes me as odd. While the Jewish plot was meant to seem centuries old, all the references in the Protocols are to petty fin-de-siecle French questions. The business about visual education stulifying the masses is a clear allusion to the educational program of Leon Bourgeois, who had five Masons in his government. Another passage advises electing people compromised in the Panama Scandal, and one of these was Emile Loubet, who in 1899 became president of the French republic. The Metro is mentioned because in those days the right-wing papers were complaining that the Compag-nie du Metropolitain had too many Jewish shareholders. Hence the theory that the text was co
bbled up in France in the last decade of the nineteenth century, at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, to weaken the liberal front."

  "That isn't what impresses me," Belbo said. "It's the sense of deja vu. The upshot is that these Elders are planning to conquer the world, and we've heard all that before. Take away the references to events and problems of the last century, replace the tunnels of the Metro with the tunnels of Provins, and everywhere it says Jews write Templars, and everywhere it says Elders of Zion write Thirty-six Invisibles divided into six...My friends, this is the Ordonation of Provins!"

  94

  Voltaire lui-meme est mort jesuite: en avoit-il le moindre soupcon?

  ¡XF. N. de Bonneville, Les Jesuites chasses de la Mafonnerie et leur poignard brise par les Masons, Orient de Londres, 1788, 2, p. 74

  All along it had been right in front of us, the whole thing, and we had failed to see it. Over six centuries, six groups fight to achieve the Plan of Provins, and each group takes the text of that Plan, simply changes the subject, and attributes it to its adversaries.

  After the Rosicrucians turn up in France, the Jesuits reverse the Plan, replace it with its negative: discrediting the Baconians and the emerging English Masonry.

  When the Jesuits invent neo-Templarism, the Marquis de Lu-chet attributes the Plan to the neo-Templars. The Jesuits, who by now are jettisoning the neo-Templars, copy Luchet, through Barruel, but they attribute the Plan to all Freemasons in general.

  Then the Baconian counteroffensive. Digging into the texts of this liberal and secular polemic, we discovered that from Mi-chelet and Quinet down to Garibaldi and Gioberti, the Ordonation was attributed to the Jesuits (perhaps that idea originated with the Templar Pascal and his friends). The subject was popularized by Le Juif errant of Eugene Sue and by his character, the evil Monsieur Rodin, quintessence of the Jesuit world conspiracy. But as we looked further into Sue, we found far more: a text that seemed copied¡Xbut half a century in advance¡Xfrom the Protocols, almost word for word. This was the final chapter of Les Mysteres du peuple, where the diabolical Jesuit plan is exposed down to the last criminal detail: in a document sent by the general of the Society, Father Roothaan (historical figure) to Monsieur Rodin (who appears in the earlier Juif errant). Ru-dolphe de Gerolstein (previously the hero of the Mysteres de Paris) comes into possession of this document and reveals it to the other democracy-loving characters: "You see, my dear Le-brenn, how cunningly this infernal plot is ordered, and what frightful sorrows, what horrendous enslavement, what terrible despotism it would spell for Europe and the world, were it to succeed..."

  It seemed Nilus's preface to the Protocols. Sue also attributed to the Jesuits the motto (which will be found in the Protocols, attributed to the Jews), "The end justifies the means."

  95

  There is no need to multiply the evidence to prove that this degree of Rosy Cross was skillfully introduced by the leaders of Masonry...The doctrine, its hatred, and its sacrilegious practices, exactly those of the Cabala, of the Gnostics, and of the Manicheans, reveals to us the identity of the authors, namely the Jewish Cabalists.

  ¡XMons. Leon Meurin, S.J., La Franc-Mafonnerie, Synagogue de Satan, Paris, Retaux, 1893, p. 182

  When Les Mysteres du peuple appears and the Jesuits see that the Ordonation is attributed to them, they quickly adopt the one tactic not yet used by anyone. Exploiting Simonini's letter, they attribute the Ordonation to the Jews.

  In 1869, Henri Gougenot de Mousseaux, famous for two books on magic, publishes Les Juifs, le judaisme et la judaisation des peuples chretiens, which says that the Jews use the cabala and are worshipers of Satan, since a secret line of descent links Cain directly to the Gnostics, the Templars, and the Masons. Gou-genot receives a special benediction from Pius IX.

  But the Plan, novelized by Sue, is rehashed by others, who are not Jesuits. There's a nice story, almost a thriller, that takes place a bit later. In 1921¡Xafter the appearance of the Protocols, which it took very seriously¡Xthe Times of London learns that a Russian monarchist landowner who fled to Turkey has bought from a former officer of the Russian secret police, now a refugee in Constantinople, a number of old books, and among them is one without a cover. On its spine it has only "Joli," and there is a preface dated 1864. This is the source of the Protocols. The Times does some research in the British Museum and discovers the original book, by Maurice Joly, Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel, Bruxelles (though it says Geneve on the title page), 1864. Maurice Joly has no connection with Cretineau-Joly, but the similarity of the names must mean something.

  Joly's book is a liberal pamphlet against Napoleon III, in which Machiavelli, who represents the dictator's cynicism, argues with Montesquieu. Joly is arrested for this revolutionary venture, he serves fifteen years in prison, and in 1878 he kills himself. The Jewish plot enunciated in the Protocols is taken almost literally from the words Joly puts in Machiavelli's mouth (the end justifies the means); after Machiavelli, the words become Napoleon's. The Times, however, does not realize (but we do) that Joly had shamelessly copied Sue's document, which predates it by at least seven years.

  An anti-Semite authoress, devotee of the plot theory and the Unknown Superiors, a certain Nesta Webster, faced by this development, which reduces the Protocols to the level of cheap plagiarism, provides us with a brilliant idea, the sort of idea that only a true initiate or initiate-hunter can have: Joly was an initiate, he knew the Plan of the Unknown Superiors, and attributed it to Napoleon III, whom he hated. But this does not mean that the Plan does not exist independently of Napoleon. Since the Plan outlined in the Protocols is a perfect description of the customary behavior of the Jews, then the Jews must have invented the Plan. We had only to reread Mrs. Webster in the light of her own logic: Since the Plan coincided exactly with what the Templars wanted, it was the Plan of the Templars.

  Besides, we had the logic of facts on our side. We were particularly attracted by the episode in the Prague cemetery. This was the story of a certain Hermann Goedsche, an insignificant Prussian postal employee who published false documents to discredit the democrat Waldeck. The documents accused him of planning to assassinate the king of Prussia. Goedsche, after he was unmasked, became the editor of the organ of the big conservative landowners. Die Preussische Kreuzzeitung. Then, under the name Sir John RetclifFe, he began writing sensational novels, including Biarritz, 1868. In it he described an occultist scene in the Prague cemetery, very similar to the meeting of the Illuminati described by Dumas at the beginning of Giuseppe Balsamo, where Cagliostro, chief of the Unknown Superiors, among them Swedenborg, arranges the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. In the Prague cemetery the representatives of the twelve tribes of Israel gather, to expound their plans for the conquest of the world.

  In 1876 a Russian pamphlet reprints the scene from Biarritz, but as if it were fact, not fiction. And in 1881, in France, Le Contemporain does the same thing, claiming that the news comes from an unimpeachable source: the English diplomat Sir John Readcliff. In 1896 one Bournand publishes a book, Les Juifs, nos contemporains, and repeats the scene of the Prague cemetery; he says that the subversive speech is made by the great rabbi John Readclif. A later version; however, reports that the real Readclif was taken to the fatal cemetery by Ferdinand Las-salle.

  The plans revealed are more or less the same as described a few years earlier, in 1880, by the Revue des Etudes Juives, which publishes two letters attributed to Jews of the fifteenth century. The Jews of Aries ask the help of the Jews of Constantinople, because in France they are being persecuted, and the latter reply: "Well-beloved brothers in Moses, if the king of France forces you to become Christian, do so, because you cannot do otherwise, but preserve the law of Moses in your hearts. If they strip you of your possessions, raise your sons to be merchants, so that eventually they can strip Christians of their possessions. If they threaten your lives, raise your sons to be physicians and pharmacists, so that they can take the lives of Christians. If they destroy your synagogues
, raise your sons, to be canons and clerics, so that they can destroy the churches of the Christians. If they inflict other tribulations on you, raise your sons to be lawyers and notaries and have them mingle in the business of every state, so that putting the Christians under your yoke, you will rule the world and can then take your revenge."

  It was, again, the Plan of the Jesuits and, before that, of the Ordonation of the Templars. Few variations, few changes: the Protocols were self-generating; a blueprint that migrated from one conspiracy to another.

  * * *

  And when we racked our brains to find the missing link that connected this whole fine story to Nilus, we encountered Rach-kovsky, the head of the tsar's secret police, the terrible Okhrana.

  96

  A cover is always necessary. In concealment lies a great part of our strength. Hence we must always hide ourselves under the name of another society.

  ¡XDie neuesten Arbeiten des Spartacus und Philo in dem Illuminaten-Orden, 1794, p. 165

  At that same time, reading some pages of our Diabolicals, we found that the Comte de Saint-Germain, among his numerous disguises, had assumed the identity Rackoczi, at least according to the ambassador of Frederick II in Dresden. And the landgrave of Hesse, at whose residence Saint-Germain was supposed to have died, said that he was of Transylvanian origin and his name was Rago/ki. We had also to consider that Comenius dedicated his Pansophiae (a work surely born in the odor of Rosicrucian-ism) to a landgrave (another landgrave) named Ragovsky. A final touch to the mosaic: browsing at a bookstall in Piazza Castello, I found a German work on Masonry, anonymous, in which an unknown hand had added, on the flyleaf, a note to the effect that the text was the work of one Karl Aug. Ragotgky. Bearing in mind that Rakosky was the name of the mysterious individual who had perhaps killed Colonel Ardenti, we now could include in the Plan our Comte de Saint-Germain.