The Master Game

by Graham Hancock

  The assassination of the Duke of Berry gave the Ultras the excuse they wanted to start a witch-hunt against all anti-royalists. Louis XVIII now showed his true colors by allowing the Ultras a free hand in the affair. Louis dismissed the prime minister, Élie Decazes, who was suspected of being a Republican and Bonapartist. He was replaced by the Count of Villèle, a zealous royalist and Ultra ringleader of the worst sort.

  Decazes's dismissal much alarmed the Republicans who now began to suspect strongly that Louis XVIII was about to restore the Old Regime, and plots began to be hatched against the king. Because Decazes and many of his supporters were Freemasons, the Ultras suspected that the lodges were behind these plots. Ironically, many Freemasons including Decazes were actually loyal to the king, but it is equally true that Masonic lodges became the cover for secret political gatherings and, as was clearly the case during the 1789 Revolution, an ideal breeding ground for radicals working against the monarchy.

  By December 1821 members of an extremist secret society called the Charbonnerie (the ‘charcoal burners’), whose aim was to launch an armed rebellion against the king, began to infiltrate Masonic lodges in Paris. The Charbonnerie had direct links to the Italian Carbonari, an ultra-radical, anti-clerical and anti-royalist group which, since the early 1820s, had been behind many armed uprisings against the joint papal and Austrian-Habsburg regime in Italy.

  Much like the Freemasons, the Carbonari selected their members and had initiation ceremonies. These took place not in lodges but in ventes, an Italian word that means ‘twenty’; each was limited to 20 members so as not to attract the attention of the police. The Carbonari's origins can be traced to the year 1812, and they were almost certainly a militant offshoot of the Masonic Grande Oriente d’Italia which, at that time, was headed by Joachim Murat, the king of Naples and brother-in-law of Napoleon.80 Indeed, Italian Freemasonry had flourished after the Napoleonic conquest of Italy, and by 1820 the Carbonari and the Freemasons in Italy formed a huge network of lodges and ventes that provided ideal meeting grounds as well as an effective system of secret communication for radical political groups plotting to liberate Italy from the detested Austrians.

  The Carbonari, who symbolized the driving force behind Italy's independence movement, certainly did not hide the fact that they were staunch Bonapartists and, as such, opponents of all monarchies as well as enemies of the Catholic Church. In September 1821, after the death of Napoleon, they took to the streets causing serious unrest which forced Pope Pius VII to condemn them as well as Freemasons in general.81 The days of burning at the stake were over, but in 1821 the Austrian police launched a massive operation in Italy to purge all radical elements from Masonic lodges and the ventes of the Carbonari. There were hundreds of arrests and many Masons and Carbonari were imprisoned. Others were deported or escaped into France, where they quickly began to infiltrate the Masonic lodges.

  The 1822 Charbonnerie uprising in France immediately brought Masonic lodges there under intense scrutiny. To make things worse, it was also suspected by the Ultras that the notorious Marquis de Lafayette was the leader of the Charbonnerie. Lafayette was seen on both sides of the Atlantic as a great republican hero, and his reputation had become almost legendary among Freemasons. But even though Lafayette was staunch republican and also a very active Freemason, he was by no means a radical, and at heart almost certainly had favoured a constitutional monarchy rather than the chaotic ‘Republic’ he had witnessed first-hand in France after the 1789 Revolution. At any rate, whether Lafayette was sympathetic to the Charbonnerie or not became an academic issue, for the Charbonnerie was very poorly organized in France and heavily infiltrated by royalist spies. It was soon disbanded after the police arrested the Charbonnerie plotters en masse and also many Freemasons in the confusion that followed.

  A series of death sentences were immediately passed. Among those executed were the famous ‘four sergeants of La Rochelle’, two of whom were found to be Freemasons belonging to the Egyptian Rite of Memphis-Misraim . According to the Masonic author Jean-André Faucher, the insurrection of 1821 – 22 was, indeed, largely blamed on the new Masonic Rite of Memphis and also the Rite of Misraim, both of which were believed to have originated in Italy in the early 1800s.82 To make matters worse, Élie Decazes, the ex-prime minister, had become a member of the Rite of Misraim, as well as many other notable figures on the other side of the Channel in England who supported Decazes, such as the Duke of Leicester and the Duke of Sussex.83

  In that troubled year of 1822 there were no less than 22 Misraim lodges in Paris plus about a dozen more elsewhere in France, mostly in Lyons and Metz. The pseudo-Egyptian character of the rites that were practiced in those lodges is evident in lodge names. For example there was one in Metz called Heliopolis Reborn, another in Lyons called Memphis, and yet another in Montauban called The Flooding Nile.84

  The second revolution

  It was the Rite of Misraim which, in 1822, was principally accused of harboring the Carbonari. In consequence it was banned in 1823. In the midst of these confusing and turbulent events Louis XVIII died in September 1824 leaving no offspring to take his place. He was succeeded by his brother, the Count of Artois, crowned as Charles X, who was now approaching his 70th year.

  Like most aristocrats who had fled the 1789 Revolution, Charles had lived in exile until 1814, and this bitter and humiliating experience made him determined to restore the Old Regime with the divine right of kingship and also the full authority of the Catholic Church. At his coronation, Charles insisted that he should be anointed in accordance with the ancient rituals of kingship at Reims Cathedral with the few drops of sacred oil that had been saved when the Saint Ampoule had been smashed during the Reign of Terror of 1793 – 4.

  Once crowned, Charles X became the leader of the Ultras and the Catholic revival began to gather pace, causing outrage among those who had supported the Revolution. Many anti-clericals as well as Republicans now joined Masonic lodges not for spiritual enlightenment but for political shelter. Charles X, who was a devout Catholic himself, began to revive the dreaded ‘Society of Jesus’, the Jesuits, and soon it was rumored that he had joined the order and might hand over power to them.

  Political unrest reached boiling point in March 1830, when, in a naïve move to appease his critics, the king dissolved the Chambre des Députés and called a general election which he hoped the Ultras would win. The vote, however, went against the Ultras and Charles X now confronted two unsavory options: he could either agree to a constitutional monarchy or scoop the power already in his hands with a coup d’état by eradicating the Bonapartists and Republicans in his government. He unwisely opted for the latter, and by July 1830 the barricades were up again in the streets of Paris.

  For the second time in less than 50 years a revolution had been unleashed against the Bourbon dynasty.

  Lafayette seizes the day

  Not unexpectedly, two factions quickly emerged, one made up of pure Republicans the other up of Constitutional Monarchists. Lafayette, that eternal compromiser, at first swayed between the two, even though the Republicans considered him their leader. In his view, however, the best option now was to oust the Bourbons altogether and replace them with a new monarchy who would ‘constitutionalise’ the Old Regime. He had in mind a young prince, the Duke of Orléans, whose father, Philippe Égalité, had sponsored the 1789 Revolution with his immense wealth and position – for which it eventually beheaded him!

  Although Lafayette had been at odds with Philippe Égalité during the 1789 Revolution, he was now in very close contact with his son, Louis-Philippe d’Orléans. Lafayette's plan had the distinct advantage of offering a solution that might be acceptable to both the Republicans and the Constitutional Monarchists, and thus avoid the real risk of a civil war. It remained now to persuade the Republicans, the Bonapartists and, especially, the general population of Paris, that Louis-Philippe d’Orléans was the right man for the job. This, Lafayette achieved with the well-judged use of powerful sym
bolism – a technique that had so often worked with the rowdy Parisian mob.

  In August 1830 Charles X was forced to abdicate. In a desperate bid to keep the Bourbon dynasty on the throne of France, he asked that his grandson, the ‘miracle child’ of the Duchess of Berry, be accepted as the new king. But both the Republicans and the Constitutional Monarchists rejected the proposal outright. This was the moment when Lafayette and his own candidate, Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, made their move. After three days of bloody street fighting in Paris, the crowds gathered at the Hôtel de Ville and, in a perfectly timed propaganda coup that only high initiates would know how to bring about, Lafayette grabbed a tricolor flag of the Revolution and wrapped it around Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, proclaiming him the ‘Citizen King’ of France.

  Amazingly, the theatrical gesture worked. The Parisian mob cheered and Louis-Philippe won the day. The hard-line Republicans and Bonapartists were furious at having their ‘revolution’ snatched away from them by such trickery, but there was not much they could do.

  Almost immediately King Louis-Philippe I began a series of projects supposed to demonstrate his love and support for Bonaparte and the Revolution. He ordered that the Arc de Triomphe, the construction of which had begun in 1809 but had been shelved ever since, should now be completed. He also ordered the construction of a huge pillar at the Place de la Bastille to commemorate the 1830 Revolution; on top of the pillar, as the reader will recall from Chapter One, was then placed the ‘Genie of Paris’, a winged youth much resembling the Greek Hermes.85

  Also at about this time Louis-Philippe ordered that the obelisk brought from the Temple of Luxor in Egypt, and recently arrived in Paris, should now raised in the Place de la Concorde …

  Champollion

  In 1822, a year and a half after Napoleon's death, an amazing scientific discovery was made which would not only stun the academic world but would also fulfill a promise that the emperor had made at St. Helena. For when asked why he had invaded Egypt, Napoleon had calmly replied: I came to draw attention and bring back the interest of Europe to the center of the ancient world.86

  This was a side of Napoleon that has often been neglected, namely that he was not only a military genius but also an accomplished scholar and a senior member of the Institut National. It was Napoleon who had the great forethought of taking the 167 savants to Egypt in 1798, and it was he who founded the first modern scientific institute in Egypt: the Institut d’Égypte in Cairo. It was therefore appropriate that his grand dream of restoring cultural interest in ancient Egypt was not fulfilled by a politician but rather by a quiet and studious young man living in the little town of Figeac near Grenoble – a young man who had never traveled out of France, let alone to Egypt.

  On 17 September 1822 Jean-François Champollion, coughing and speaking with the weak voice of someone suffering from serious pulmonary problems, announced to a group of scholars at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris that he had an important statement to make regarding the mysterious ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Feeling awkward in front of such an illustrious and very skeptical congregation of learned men, Champollion slowly read a paper which he had addressed to the chairman of the Académie Française, Monsieur Dacier, and which was simply titled Lettre à M. Dacier relative à l'alphabet des hiéroglyphes phonétiques.

  It was, in fact, a cultural and scientific bombshell on a scale rarely experienced in the world. For it became obvious to many of those listening to Champollion that day that the young man had solved the biggest mystery of the past: he had cracked the code of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic language. Indeed, Champollion's modest Lettre à M. Dacier was to mark the most prestigious moment of the Académie Française and provided the foundation stone upon which scientific Egyptology would be developed. Many Freemasons present on that day in September 1822 would also have thought it wonderful and most appropriate that this world-changing discovery had been announced in Paris, the city of Isis.

  In the 1820s the area of Grenoble and Lyons where the Champollions lived was not only the haunt of Republicans and Bonapartists who opposed the monarchy, but also the hotbed of many innovative Masonic movements, especially those related to the ‘Egyptian’ type of Freemasonry started at Lyons by Cagliostro.87 It is known that Champolion and, more especially, his older brother, Jacques-Joseph, were fervent Bonapartists, and so were most of their friends, many of whom were also Freemasons.88 The question must arise, therefore, whether Champolion himself was not a member of the brotherhood and, more specifically, a member of one of the Egyptian-style lodges? Today some Masonic historians list Champollion as a ‘famous Freemason’, but there is no documented proof of his involvement.89

  Champollion and his brother, Jacques-Joseph, had at one time been held under suspicion of political agitation and, in 1816, had even been placed under house arrest at Figeac. It is said that they gained the support of the influential Freemason, Élie Decazes, then the minister of interior, who ordered their release and allowed the two brothers to return to Grenoble in 1817.90

  Decazes, as we shall recall, was to become Grand Commander of the Supreme Council of the 33rd Degree and one of the first notables to join the Egyptian Masonic Rite of Misraim.91 Later also the prominent statesman, the Duke of Blacas, became the patron and protector of Champollion.92 Paradoxically, the Duke of Blacas was a staunch Ultra and a favourite of both Louis XVIII and of Charles X. The duke had served as the French ambassador to the kingdom of Naples since 1815, then the hotspot of ‘Egyptian’ Misraim Freemasonry. Let us also note that there had been curious exchanges between Champollion and certain well-known adepts of these neo-Egyptian Masonic groups.

  Champollion was a rival of Alexandre Lenoir, a staunch Freemason and once the superintendent of the king's buildings before the 1789 Revolution. Lenoir, who was a keen adept of the Scottish Rite,93 and an ‘initiate of the cult of Isis’,94 was also the publisher of La Nouvelle Explication des Hiéroglyphes in 1808. When Champollion began his own work on the Egyptian hieroglyphs he had condescendingly called Lenoir un oison (‘a little goose’) and stated that he only respected the older man because he was ‘in the good books’ of Empress Joséphine.95 In 1814 Lenoir had published a book entitled La Franc-Maçonnerie rendue à sa véritable origine (‘Freemasonry brought back to its true origins’), in which he linked the origins of the brotherhood to the ‘cult of Isis’, which may explain why Lenoir, as Champollion himself had dryly noted, was highly regarded by Joséphine.

  There is, too, Champollion's relationship with an Italian-Greek beauty from Livorno, Angelica Palli, with whom Champollion had fallen desperately in love during a research trip to Italy in 1826. Livorno, which is on the Mediterranean coast near Pisa, had been the principal port of the Medici of Florence who, as we saw in Chapter Eight, played a great part in the Hermetic Renaissance. Angelica Palli, a poetess and writer, was very conversant with Hermetic and Neo-Platonic literature. Her evocative name (literally ‘angel of the temples’), must have much stirred the fertile imagination of Champollion, who was to write of her to his friend, the Abbé Gazerra: ‘I thank the great Ammon-Ra for meeting her.’ She in return commented with delight on his ‘philosophy’ which she found to be imbued with ‘Egyptian doctrines, fertile source from which drew Plato and … Pythagoras.’96

  Many years later Angelica Palli became an active supporter of the famous Italian revolutionary, Giuseppe Manzini, a staunch Freemason who was head of the Italian Supreme Council of the 33rd Degree. Manzini was a close friend and colleague of the popular hero, Giuseppe Garibaldi, who was to become the first Grand Master of the Egyptian Masonic Rite of Memphis-Misraim.97 There was, too, a curious connection between the city of Livorna, where Palli and Champollion had met, and a rather elusive Masonic society called the Société Secrète Égyptienne. It is thought that one of the founders of this society was Mathieu de Lesseps, father of the famous engineer, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who built the Suez Canal in Egypt.98 The story goes that in 1818 the Austrian police r
aided a Masonic lodge in Venice. Amongst the confiscated documents was one revealing the existence of the secret society and implicating as one of its members no less a figure than Egypt's first modern ruler, Khedive Muhammad Ali.99

  Mathieu de Lesseps was a staunch Bonapartist and also a keen adept of the Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry.100 He was a very close friend of the khedive, and from 1803 to 1806 had been France's commercial attaché in Egypt, after which he had served as French consul in the city of Livorna.101 We shall encounter the de Lesseps family again in the next chapter in connection with the Statue of Liberty that stands in New York Harbor. Meanwhile, whether all this had any influence or bearing on Champollion whilst he was in Livorno is not clear, but it may explain his mindset as he began to plan there his first and only trip to Egypt …

  ‘If you go to Thebes do send me a little obelisk …’

  In Chapter One we saw that three years before his abdication in 1830, Charles X had commissioned the artist François-Édouard Picot to decorate the ceiling of his personal museum at the Louvre with an ancient Egyptian motif centred upon the goddess Isis.102 The reader will recall that Picot had been a student of the radical revolutionary and Bonapartist Jacques-Louis David who, along with Robespierre, had masterminded the various celebrations in Paris of the goddess Reason and the Supreme Being and, more especially, the celebrations at the Bastille in August 1793 when a statue of Isis was displayed to the Parisian crowds. Bearing this in mind, the ‘Isis’ featuring on the large-format ceiling painting by Picot can be seen immediately to have been modelled on David's statue of ‘Isis of the Bastille’. Indeed the painting itself contains independent confirmation of this connection – for seen flying above ‘Isis’, is the so-called Genie of the Arts, a naked youth with golden wings much resembling the Greek god Hermes. The ‘genie’ holds a torch in one hand in order to illuminate the landscape below for the benefit of the ‘goddess Athena’, at whose feet can be seen an owl, the symbol of wisdom acquired through initiation.