Mark Coleman Wallace PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

adical in practice than several other aspects of European thought in this
period.” 14
David Stevenson correctly reasons that frequent misuse of the word
‘masonic’ to describe “anything combining radical ideas and secrecy…was
illogical and confusing.” 15 This confusion ultimately allowed detractors of the
masons to formulate conspiracy theories which asserted that “freemasonry was
one of the great causes of the French Revolution.” 16 Although there was little
tangible evidence to substantiate such allegations, British freemasonry became
the object of much scrutiny and suspicion.
In 1797, amid claims of Jacobin lodges in France and seditious and
treasonable activities among German freemasons, John Robison – eminent
mechanical philosopher and professor of natural philosophy at the University of
Edinburgh – published Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and
Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of the Freemasons,
Illuminati, and Reading Societies, Collected from Good Authorities. 17
Convinced that all of Britain stood on the brink of revolution based on the
189
14
Jeremy Black, Eighteenth-Century Europe (London, 1999), 496-497.
15
Stevenson, Origins, 1-12.
16
Jacob, Living The Enlightenment, 9-10; Abbe de Barruel published a work entitled Memoires
pour servir a l’Historie du Jacobinisme, or Memoris, Illustrating the History of Jacobinism
(London, 1798), which condemned freemasonry. He did, however, distinguish between British
and French freemasonry, separating the goals, aims, and circumstances of each. For an
additional discussion on freemasonry and the French Revolution, see A. Mellor, “Eighteenth
Century French Freemasonry and the French Revolution,” AQC, 114(2001), 105-114. Michael
Kennedy, in The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The First Years (Princeton, 1982),
dismisses Barruel’s claims, stating that a “tremendous amount of research has been done in
recent years on freemasonry; and while, unfortunately, only a small proportion pertains directly
to the clubs, it is now possible to discard a number of once-popular theories about their masonic
origins. Today, only the most imaginative minds could describe the masons as conspirators who
established the clubs as part of a grand design to subvert the Church and the Monarchy,” 5.
17
John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe,
Carried on in the Secret Meetings of the Freemasons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies,
Collected from Good Authorities (Edinburgh, 1797).