The Origins of Freemasonry. Margaret C. Jacob

piece of French masonic jewelry, confiscated from its Jewish engraver by the authorities in Brussels, displayed “the arms of France illuminating the attributes of freemasonry.”³⁶ By the 1770s the unified French lodges were focused on the institutions of central authority, beginning with a revitalized Grand Lodge.

      In 1774 the new Grand Lodge of Paris chose to establish a national assembly. Representatives came from all over the country and each had one vote.³⁷ All were expected to pay taxes to the Grand Lodge. At the time of the first national assembly, no such institution existed in France. If a man or a woman was a freemason, might the conclusion be that masonic government was superior to what existed in France? In 1779 an orator in Grenoble lamented that “in our modern institutions where the form of government is such that the majority of subjects must stay in the place assigned them by nature, how is it possible to contribute to the common good?”³⁸ In the 1770s the French Grand Lodge sought to contribute to the common good by having a public presence in Paris. The relationship between the French lodges and the state had gotten off to a bad start when, in the early 1740s, the chief minister of state, Cardinal Fleury, had them spied upon. By the 1770s the Grand Lodge presented a public face of absolute loyalty to church and crown. But ordinary brothers had begun to resent the sycophantic aristocrats who controlled it.

      In addition to a national representative assembly with one man, one vote, the Grand Lodge set up charity funds for brothers and sisters fallen on hard times. Seeing oneself as capable of constituting the polity and tending to its needs made freemasons into a new breed of political men—not necessarily disloyal or even republican—but with a new, and potentially dangerous, confidence about self-governance. In the case of charity they even supplanted the government in an age when governmental welfare was unknown. The freemasons did not cause the French Revolution of 1789, as the conspiracy theorists right up to the Nazis claimed, but they did make it more rather than less likely to happen.

      The same impulse to govern surfaced in the women’s lodges which spread rapidly on the Continent. In them women could identify themselves as enlightened, worship the God of Newtonian science, the Grand Architect, as He was called by the freemasons, invent rituals, and give orations. In one women’s ritual the principal figure was the Queen of the Amazons. She ran the ceremonies, despite the 1723 Constitutions, which had said that women could not even join lodges. The Queen initiated both men and women and her female officers had military titles. The catechism of the lodge called on women to recognize the injustice of men and to throw off the masculine yoke, to dominate in marriage and to claim equal wealth with men. In one ceremony the Queen holds the constitutions and queries the “Grand Patriarch:” How do men keep women under them? She then urges her sisters to cast off the bondage imposed by men, to regard as tyrants those who will not obey women.³⁹ By the 1780s the lodges in France had become focuses for innovation, particularly in the area of relations between men and women.

      Freemasonry could make abstract ideals like reason, equality, and self-governance concrete, even if difficult to attain. By 1750 around fifty thousand European and American men had joined lodges; by 1785 there were probably well over fifteen hundred women freemasons. The colonial numbers are unknown, but the lodges, like the churches, spread with empire. They expressed the highest ideals articulated during the age of Enlightenment; they could also be places of exclusion, purposefully remote from peasants, workers, in many places women, and in all places slaves. Yet in their search for equality and merit, for self-governance, free speech and religious toleration, the lodges look to the future, toward human rights and egalitarian ideals. For that reason alone they would be hated by the enemies of democracy, both in the eighteenth century and also in some of the recently created emerging eastern European and Russian democracies. It is still possible to get into a taxi in Moscow and be told that the country is being run by Jews and freemasons.

      Many of these aspects of eighteenth-century freemasonry are explored in the pages ahead. We will examine the role of governance in the lodges and the symbiotic relationship between civil society and the growing power of the state. We will also look at the masonic charity funds that operated in France during the 1780s and examine the tensions they reveal in a society soon to be convulsed by revolution. Women’s freemasonry also receives attention; it is a subject too long neglected in books about freemasonry. But before these specific topics can be broached, we need to know something about the daily lives and ideals of the fraternity.

      In the next chapter I try to give a sense of what daily life may have been like for brothers and sisters. We have a superb collection of pocket diaries or almanacs, largely from the Library of the Grand Lodge in The Hague, which tell us a great deal about what the user may have thought as he or she recorded tasks or appointments; checked for the times of coaches; and in rare moments of leisure, read the almanac with its masonic orations, engraved ceremonies, and moral admonitions. For its true believers freemasonry was meant to be lived, not simply joined. The most startling aspect of masonic day-to-day living lay in the penchant of the lodges to invent forms of governance. These began with dues and oaths of loyalty, but then extended to behavior that suggests citizenship: voting, orating before one’s brothers, setting the terms of officers and elections, and offering prescriptions for civic life within the lodge, even policing mores. Such habits have become harmless enough, but in the eighteenth century governance everywhere was the designated work of kings, churches, or elites. Blood and ordination counted in matters of government, but in the lodges—it was claimed—merit and discipline determined status. Perhaps it was inevitable that the enemies of democracy would come late in the century to blame the freemasons for its revolutionary manifestations.

      CHAPTER 2

      Daily Lives as Measured in Masonic Time

      Getting at the daily rhythms or thoughts of people in the past presents a challenge. Today our lives would appear in outline in our daily diaries, written or electronic. Trips to the doctor mix with important events in personal and family life, also with information deemed necessary for daily living: phone numbers, holidays, days when the government closes and so on. Framed in day-to-day time we jot our lives down, almost in passing, perhaps never imagining that hundreds of years from now our pocket diaries might prove to be very interesting. Such daily jottings from the eighteenth century are rare, almost nonexistent. But we do possess multiple copies of the small, printed books, generally called almanacs, that people used to get at the information they needed, like the times of coaches, or about how to get around in a city, find the right merchant or court, or to look up the day of the week on which Christmas would fall. Seeing a specific market, publishers made such almanacs for freemasons. The way they record time, and provide readings to assist in its passage, especially concerns us.

      We would give the world to know how such an eighteenth-century diary was used, how personal events mixed with the printed outline of the year around which it would be lived. We would love to know whether women used their daily diaries differently from men; perhaps they took fewer coaches but needed to know the days of holidays more exactly. The information about actual use is probably lost forever. Neither in masonic nor in general pocket diaries—both often described as almanacs—do handwritten jottings appear with any frequency. Most times we have no idea who owned the diary, or even if particular copies preserved in libraries throughout Europe or America were anything more than part of a print overrun, just one copy that never got sold.

      FIGURE 4. Frontispiece to De Almanach der Vrye Metzelaaren … 1780 (Amsterdam: Willem Coertze, Jr.), showing a woman holding a square and compasses. The use of women as allegorical figures was commonplace in masonic symbolism of the age. With permission of the masonic library, Prins Frederik Cultural Masonic Center, The Hague; copyright Grand East of the Netherlands.

      We can extrapolate from the printed contents of pocket almanacs as to what their publishers—especially when many of them were freemasons—thought would best sell the diaries or almanacs to a consumer. Masonic almanacs interest us most compellingly in this chapter, but they are best seen in light shone by general almanacs intended for any literate reader. One remarkable feature stands out that separates most masonic diaries from those aimed at a general audience. Most general diaries contained pious sentiments that invoked