Living the Enlightenment in an Age of Revolution: Freemasonry in Bordeaux, 1788-1794

© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of French History. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

French History, Vol. 24, No. 1doi:10.1093/fh/crp067, available online at www.fh.oxfordjournals.orgAdvance Access published on 27 October 2009

* Kenneth Loiselle is an assistant professor of history at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He is completing a manuscript on male friendship practices within Freemasonry in Enlightenment and revolutionary France and may be contacted at [email protected]. The author wishes to thank Stephen Auerbach, Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, Malcolm Crook, Alan Forrest and Marisa Linton for their helpful comments and Pierre Mollier for his assistance in navigating the archival holdings at the Grand Orient in Paris.

L i V i N G T H E E N L i G H T E N M E N T i N A N A G E O F R E V O L U T i O N : F R E E M A S O N R Y

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K E N N E T H L O i S E L L E *

Abstract—despite the assumed connections between Freemasonry and the French Revolution, the historiography of the brotherhood during this period remains remarkably thin. Using newly available archival holdings, this microhistory reconstructs Masonic life in Bordeaux, focusing specifically though not exclusively on the Anglaise lodge, from the calling of the Estates General to the fall of Robespierre. it demonstrates the remarkable vitality of this city’s lodges and argues that while some aspects of Masonic associational culture may be construed as republican, Freemasonry’s reaction to revolutionary events was no different from that of the wider public. it is thus more useful to study the movement as a laboratory where an institution of the Enlightenment encountered and adapted to a new political order rather than seek the origins of the Revolution in Masonic activities.

From its earliest history in France it was said there was something insidious about Freemasonry. Anglophile freethinkers of a deist or even atheist spirit clandestinely gathered in Masonic lodges and, in spite of tight police surveillance, hatched their dark plot against Church and Throne. The order’s triumph lay in its deceptiveness. To the king and public at large, it portrayed itself as a benign organization of sociability with a penchant towards the occult. Within the walls of the lodge, however, brethren hammered away mercilessly against the French monarchy and openly preached and practised democratic republicanism: laws were devised, constitutions drafted and elections held. ignorant of Freemasonry’s true purpose, the government permitted its expansion and, as the eighteenth century advanced, so too did the Masonic project to topple the ancien régime. On the eve of the Revolution, the French and Masonic mentality, at least among the elites, had become one. it thus came as no surprise that the Masonic model of politics directly influenced the Third Estate to break away from its traditional role in the Estates General, in order to establish the National Assembly. With the creation of this body, France had become a Masonic government.

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K E N N E T H L O i S E L L E 61

This, with negligible differences from writer to writer, was the distorted caricature of Freemasonry put forth in the flood of anti-Masonic tracts that appeared during the final decade of the eighteenth century in France and abroad. Conservative thinkers, most notably the abbé Barruel in his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme, waxed nostalgically about an ancien régime they had lost and looked out with dismay and confusion upon a France whose political, social and cultural order they no longer recognized.1 Perhaps driven to regain some sense of clarity, observers like Barruel sought out the ‘principal authors’ of 1789 and singled out Freemasonry as one of the organizations most responsible for the coming of the Revolution. Adversaries of the Masons established such a tight cause-and-effect sequence between them and revolutionary politics—at both the level of agency and political credo—that one writer simply declared, ‘[i]t is difficult to explain how much the National Assembly of France owes to Freemasonry.’2

While the notion of Masonry purposefully staging the Revolution had lost much of its intellectual currency by the twentieth century, new and equally unconvincing arguments were nevertheless put forward that refused to sever completely some type of causal link between the brotherhood and political transformation.3 it has been only in the last thirty years or so that scholars have discarded this teleological vision and have struck out in new, more fruitful directions in assessing Enlightenment Freemasonry. Beginning with the work of Maurice Agulhon and Pierre Chevallier, historians have reconstructed in great detail the socio-professional composition of membership, and the geographic distribution and expansion of lodges over the course of the century, as well as the complex relationship between the brotherhood and the forces of order as the ancien régime drew to a close.4

1 On anti-Masonry during the Revolution: J. Lemaire, Les origines françaises de l’antimaçonnisme (1744-1797) (Brussels, 1985), 81–97. For a detailed list of anti-Masonic texts published during the Revolution: C. Porset, Hiram sans culotte? Franc-maçonnerie, Lumières et Révolution: trente ans d’études et de recherches (Paris, 1998), 80–127. On conspirational thought in the years before and during the Revolution more generally: P. Campbell, ‘Perceptions of conspiracy on the eve of the French Revolution’, in Conspiracy in the French Revolution, eds Campbell, T. Kaiser and M. Linton (Manchester, 2007), 15–41; d. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2001), 73–83.

2 F. Lefranc, Le Voile levé pour les curieux, ou le secret de la Révolution de France, révélé à l’aide de la Franc-maçonnerie (Paris, 1792), 34.

3 The final gasp of the ‘conspiracy’ argument may be found in the work of B. Faÿ, La Franc-maçonnerie et la révolution intellectuelle du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1935). in a more nuanced yet equally problematic fashion, the early twentieth-century historian Augustin Cochin claimed that, because of their strong solidarity and familiarity with electoral practice within lodges, Freemasons in Brittany and Burgundy successfully manoeuvred through the assemblies of 1789 in order to place themselves in positions of power. A succinct discussion and rebuttal of Cochin may be found in M. Crook, Elections in the French Revolution: An Apprenticeship in Democracy, 1789-1799 (Cambridge, 1996), 25–8.

4 M. Agulhon, Pénitents et francs-maçons de l’ancienne Provence. Essai sur la sociabilité méridionale (Paris, 1984 edn); P. Chevallier, Les Ducs sous l’Acacia ou Les premiers pas de la Franc-maçonnerie française, 1725-1743 (Paris, 1964); idem, La première profanation du temple maçonnique, 1737-1755 (Paris, 1968); R. Halévi, Les Loges maçonniques dans la France d’ancien régime (Paris, 1984). Some earlier regional monographs also merit inclusion, notably E. Lesueur, La Franc-maçonnerie artésienne au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1914).

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62 LiViNG THE ENLiGHTENMENT iN AN AGE OF REVOLUTiON

While this impressive and ever growing body of scholarship has definitively put to rest the idea of a revolutionary conspiracy at the heart of the Masonic project, it still leaves open the extent to which Enlightenment Freemasonry and the Revolution were interrelated. To be sure, their connection has not been entirely neglected and historians have attempted to link them in two distinct ways. in her pioneering study, Margaret Jacob offered a nuanced picture of the affinities between Masonic associational culture and the Revolution in arguing that the lodge, specifically in its adherence to a constitutional republicanism, prefigured—while by no means determining—one aspect of revolutionary politics.5 François Hourtoulle and others, on the other hand, have sought a link between Masonic and revolutionary realities by following the political trajectory of particular brethren through the tumultuous revolutionary dynamic.6

Some historians have undertaken forays into a third area of investigation, focusing not on individual Masons but rather on the lodges themselves, examining how the Revolution impacted on this institutional milieu. How did political transformation affect the patterns of meetings, membership as well as the content of rituals, discourses and auxiliary social events? At first glance, it would appear that this path leads us to the straightforward answer Robert darnton advanced long ago: ‘The Revolution turned the cultural world upside down.’7 Pillars of the Enlightenment such as the academies, musées and salons all crumbled under the weight of 1789, and Masonic life appears to have suffered a similar demise. Reporting on the situation in Narbonne early in the Revolution, the marquis de Chefdebien remarked that political events caused ‘meetings to become less frequent, less numerous; the mutual expressions of friendship are no longer made with the same effusion’.8 in 1789, the master of the Choix des Vrais Amis Unis in Marseille also declared that ‘enthusiasm is waning’.9 The capital, along with other areas such as the Charente, Clermont-Ferrand, Corsica, Limousin, Lyon, Normandy, Provence, and to some degree Toulouse, all registered a marked decline in Masonic activity at some point between 1789 and 1794. After four frustrating years wracked with financial woes, the Grand

5 M. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford, 1991). The novelty of the Masonic emphasis on voting and adherence to a written set of laws should not be exaggerated, however. Freemasonry was but one of the many social venues emerging in eighteenth-century France where members voted on new initiates and elected officers and whose meetings were structured according to a set of written guidelines. For a sampling of these clubs: A. dinaux, Les Sociétés badines, bachiques, littéraires et chantantes leur histoire et leurs travaux: leur histoire et leurs travaux, vol. 2 (Paris, 1867). Comparing Masonic laws and voting procedures with these poorly studied societies would be helpful.

6 F.-G. Houtroulle, Franc-maçonnerie et Révolution (Paris, 1989), 337–57; also Agulhon, Pénitents et francs-maçons, 262–6. A summary of local studies may be found in A. Soboul, ‘La Franc-maçonnerie et la Révolution française’, A[nnales] h[istoriques] de la R[évolution] f[rançaise], 46 (1974), 76–88.

7 R. darnton, ‘The high Enlightenment and the low-life of literature in pre-revolutionary France’, Past and Present, 51 (1971), 112.

8 B. Fabre, Un initié des sociétés secrètes supérieures, ‘Franciscus, eques a capite galeato’, 1753-1814 (Paris, 1913), 30.

9 d. Ligou, Franc-maçonnerie et Révolution française, 1789-1799 (Paris, 1989),156.

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Orient—the administrative hub of French Freemasonry—also finally ceased corresponding with lodges late in 1793. in sum, it is quite possible that fewer than 3 per cent of ancien régime lodges survived the Revolution.10

Such a picture of Freemasonry during the Revolution undoubtedly reflects in part the historical reality but it is equally likely to be founded upon the archival peculiarity of Masonic history. Though some monographs have made fine use of sources located in municipal or departmental locations, much work on eighteenth-century Freemasonry has relied heavily on the fonds maçonnique at the Bibliothèque Nationale. A significant drawback of this tendency is that it has relied nearly exclusively on the Grand Orient paper trail to confirm the existence of a particular lodge. Such an approach is therefore incomplete for it cannot account for lodge records that fell beyond the purview of the Grand Orient, notably a lodge’s meeting register, the livre d’architecture. While earlier generations of historians had to settle for painstaking hit-or-miss research in municipal and departmental archives, a new, centralized archival source has emerged that is particularly rich for the Enlightenment and revolutionary periods: 27,000 dossiers now housed at the Grand Orient and Grande Lodge. it is within these ‘Russian archives’—which migrated during the postwar period to the Soviet Union via East Germany and returned to France only in 2000—that one finds a rich record of eighteenth-century Masonic life in provincial centres where Freemasonry touched all ranks of French society, from skilled artisans to the nobility.11 documents from Bordeaux survive, and the massive livres d’architecture for the Anglaise lodge—one of the oldest Masonic establishments in France—emerge as some of the richest material in this collection, numbering well over 1000 manuscript pages. Such material enables the historian to trace in minute detail the transformations and continuities of Bordelais Freemasonry during the turbulent period 1789–94.12

10 Agulhon, Pénitents et francs-maçons, 262–6; P. Barral, ‘Les francs-maçons grenoblois et la Révolution française’, AHRF, 41 (1969), 510; P.-Y. Beaurepaire, Les francs-maçons à l’orient de Clermont-Ferrand au XVIIIe siècle (Clermont-Ferrand, 1993), 259; A. Bouton, ‘dispersion poli-tique des francs-maçons du Maine au printemps 1792’, AHRF, 41 (1969), 490; P. Chevallier, École de l’Égalité, 337; A. Combes, Histoire de la Franc-maçonnerie à Lyon des origines à nos jours (Lyon, 2006), 114–17; M. Laguionie, Histoire des francs-maçons à Limoges (Saint-Paul, 2000), 43; Lesueur, La Franc-maçonnerie artésienne, 271–7; J. Royer, Histoire de la Franc-maçonnerie en Charente (Paris, 1994), 33–7; J.-M. Mercier and T. Zarcone, Les francs-maçons du pays de Daudet: Beaucaire et Tarascon. Destins croisés du XVIIIe au XXe siècles (Aix-en-Provence, 2004), 35; C. Santoni, Chronique de la Franc-maçonnerie en Corse, 1772-1920 (Ajaccio, 1999), 48; E. Saunier, Révolution et sociabilité en Normandie au tournant des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Le Havre, 1998), 305; M. Taillefer, La Franc-maçonnerie toulousaine sous l’ancien régime et la Révolution (Paris, 1984), 238. Gérard Gayot estimates that a mere eighteen lodges affiliated with the Grand Orient were still operating in 1796 as compared with 635 in 1789: La Franc-maçonnerie française: textes et pratiques (XVIIIe-XIXe siècles) (Paris, 1980), 34–5.

11 C. Porset, ‘Un nouveau massif de sources: les archives du KGB’, in Franc-maçonnerie et his-toire: Bilan et perspectives, eds C. Gaudin and E. Saunier (Rouen, 2003), 37–43.

12 Margaret Jacob has devoted some attention to Anglaise in the Revolution in Strangers No-where in the World: Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia, 2006), 107–14. Ample material from other Bordelais lodges has survived and will be integrated into a forthcoming study.

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in the first instance, this microhistorical study will explore the structural aspects of Masonic sociability during the revolutionary moment in Bordeaux, attempting to answer the following questions. did Freemasonry come to a gradual—indeed grinding in some regions—halt as previous historians have suggested? if not, how did the course of the Revolution in both the provincial and national context impact on the frequency and attendance of meetings? did the lodge’s membership profile change during this period and, if so, does one find an increasing socio-economic diversification of brethren, reflecting the revolutionary principle of social levelling? A second set of questions intends to illuminate the cultural changes wrought by political developments. To what degree did Freemasonry become politicized by outside events? Can traces of the Revolution be found in speeches, songs, banquet toasts and the like? Answering such questions not only puts flesh on what has been an otherwise skeletal history of Freemasonry during this time, but it also can reveal something about a classic, yet persistent question in eighteenth-century French historiography: how were the Enlightenment and the Revolution interrelated?13

i

Anglaise held its first meeting in late April 1732, less than a decade following the implantation of the brotherhood in Paris and elsewhere.14 despite its name, it was comprised primarily of irish négociants; one finds such names as Boyd, Bradshaw, Knox, Madden and Quinn on the rolls during the first decade of the lodge’s existence. Such a national profile is unsurprising as Cork and dublin were important maritime contact points with Bordeaux from the 1720s onward and a number of irish merchants settled in the city.15 Anglaise became decidedly Bordelais from the 1740s onwards, as members increasingly tended to be drawn from the affluent mercantile classes originating either in the city or the

13 Like Jacob’s Living the Enlightenment, this study situates Freemasonry within the Enlighten-ment for its adherence to a form of republicanism within the lodge. it should be stressed, however, that Masons generally did not share the distinct anticlerical position of the philosophes—clergy could be found in lodges throughout the kingdom—and Christian symbolism and objects were prevalent in Masonic sociability and ritual throughout the century. in this way, Freemasonry re-minds us that the French Enlightenment could be quite accommodating to Christianity, a point made in H. Rosenblatt, ‘The Christian Enlightenment’, in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 7: Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution, 1660-1815, eds S. Brown and T. Tackett (Cambridge, 2006), 283–301. Taking a more intellectualist and subsequently limited perspective, david Sorkin sees the 1780s and early period of the Revolution as the only brief moment of fruitful dialogue between Catholicism and the Enlightenment in France: The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, 2008), 261–6.

14 This account of the early history of Anglaise has been based on P.-Y. Beaurepaire, L’Autre et le frère: l’étranger et la Franc-maçonnerie en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1998), 233–6; J. Coutura, La Franc-maçonnerie à Bordeaux (XVIIIe – XIXe siècles) (Marseille, 1978), 21–3. On early Bor-delais Freemasonry, see also A. Bernheim, ‘Notes on early Freemasonry in Bordeaux (1732–1769)’, Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 101 (1988), 33–131.

15 L. Cullen, ‘The irish merchant communities of Bordeaux, La Rochelle and Cognac in the eight-eenth century’, in Négoce et industrie en France et en Irlande aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, ed. P. Butel and L. Cullen (Paris, 1980), 51–63.

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surrounding region. This shift can be seen as early as 1743 when the lodge decided to adopt French as the official working language. Along with Anglaise, other lodges opened their doors during the reign of Louis xV, but it was not until the final decades of the century that Freemasonry truly blossomed in Bordeaux. Almost every year from 1770 to 1789 saw the opening of a new lodge—fifteen in all—whereas a mere seven lodges had appeared during the previous fifty years.16 The city’s middling sort and its elites were attracted to Masonry because it offered a hybrid, amorphous sociability whose appeal lay in the diversity of its content. Fashionable cultural currents such as mesmerism and occultism, as well as the pseudo-scientific teachings of Count Cagliostro, all found their place within Bordelais lodges at some point during the pre-revolutionary period.17 For members of Anglaise, however, charity work and conviviality remained their chief preoccupations and, as the oldest Masonic establishment in the city, they also oversaw the founding of local lodges and even those as far flung as Edenton, North Carolina.18 Brethren envisioned the lodge as a sanctum from the outside world, one in which men could devote themselves to forming lasting friendships. The importance of friendship—a theme to which we will return below—was emphasized during a Saint John’s day banquet at some point in the 1770s. To conclude the festivities, attendees exercised a degree of literary imagination, personifying the strong bonds of solidarity forged between them. ‘Tender friendship’, they sang in unison, ‘come and kindle your flames, embrace us with your celestial flames, [and] let every day strengthen your tender bonds … You flee far from the tumult and fracas of cities [and] the eyes of profane mortals. it is among us in these happy refuges that you forever make your altars’.19 By the eve of the Revolution, Anglaise largely comprised the prosperous commercial classes, a group Alan Forrest aptly crowned as the ‘new urban aristocracy’ of the period. A membership list from 1787 bears out this trend: of the fifty-eight registered members, nearly 80 per cent listed their profession as pertaining to commerce, as either négociant or capitaine de navire. Such a profile reflected the unambiguously strong presence of the mercantile classes in Bordelais Freemasonry during the closing decades of the ancien régime.20

16 Lodge lists for Bordeaux are located in A. Le Bihan, Loges et chapitres de la Grande Loge et du Grand Orient de France (2e moitié du XVIIIe siècle) (Paris, 1967) and F. Weil, ‘La Franc-maçonnerie en France jusqu’en 1755’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 27 (1963), 1787–815.

17 J. Coutura, Les francs-maçons de Bordeaux au 18e siècle (Bordeaux, 1988), 35–46.18 A[rchives] d[épartementales de la] G[ironde], Série 6E 9 unfoliated, for the 1779 correspond-

ence between the francophone Amitié lodge in Edenton with Anglaise.19 AdG, Série 6E 9, unfoliated, ‘Cantique de l’Amitié’.20 Library of the Grand Orient of France (hereafter GOdF), Paris, MS AR 113.2.516, fo. 51. Over

the course of the entire century, nearly 75 per cent of Anglaise members (sixty-two out of the eighty-five brethren whose profession can be identified) were engaged in trade. See the member-ship list in Coutura, Les francs-maçons de Bordeaux, 58–205. Anglaise appears to have welcomed more merchants than most lodges in the city, as slightly more than half of all brethren (556 out of 1094) were classified by daniel Roche as involved in négoce: Le Siècle des Lumières en province: académies et académiciens provinciaux, 1680-1789, vol. 2 (Paris, 1978), 419, 423.

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With the announcement of the Estates General in early July 1788, Bordeaux resembled much of the kingdom in that it was soon awash with political talk, print and action. Later that year, all three estates began meeting in order to decide upon their choice of deputies and draw up respective cahiers de doléances. The new printing houses emerging during the period also generated a vast quantity of pamphlets which provided the city’s literate public with a running commentary on local and national events.21 Beyond the clubs emerging from 1790 onwards, political meetings in the city could take a variety of forms, from large open-air assemblies at the Jardin Public to informal gatherings in a neighbourhood café. And while Bordelais impatiently awaited correspondence from Paris, it is important to emphasize that excitement surrounding events held grassroots appeal, especially during the years 1789–93 when the mercantile and propertied elite controlled municipal politics; they viewed the Revolution as providing the political conditions that could make real economic reform possible. As one local chronicler pithily summarized: ‘Effervescence is great.’22

To live in Bordeaux in 1788 or 1789, then, would be a gripping adventure in political apprenticeship and the Anglaise lodge would have been in the thick of it: meetings were held in a set of rooms somewhere just off the Jardin Public.23 in a city that expected its citizens to show enthusiasm for the Revolution, it would have been difficult indeed for these Masons to remain ambivalent or apathetic. Already in mid-1789, the cockade was a mandatory accessory; prominently displaying it was required to enter public spaces such as the theatre.24 it must also be stressed that although it was typical of brethren to erect a sharp divide along ethical lines between Masons and the non-Masonic ‘profane’ public, Masonry was not a totalizing institution whose participants were sealed off from the outside world. Lodges throughout the century indeed emphasized that they had an active role to play in improving society at large, largely through charitable works that often were coordinated

21 during the 1788–94 period, the number of imprimeur-libraires tripled in the city: E. Labadie, Notice biographique sur les imprimeurs et libraires bordelais des XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Bordeaux, 1900), 131–2. Unsurprisingly, titles of periodicals emerging in the first year of the Revo-lution in Bordeaux specifically referred to developments in Paris or at home, such as Journal de l’Assemblée Nationale (May 1789), La Nouvelle du Jour ou Lettre à un politique sur ce qui se passe … principalement dans l’Assemblée Nationale et à Bordeaux (Jan. 1790), and Le Courrier de Paris à Bordeaux (Jan. 1790). On the high demand for political pamphlets in revolutionary Bordeaux: J. McLeod, ‘A bookseller in revolutionary Bordeaux’, Fr Hist Studies, 16 (1989), 262–83 and Labadie, Notice biographique, xl.

22 M. Lhéritier, Les Débuts de la Révolution à Bordeaux d’après les Tablettes manuscrites de Pierre Bernadau (Paris, 1919), 74, (entry for 20 July 1789). On Bordeaux’s rapid politicization, see A. Forrest, Society and Politics in Revolutionary Bordeaux (Oxford, 1975), 62-87.

23 GOdF MS AR 113.2.101, fo. 96v. The lodge moved to new quarters ‘near the Jardin Public’ in July 1787.

24 Lhéritier, Les Débuts de la Révolution, 74 (entry for 18 July 1789); also Forrest, Society and Politics, 62.

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with local parishes. Anglaise continued to function this way into the revolutionary period.25

despite the profound transformations in the political climate of Bordeaux and some members’ absences due to these ‘civic affairs of the greatest consequence’, no explicit mention of the Revolution was noted in the lodge register until the middle of 1790.26 This was not due to lack of meetings, however. As Table i illustrates, Anglaise did measure a slow and steady decline in Masonic life, but members still managed to gather 216 times before July 1794 and held nearly fifty meetings in 1789 alone. Why then did this lodge remain a loge immobile during the initial politicization of the city? At first glance, it is possible to dismiss this lacuna as a reflection of the assumed Masonic prohibition against discussing matters of state in meetings. However, Anglaise brethren had in fact transgressed this supposed cardinal rule on more than one occasion in the recent past. Not only had they followed the Masonic consensus throughout the kingdom in celebrating the birth of the dauphin in late 1781, but local events later that decade had also prompted a banquet. in September 1788, when Louis xVi allowed Bordeaux’s Parlement to return from its year-long exile in Libourne, for having stubbornly refused to register royal edicts pertaining to creating provincial assemblies, Anglaise decided to ‘hold a banquet … to celebrate the happy return of our respectable magistrates who have returned to the seat of justice’.27 At the banquet itself, the presiding lodge master, merchant Paul Ore, began the festivities by raising his glass to the parlementaires, ‘reminding all brethren that this respectable lodge is assembled today … to celebrate the happy return of our virtuous magistrates and of the reestablishment of justice in the kingdom’.28

Eighteenth-century Freemasonry thus did not merely represent a space where a distinct form of political culture could take hold—one anchored in elections and following written laws—but actual talking about actual politics could and did occur within the lodge. Why then did the lodge register of Anglaise brethren remain silent on the Revolution for over a year? The most likely explanation was that these Masons sought out new venues specifically intended for the

25 On the charitable activity of eighteenth-century Freemasonry: Agulhon, Pénitents et francs-maçons, 182; Lesueur, La Franc-maçonnerie artésienne, 220; Saunier, Révolution et sociabilité en Normandie, 145–56; Taillefer, La Franc-maçonnerie toulousaine, 168–72. Beyond the typical Ma-sonic practice of circulating the poor box (boîte des pauvres) at the end of each meeting, Anglaise also assisted those whose possessions had been lost in a fire in late August 1789 and the following year answered the call of a local curé to help an unnamed family: GOdF, MS AR 113.2.102, folios 51 and 84v. Emphasis on charitable work appeared following a 1792 initiation where the orator stressed that ‘the kindest of [Masonic] duties is to cherish in his fraternal bosom the unfortunate who has been shunned by society’s prejudices.’: GOdF, MS AR 113.2.102, fo. 134.

26 Members sent letters apologizing for their lack of attendance as early as April 1789. See, for example, Library of the Grand Lodge of France, AR 112, Opis 4, Boîte 9, fo. 292. Although equally rich, the Grand Lodge’s ‘Russian Archive’ differs from that of the Grand Orient in that it is chiefly devoted to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

27 GOdF, MS AR 113.2.102, fo. 16v. The banquet was held on 9 Nov. 1788.28 GOdF, MS AR 113.2.97 (banquet register, 1781–96), fo. 29.

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communication of political issues that were emerging throughout Bordeaux in response to the tumultuous summer of 1789. Already in late June, the Club du Café National began meeting as a group to read and discuss news from Paris and the region and other clubs took form by early 1790; the well-off members of Anglaise were, in all likelihood, particularly attracted to the moderate Amis de la Constitution.30 it thus appears that while overt political matters could be expressed within the Masonic context during the ancien régime, brethren quickly recognized that the lodge was not the most appropriate or effective means to do so. This trend was particularly acute in the aftermath of major events over the course of the Revolution when meeting frequency registered a noticeable decline. Consider the case of the flight of the king in late June 1791. After news of the royal family’s failed attempt to flee to Montmédy had reached Bordeaux on 24 June, concern over the future of the Revolution immediately gripped the city. Bordeaux closed its port, members of the National Guard renewed their vows to the fledgling nation, the phrase ‘The Constitution or death’ was to be prominently displayed outside residences, and political clubs met continuously.31 While Anglaise averaged nearly four meetings per month from January to June, brethren were able to organize only one meeting per month on average for the remainder of the year. New political clubs, on the other hand, displayed precisely the opposite trend. Compared with monthly figures preceding the king’s flight, the Société Patriotique des Surveillants Zélés de la Constitution met 30 per cent more frequently from July until december of that year and nearly 80 per cent more often in the summer months immediately following this event.32

Table I Anglaise Meetings, January 1788-July 179429

Meetings Average Attendance Initiations

1788 86 23 311789 49 19 41790 44 15 51791 32 14 61792 32 12 51793 29 10 71794 30 11 4

29 More restricted gatherings such as master’s lodges (loge des maîtres) have not been counted as they normally occurred on the same day as general meetings. Banquets have been included.

30 due to the general absence of membership lists of Bordeaux’s clubs and sections, it has not been possible to trace the political involvement of Anglaise brethren.

31 R. Brace, Bordeaux and the Gironde, 1789-1794 (New York, 1947), 85–98; T. Tackett, When the King Took Flight (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 159, 164; A. Vivie, Histoire de la Terreur à Bor-deaux, 2 vols (Bordeaux, 1877), i. 35–7.

32 Archives Municipales de Bordeaux, i 72, Délibérations de la Société Patriotique des Surveil-lants Zélés de la Constitution. The averages of monthly meetings for this club were nine (before the flight), sixteen (from July to Sept.) and twelve (from July until dec.).

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Beyond the establishment of competing venues such as clubs and later sectional assemblies, other factors surely drained Anglaise attendance. From 1792 to 1794, we find mention in the lodge register of members who were part of the local National Guard or regular army. This is hardly surprising since armed forces in the city drew heavily from the same middling sort that populated the ranks of the lodge.33 On numerous occasions, the lodge secretary regretted the absence of brethren but found solace in the fact that they have left to be ‘virtuous defenders of the Republic’, ‘to assure the tranquillity of France’s coasts’ and to ‘combat the enemies of freedom’.34 in 1793, following the declaration of war with Spain and the decree on the levée en masse, we find no meetings held in April and only two in May; at least 2000 troops from the Gironde had been dispatched to Bayonne alone to hold the Spanish at bay.35 A final source of depletion in the rank and file was that an undetermined number of Masons left Bordeaux, either temporarily or never to return. From late 1790 onwards, one finds brethren excusing themselves for their ‘prompt departure’ often for ‘the colonies’, ‘the islands’ or ‘America’, references to French possessions in the Caribbean.

despite these issues, the lodge continued to meet throughout the Revolution, with the exception of a brief period after July 1794. indeed, by tracking who was visiting and corresponding with Anglaise, it also becomes apparent that at least seven other lodges in the city remained active until early or mid-1794.36 Stubborn persistence thus emerges as the most useful way of describing Bordelais Freemasonry during the Revolution and sweeping generalizations often advanced that French lodges emptied in 1789 may be safely discarded. in fact, when compared with other regions, Masonic life in Bordeaux may have been among the most vibrant in France. in his excellent monograph on Freemasonry in Toulouse, Michel Taillefer distinguished the brotherhood in this city from other areas for its persistence into the Terror. Yet, while over a half a dozen lodges may be found in Bordeaux, Taillefer identifies only four still functioning in Toulouse beyond 1793. Furthermore, besides the exceptionally resistant lodge Saint-Joseph des Arts, Anglaise outpaced other lodges in Toulouse

33 Forrest, Society and Politics, 42. it should be noted that no mention is made of members’ participation in Bordeaux’s brief ‘federalist’ uprising in the summer of 1793.

34 GOdF, MS AR 113.2.97, fos 35–6v. Special gatherings could be held to praise members for their military service. On 9 Oct. 1792, a banquet was held in honour of a certain brother Estabé du Vigneau who had returned from an unspecified field of conflict, probably in the north-east. The lodge master specified that he ‘merits our admiration and our friendship in devoting himself to go to our frontiers to finish hunting the tyrants and their puppets.’

35 Forrest, Society and Politics, 114.36 GOdF, MS AR 113.2.102, fo. 161. Local lodges still corresponding with and sending delega-

tions to Anglaise were Amitié (until Jan. 1794), Essence de la Paix (until July 1794), Etoile Flamboy-ante (until Mar. 1794), Fidèle Anglaise (until July 1794) and Française d’Acquitaine (until July 1794). One lodge remained unidentified, as Anglaise referred to seven groups operating in the city in late November 1793.

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in terms of the annual number of meetings.37 We should also bear in mind that before Anglaise’s involuntary closure in July 1794, brethren had already met on thirty separate occasions; it is thus quite likely that 1794 would have represented a return to, or surpassing of pre-revolutionary levels. in short, Freemasonry in Toulouse was by no means alone in continuing to operate during the most turbulent of times in the Revolution.

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The degree to which aspects of revolutionary culture impacted on the associational life of the Anglaise lodge require demonstration. How, for instance, did the shifting perceptions of the monarchy, new ways of conceiving of citizenship and reaction against the nobility and institutional religion shape Masonic sociability? The lodge’s reaction to the Revolution may be divided into three stages: before and after the king’s flight; and during the Reign of Terror, from late summer 1793 to July 1794. As noted earlier, from 1789 until 1791 the intrusion of the Revolution into Masonic practice was rather limited; with the exception of the lower rate of meetings cited earlier, no significant difference from ancien régime meetings may be found. Brethren gathered to discuss new initiates, distribute charity to the neighbourhood poor or members in financial distress, plan the biannual St. John’s day banquets, elect new officers and, of course, partake in wine-fortified socializing. it was not until 6 July 1790, a week before the Fête de la Fédération, that we first find reference to political activity in the lodge register:

The First Warden [the highest ranking officer in a Masonic lodge besides the master] said that true Masons, always free and incessantly allies of the king, have no greater homage to render than to those dignified leaders who maintain order and peace …[he] proposed that in light of the fortunate revolution of the fatherland [de la patrie], the day where we celebrate the feast of St. John, we will firstly toast the virtuous French citizens and the second toast will be immediately offered to the honour of the good and sensible monarch and dignified father of the French and for the prosperity of his dear family …38

despite the warden’s proposal and the membership’s agreement, the toasts of the Saint John’s day banquet held a week later made no mention of citizens though the king was honoured with the first toast as had been the practice during the ancien régime. it is not clear why those ‘virtuous citizens’ were

37 Taillefer, La Franc-maçonnerie toulousaine, 240–1, n. 12, 255. Saint-Joseph des Arts held 36 per cent more meetings (294) than Anglaise. it is also possible that Coeurs Réunis surpassed Anglaise in 1794, but Taillefer only provides a table for this lodge from 1789 to 1793 during which time Anglaise gathered 13 per cent more frequently.

38 GOdF, MS AR 113.2.102, fo. 67v–fo. 68.

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absent from the banquet toast register. did opposition to this innovation emerge during the banquet itself? Such a scenario is unlikely as a large number of brethren (twenty-one) had originally heard and endorsed the warden’s idea. it is also improbable, given his scrupulous habits, that the secretary would have omitted such an important modification.

This issue aside, this speech’s significance lies in the fact that it serves as a clear marker of the Anglaise view of the opening period of the Revolution which saw the king and the National Assembly as working in tandem and as the political reforms under way as overwhelmingly positive. As Timothy Tackett has observed, the French public expressed warm attitudes towards Louis before his flight and as the Anglaise lodge speech illustrates, his traditional image as the paternalistic head of the kingdom was extended into the opening years of the Revolution.39 despite its arguably republican political practices—its anonymous voting, removability of officers and respect for a written constitution—Anglaise Masons did not intend to extend these principles beyond the lodge. We find no positive endorsement or even mention of a republic in meetings until November 1792, two months after its official proclamation. in this way, Masonic political thinking, at least in Bordeaux, resembled most strands of French Enlightenment thought in that it did not envision a republic as a feasible political reality.40

Because the Masonic vision of politics was by and large indistinguishable from that of the wider population in the eighteenth century—as an organization it possessed no coherent political ideology—the local context functioned as the key variable in explaining a given lodge’s political orientation. As noted earlier, Anglaise was comprised mainly of men engaged in trade, either domestically or overseas. Like most of the commercial classes of Bordeaux, Anglaise brethren welcomed the Estates General with enthusiasm, essentially because they saw it as an opportunity to promote their own economic interests.41 it was seen as a venue to redraw taxation schemes in order to ensure a more equitable burden amongst all orders and to allow for a freer circulation of goods within the region. And Anglaise support remained spontaneously positive as long as the city’s government remained in control of the Bordelais middling sort from where the vast majority of brethren originated. As we will shortly see, Anglaise did continue to support the Revolution during the Terror, but this was motivated primarily by fear of closure rather than a genuine alignment of interests.

Following the flight of the king, we detect an increasing politicization of Masonic sociability. By ‘politicization’, we refer to the gradual process by which values not inherent to ancien régime Freemasonry began to infiltrate Masonic life to the extent that admission into the brotherhood meant subscribing to them. For example, the initiation ritual in most lodges in Enlightenment France

39 Tackett, When the King Took Flight, 101.40 On republicanism in the French Enlightenment: K. Baker, ‘Transformations of classical repub-

licanism in eighteenth-century France’, Jl Mod Hist, 73 (2001), 32–53.41 On the mercantile community’s support for the Revolution: Forrest, Society and Politics,

ch. 2.

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required that the candidate affirm his acceptance to behave as both an honnête homme and as a Christian; brethren subscribed to an ecumenism between Protestants and Catholics that reflected a wider eighteenth-century doctrinal indifference that david Bien identified long ago.42 While Anglaise did not abandon these twin ethical points of reference—the Gospels continued to be used throughout the period, for instance—it added another: from 1792 onwards, recognition of the initiate’s civisme, amour de la patrie and his status as a citoyen or républicain français became commonplace before initiation. References to Louis and his family in banquet toasts also disappeared after June 1791 and were eventually replaced with well-wishes to ‘the prosperity and perpetuation of the sublime French republic’ as well as to the ‘representatives of the French Republic in the Convention’.43

Not only did Masonic practice in Bordeaux become bound up with allegiance to the fledgling revolutionary nation but it was also shaped by local identity. Because of the prosperity generated by Bordeaux’s vast trading sector, residents held their city in high regard; they saw it as one of the great urban centres of France on par with the capital.44 Such local pride naturally continued into the Revolution and made its imprint on national politics; as Ted Margadant has pointed out, the ‘politics of parochialism’ in provincial urban centres like Bordeaux shaped much of the definition of departments and districts in the National Assembly.45 Within Freemasonry, regionalism led to the resurrection of an umbrella organization known as a ‘general lodge’ that had operated intermittently from the 1750s to the early 1780s.46 in late July 1790, brethren in the city soon began talk of a ‘confederation’ of all lodges in the city, where a general meeting would be held at least once a month. However, this new proposal went much further than earlier attempts at strengthening ties between lodges. it was added that visiting delegations were encouraged to attend not only other lodge meetings but also offer their input on potential recruits and attend initiation ceremonies. According to the First Warden of Anglaise, the rationale for such a scheme lay in assuring a degree of uniformity and harmony

42 d. Bien, The Calas Affair: Persecution, Toleration, and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century Tou-louse (Westport, CT, 1979), ch. 2. On ecumenism within Enlightenment Freemasonry: P.-Y. Beau-repaire, ‘Lumières maçonniques et christianisme’, Dix-huitième siècle, 34 (2002), 27–40. On the mechanics of the initiation: K. Loiselle, ‘“Nouveaux mais vrais amis”: la Franc-maçonnerie et les rites de l’amitié au dix-huitième siècle’, Dix-huitième siècle, 39 (2007), 303–18.

43 The systematic verification of a candidate’s explicit adherence to the Republic began in Nov. 1792. The republican calendar also eventually came into use, but Masonic dating (adding 4000 years to the Gregorian and beginning the year in Mar.) continued to be noted. The first mention of the Republic in banquet toasts appeared on 9 Oct. 1792; brethren also began punctuating these gather-ings with patriotic hymns such as the ‘Marseillaise’ in the summer of that year: GOdF, MS AR 113.2.97, fos 34v–35.

44 Forrest, Society and Politics, 5, 25.45 T. Margadant, Urban Rivalries in the French Revolution (Princeton, 1992), chs 5–7.46 For the general lodge in the 1750s and 1760s: GOdF MS AR 113.1.14, correspondence be-

tween the Grand Lodge of France (the predecessor to the Grand Orient) and Bordelais lodges. For the pre-revolutionary period: GOdF, MS AR 113.2.941, fos 64–71v, Livre des Délibérations pour les Loges de Maîtres et pour les Loges Généralles.

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across lodges during a time ‘when Masons should consider only order and peace’.47 By September, local Masons crossed the threshold of Anglaise with ever increasing frequency. despite having held far fewer meetings in 1790 than in 1789 (see Table i), the number of local visitors to Anglaise increased tenfold during this time. in total, from 1790 to 1794, well over 300 brethren from the city entered the lodge, comprising approximately 88 per cent of all identifiable visitors. in 1788 and 1789, by contrast, they made up less than 40 per cent of the total. it is also significant that Bordeaux’s lodges dubbed their confederation a pacte fédératif, clearly borrowing this term from political developments already under way in the region. in 1790, cities and outlying communes as well as neighbouring departments throughout France began to ally themselves with one another under such ill-defined ‘pacts’ whose objective was by and large to maintain public order. Bordeaux and Toulouse entered into such an arrangement in June of that year, which represented, in the words of the Bordelais municipal officers, ‘an alliance to unite us forever in the upholding of the Constitution’.48 in this instance, it was once again the Revolution informing Masonic sociability and not the reverse as has so often been stated.

did these trends—increasing local ties and later adherence to the French Republic—translate into an abandonment of Freemasonry’s long-held cosmopolitan ethos where brethren nominally did not differentiate between French and foreign brethren? Recent scholars have suggested that an emerging nationalist sentiment in late eighteenth-century Europe strained international Masonic relations, and the lodge register of Anglaise indicates that the number of European visitors did in fact drop over the course of the Revolution: in 1788, seven foreign Masons entered the lodge, while no more than three can be found for any year during the 1789–94 period.49 Nevertheless, since the trend mirrored other variables such as declining meeting attendance and initiations, it most likely emerged on account of the overall instability and difficulty of travel during the period—especially when Bordeaux was under tight surveillance during the Terror—and did not reflect a growing penchant amongst Anglaise Masons to exclude visitors along nationalist lines. On the contrary, when the occasion arose, the lodge continued to welcome brethren from England and Prussia despite the outbreak of hostilities with these powers.50 As one orator clearly put it, cosmopolitanism and patriotism could co-exist neatly alongside one another within the Masonic mind: ‘The charms of Masonry’, he declared following an initiation at the height of the Terror, ‘are the inviolable principles of love both of one’s country and of humanity.’51 it is also worthy to note that, until the

47 GOdF, MS AR 113.2.102, fo. 74.48 Lettres et délibérations des municipalités de Toulouse et de Bordeaux, pour un pacte fédéra-

tif (Bordeaux, 1790), 5; also Forrest, Society and Politics, 44–7.49 Beaurepaire, L’Autre et le frère, 607–51.50 Masons from Berlin, Winchester and an unspecified British colony visited the lodge between

1792 and 1794 and were admitted without opposition.51 GOdF, MS AR 113.2.102, fo. 176 (2 Apr. 1794).

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Terror in Bordeaux, members made no move to change their potentially scandalous lodge title even after the declaration of war against Great Britain in early February 1793.

The final stage of the history of the lodge in the Revolution spanned the period from autumn 1793 to the summer of 1794.52 At this point, Bordeaux had capitulated to the Convention and the city’s municipal government was now in the hands of the représentants-en-mission sent from Paris. This political shift made an immediate impact on Anglaise: brethren met only twice throughout the entire autumn and one meeting attracted a paltry three Masons, the absolute minimum to hold a lodge. it was a tense atmosphere where the comité de surveillance declared that ‘indifference was a crime’ and Freemasonry judiciously responded by incorporating revolutionary political symbols into their meetings in an unprecedented manner.53 Similar to the streets and public spaces in the city, lodges adopted names perceived to be more in line with the values of the Jacobin-controlled municipal government: Anglaise became Egalité, Française d’Acquitaine now called itself Française d’Unité, and Fidèle Anglaise changed its name to Liberté.54 Following the law of 31 October 1793 that made the familiar tu form of address mandatory, lodge members followed suit despite the fact that tu had been used primarily in ancien régime Freemasonry only when belittling neophytes during the initiation process.55 in addition, Anglaise placed the tricolour on all its official correspondence and decorations, and it was hoped that these measures would shield the lodge from any unwanted attention from the newly formed Jacobin municipal council which had already begun to arrest, condemn and execute perceived dissidents. After these changes, Anglaise or Egalité personally invited deputy Claude-Alexandre Ysabeau—himself a Freemason—to visit their lodge, though it is not known if such a visit ever occurred.56

What is clear, however, is that these actions were probably prudent safeguards rather than genuine testimonials to the membership’s support of the Terror. Two reasons justify such an interpretation. First, the commercial classes still constituted the majority of Anglaise membership in late 1793. From the summer

52 The lodge register makes no mention of Bordeaux’s resistance to Paris following the expulsion of the city’s deputies from the Convention in late May 1793. As indicated earlier, this was probably due to the fact that Anglaise members attended sections and clubs intended for discussion of such issues.

53 On the intolerance of apathy to the Revolution in Bordeaux: Forrest, Society and Politics, 231.

54 These changes occurred in Nov. and dec. 1793.55 Loiselle, ‘Rites de l’amitié’, 311–12. Anglaise adopted the tu form on 28 Nov. 1793: GOdF, MS

AR 113.2.102, fo. 162. This transition to tu occurred in other surviving lodges outside Bordeaux. A revealing discussion on this issue took place in the Guillaume Tell lodge in Paris: Bibliothèque na-tionale, Cabinet des manuscrits, Fonds maçonnique, FM3 31, fos 97–109; also P. Wolff, ‘Le tu révo-lutionnaire’, AHRF, 62 (1990), 89–94.

56 GOdF, MS AR 113.2.102, fo. 161v: ‘it was agreed that there would be a delegation of seven brethren to the representative of the people, brother Ysabeau, to invite him to do us the favour of visiting us.’

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of 1789 to the summer of 1794, absolutely no social levelling had occurred; of the twenty-eight candidates proposed for membership in this period, nearly 80 per cent were drawn from the mercantile profession, exactly the same proportion as the late 1780s. Constantly adjusted for the massive inflation of the period, initiation fees and annual dues remained high enough—at one point as high as 10,000 livres—to exclude much of the city’s population. in early 1795, for example, a carpenter in Bordeaux could hope to earn a daily wage of 10 livres; the reception fee in Anglaise at this time was 1000, nearly a third of his annual income.57 Because its membership profile remained remarkably static from the ancien régime to the Terror, the lodge surely would not have embraced the new municipality’s stance towards trade or their social group; négociantisme indeed became a label on par with aristocratie in Bordeaux in late 1793 and the authorities did not hesitate to arrest hundreds of merchants. What is particularly striking is that, according to the Commission militaire records, no socio-professional group in the city—including the clergy and nobility—suffered more imprisonment, fines or executions than those engaged in trade; it is also quite possible that at least one member of Anglaise fell victim to the Terror in Bordeaux.58

it is above all by listening closely to the words of Anglaise and how members themselves interpreted their actions that it becomes clear that the concern to appear as innocuous as possible rather than inward conviction motivated the lodge to alter its modalities of practice during the Terror. Although brethren were doubtless aware that hostility to organized religion had become a major feature of the Republic by the Year ii, they continued to use the Gospels during initiation and to celebrate the biannual banquets of St John. it was only by the summer of 1794 that they finally expunged any reference to Christianity from these gatherings, dubbing them the ‘general festival of Masons’. However, if the secretary’s writing is any measure of the lodge’s temperament, it can be assumed that this name change was merely a semantic manouevre. At the beginning of a banquet just a few weeks preceding the lodge’s closing, the secretary wrote the expression, ‘the feast of St John the Baptist’ before carefully crossing it out twice and replacing it with the de-christianized fête générale des maçons.59 if not the secretary, then perhaps the master, sat down at the end of the night to review the register and thought it wise to censor his fellow. Once the fall of Robespierre and the departure of the Convention’s representatives from Bordeaux had taken place, there was no longer any reason for Anglaise to maintain this façade. When the register picks up again the following year, the

57 Forrest, Society and Politics, 200. initiation fees for Anglaise rose from 300 livres in 1792 to 10,000 in late 1795. Some brethren evidently did broach the issue of reducing the costs of entry in May 1794, but the lodge decided against this motion: GOdF, MS AR 113.2.102, fo. 179.

58 Vivie, Histoire de la Terreur, ii. 389, 404. The victim in question was a certain Jean-Baptiste Pagès de la Boisette who went to the guillotine on 27 July 1794 and who was probably a member recorded on the lodge’s 1787 roster.

59 GOdF, MS AR 113.2.102, fo. 185 (28 June 1794).

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lodge proceeded to abandon the name Egalité and explicitly repudiated its conduct in late 1793: ‘we will conduct ourselves as did our fathers who preceded us and who honoured Freemasonry, for in the lodge, the brother is neither a civic man nor a political man, he is a Mason. Masonry has its old ways, its old practices, its old rites and we cannot change anything …’.60 Expressing the distinctly unenlightened pessimistic anthropology present in the order since its beginnings, the lodge regretted its decisions under the Terror but reminded itself that ‘Masons are men … they [therefore] have shortcomings and weaknesses … with pretensions and a penchant towards innovation … we have abandoned the name of Egalité to readopt that of Anglaise … which we never should have forsaken …’.61

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Two basic yet fundamental questions remain: how can we explain Freemasonry’s persistence throughout most of the Terror and why did authorities eventually close down all Bordelais lodges at such a late date, in early July 1794? Both answers have much to do with the personalities of Claude-Alexandre Ysabeau and Jacques Garnier de Saintes, two of the most important representatives sent from Paris. A former priest, Ysabeau arrived in Bordeaux in October 1793 with his young colleague, Marc-Antoine Baudot, in order to realign Bordeaux with the rule of the Convention. However, Robespierre and his allies eventually deemed Ysabeau insufficiently unforgiving in his application of the Terror, leading to his recall to Paris where he had to answer to the charge of modérantisme.62 Lodges enjoyed relative freedom and toleration under Ysabeau, and the fact that he was also a Freemason may have been an additional reason why the brotherhood continued unabated.63 On the other hand, his replacement the following July, Garnier de Saintes, expressed suspicion if not outright hostility towards all who did not unequivocally endorse the revolutionary vision of Robespierre.64 Upon his arrival in the city on 10 July, he informed the Committee of Public Safety back in Paris that there remained much work to do: ‘i have arrived in Bordeaux … the ground of this department needs to be sounded out … There is less action at the moment but a mercantile spirit still

60 GOdF, MS AR 113.2.103, fos 5v–6 (5 dec. 1795). There is a break in the register from July 1794 until Oct. 1795. However, it is quite possible that meetings occurred during this period since the domestic servant of Anglaise was paid for work throughout 1795. A halting of activity for some time was nevertheless likely as some members thought it necessary to inform other lodges (presum-ably already active again) that they had ‘begun meeting again.’: GOdF, MS AR 113.2.102, fo. 188v (24 Oct. 1795).

61 GOdF, MS AR 113.2.103, fo. 11v (31 dec. 1795).62 Forrest, Society and Politics, 236–7.63 On 13 Jan. 1794, Ysabeau presided over a meeting of the Fidélité lodge in nearby Libourne. He

also authorized the reopening of lodges when he returned to the city in 1795 (and not in 1794 as Coutura claims): Coutura, Les francs-maçons de Bordeaux, 205.

64 Garnier welcomed, for instance, the downfall of danton the previous April. See his entry in J. décembre, Dictionnaire de la Révolution française, 1789-1799, vol. 2 (Nendeln, 1975), 22–3.

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reigns and selfishness is inseparable from the speculation of business.’65 The following day, he issued a public decree informing the citizens of Bordeaux that all Masonic lodges had been closed. He softened the message by initially praising Freemasonry for its ethos of social egalitarianism: ‘in our Republic, a number of societies, known as Masonic societies, have greatly advanced liberty by their hatred of tyranny … today, without a doubt, they continue to advance their love of equality which is the foundation of our Revolution …’.66

Before continuing, it is worth pausing to ask how Garnier could have possibly arrived at such an image of the brotherhood as a vehicle of the key principles of the Revolution—notably social levelling—when in fact our survey of Masonic life and recruitment in Anglaise suggests very little of the sort. it is possible that his own experience as a Freemason provided him with this interpretation, though no records have been found to confirm his membership in any lodge. Besides the cautionary measures taken by Anglaise the previous year, another explanation also emerges, one that brings us back full circle to the point where this study began, that is, with the outpouring of anti-Masonic literature being generated from 1789 onward.67 Without hesitation, scores of reactionary pamphlets pointed a damning finger at the Masons, identifying them, along with Enlightenment philosophie, as the corrupting historical agents that had sapped the vitality of the ancien régime. And because of the limited activity of lodges in many regions during the Revolution, these texts may well have been the only sustainable point of contact with Masonry for the wider public of which Garnier was a part. Though not reflective of the reality within the lodges that persisted into the final decade of the eighteenth century, Garnier’s politicized perspective of Masonic life was nevertheless commonplace by the time he arrived in Bordeaux. it is therefore ironic that enemies of Freemasonry like the abbé Barruel sought to combat and undermine the order through their attacks, and yet in the case of lodges like Anglaise, their writings had precisely the opposite effect. Because the anti-Masonic literature of the 1790s had been successful in shaping the public’s vision of Freemasonry as an institution entirely compatible with the Revolution, the distinctly ancien régime aspects of meetings—their politically lukewarm nature, elitism and continued use of Christian objects and symbolism—remained concealed.

65 F. A. Aulard, ed., Recueil des actes du Comité de salut public: avec la correspondance officielle des représentants en mission et le registre du Conseil exécutif provisoire (Paris, 1889–), xv. 66.

66 Garnier’s text has been reproduced in its entirety in Vivie, Histoire de la Terreur, ii. 495–6.67 The notion that Masonry lay behind much of the Revolution had become common intellectual

currency very early on in the decade. in the summer of 1790, Marie-Antoinette advised her brother, Leopold ii, to ‘watch out for any association of Freemasons. You must already have been warned that it is through these means that all the monsters here hope to achieve the same goal in all lands’: cited in J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (New York, 1972), 168. Earlier that year, one Parisian lodge noted that the French public assumed that the brotherhood had ‘much influence on these great events’. For a detailed list of literature mentioning the Masonic conspiracy in the early stages of the Revolution, see Porset, Hiram sans-culotte, 81–90. it is clear, then, that although Bar-ruel’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme remains the best known monument to anti-Masonry, it contained little new material and was fundamentally a work of consolidation.

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if Garnier believed that Freemasonry played an important role in the promotion of égalité, why then did he outlaw their assemblies? Here, we must turn our attention away from his understanding of the content of Masonic sociability to his views on its form. in this second case, Garnier’s perspective was more accurate than his viewpoint about Masonic political orientation, for in his decree he identified the importance of friendship amongst brethren. A number of historians have argued that the rationale of Freemasonry was to create and nurture a culture of male friendship both within and beyond the lodge, and it was these strong bonds of solidarity that proved to be Garnier’s overriding concern and reason to close lodges.68 As Marisa Linton has demonstrated, friendship—an exclusive, private, particularlistic relationship shared by a restricted group of individuals—and fraternity as the Jacobins defined it—a vague, inclusive, collective, public sentiment to bind together the entire nation—did not necessarily line up neatly alongside one another.69 Friendship could be seen as dangerous to the nascent political order, for the Jacobins saw in it a rival set of allegiances that conjured up images of powerful aristocratic networks found in the ancien régime. in many ways mirroring the monarchy’s paranoia over Freemasonry when it first emerged in the 1720s, Garnier warned that Masonic friendship and the private sphere of which Freemasonry was a part had no place in the Revolution. ‘it is in these societies’, he claimed, ‘where modérantisme can establish itself as a system; it is here that the rigidity of surveillance crumbles, where one prizes a far too intimate friendship over the austere rigidity that anchors the inflexibility of republicanism … covered by the cloak of friendship, conspirators can take up arms against liberty.’ For this reason, he argued, ‘There can exist only one lodge, that of the people.’70

68 On the role of friendship in Freemasonry, see M. Aymard, ‘Friends and neighbors’, in A History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance, ed. R. Chartier, trans. A. Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 473–5; J. Burke, ‘Freemasonry, friendship and noblewomen: the role of the secret soci-ety in bringing Enlightenment thought to pre-revolutionary women elites’, History of European Ideas, 10 (1989), 289–93; i. diet, ‘Pour une compréhension élargie de la sociabilité maçonnique à Paris à la fin du xViiie siècle’, AHRF, 63 (1991), 31–45; K. Loiselle, ‘La correspondance entre francs-maçons au siècle des lumières: témoignage sur l’histoire de l’amitié’, in Archive épistolaire et histoire, ed. L. Bergamasco and M. Bossis (Paris, 2007), 189–202; Taillefer, La Franc-maçonnerie toulousaine, 230–1.

69 M. Linton, ‘Fatal friendships: the politics of Jacobin friendship’, Fr Hist Studies, 31 (2008), 56–60.

70 Vivie, Histoire de la Terreur, ii. 495–6. Less than a fortnight later in a letter to the Committee of Public Safety, he reiterated the belief that closing the lodges had stifled counter-revolutionary activity: ‘The Revolution … is starting to take place in Bordeaux … The measure that i took against the Masonic societies has produced the most fortunate results. There existed many irregular lodges [loges bâtardes] comprised of all the rubbish of the Revolution. i was even aware that all those unhappy souls who were purged from the sectional assemblies considered these private societies to be rallying points where they could transplant the seeds of their plots’: letter to the Committee, 19 July 1794, in Aulard ed., Recueil des actes du Comité de salut public, xv. 300.

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While it would be quite unreasonable to assume that all that mattered in the problem of relating the Enlightenment to the Revolution can be seen in this case study of Anglaise and Bordelais Freemasonry, this lodge’s exceptionally rich archive nevertheless does allow one to advance some preliminary observations on this classic historiographical issue. in the first instance, this case clearly demonstrates that while Freemasons may have been ‘living the Enlightenment’ in the ancien régime, any forms of practice that can be construed as republican—such as voting for officers and respect for a written set of rules—were never intended for export beyond the lodge. Throughout the Revolution in Bordeaux, the Masonic view and reaction to events was no different from that of the wider public; brethren were not transparent personifications of some type of coherent Masonic vision towards political authority. Such a vision probably did not exist in the eighteenth century and if indeed it did, no trace of it can be found in Anglaise or other lodges in the city.71 Responses to political events amongst Masons were more likely to be embedded in contingency, a reflection of how the evolving revolutionary dynamic impacted on their non-Masonic lives. The ship captains and merchants who constituted Anglaise warmly embraced political change in Bordeaux as long as the municipal government remained in the control of men of trade. With the rise of the Montagnards in the autumn of 1793, the mercantile classes of the city were no longer in power and the lodge’s position towards the Revolution subsequently changed. While Anglaise’s support became superficially more visible during this period with a new name, decorations and celebrations, evidence suggests that these were above all wise precautionary steps taken in a time of tight surveillance. in sum, Masonic affiliation appears as a rather unpredictable variable for determining revolutionary political orientation, as individuals and their lodges made choices based on other factors, notably their profession, social status, regional setting and personal relationships to the local government.72

This study of Anglaise also endorses a different way of thinking about the relationship between Freemasonry and the Revolution. Whether it was described by an anti-Masonic pamphleteer in 1789 or a historian in the twentieth century, Masonry has often been regarded as either a direct cause or an indirect inspiration of the events, institutions and sociability of the Revolution.73 Although her analysis is far more subtle than the work of Augustin Cochin, François Furet or Reinhardt Koselleck, Margaret Jacob still situates eighteenth-century Freemasonry

71 The apolitical, ecumenically Christian orientation of eighteenth-century Freemasonry stands in stark contrast with the order less than a century later under the Second Empire: P. Nord, The Repub-lican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 15–30.

72 Some studies also have drawn attention to this issue, especially Saunier, Révolution et socia-bilité en Normandie, 315–31.

73 Michael Kennedy advances such an argument in his otherwise superb article on Jacobin clubs in the early Revolution: ‘The foundation of the Jacobin clubs and the development of the Jacobin club network, 1789–1791’, Jl Mod Hist, 51 (1979), 203.

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in the history of the development of constitutionalism that connected the English and French Revolutions. ‘The lodges’, she writes, ‘became one link in the chain that connects English political culture, and in particular its revolutions, to the late eighteenth-century democratic revolutions on the Continent.’74 The affinity between the Masonic emphasis on constitutions, laws and elections and revolutionary politics is indeed suggestive, but ultimately inconclusive as her analysis does not extend into the Revolution itself. it becomes even more difficult to pinpoint the concrete impact Freemasonry had on engendering a political culture with some connection to the Revolution if we bear in mind Timothy Tackett’s observation that the most formative ‘political apprenticeship’ of deputies took form not in ancien régime arenas of sociability but rather in the political mobilization that immediately preceded the Revolution.75 We should not lose sight, however, of a more important point Jacob makes time and again: Freemasonry belonged squarely to the cultural universe of the ancien régime. it is this second observation that has informed much of this present line of enquiry, one that entails inverting the classic approach towards relating Freemasonry and the Revolution: rather than seeking out the origins of revolutionary behaviour or attitudes within ancien régime lodges, it instead views the Masonic setting as a fruitful historical laboratory where an institution of the Enlightenment encountered and adapted to a new political and cultural landscape in the final decade of the eighteenth century. This perspective therefore takes to heart daniel Roche’s advice that the study of the Enlightenment and its institutions must not be sacrificed to ‘the idol of teleology’.76

Finally, this assessment of Bordelais Freemasonry reveals how the Revolution impacted on a significant zone of eighteenth-century cultural life: the private sphere. Over the course of the Enlightenment, Freemasonry was but one of the many voluntary associations emerging that offered individuals a space to create and nurture a wide range of relations beyond kinship and the conjugal unit.77 On the whole, the history of private life in the Revolution has been characterized as a period in which the private sphere was subsumed into the demands of public life and scrutiny of legislation. Revolutionary assemblies paid particular attention to reconfiguring family life, generating copious legal and administrative records that social and cultural historians continue to mine effectively.78 However, the study of Freemasonry reminds us that the private sphere included

74 Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, 219.75 T. Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and

the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789-1790) (University Park, PA, 2006 edn), 79–99.76 d. Roche, France in the Enlightenment, trans. A. Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 6.77 These different societies have been catalogued in dinaux, Sociétés badines. On the rise of the

private sphere in the eighteenth century, see the general statements of P. Ariès in A History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance, 1–12 and J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 5–12. For more extended treatment: W. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001).

78 M. darrow, Revolution in the House: Family, Class, and Inheritance in Southern France, 1775-1825 (Princeton, 1989) and S. desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berke-ley, 2004).

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other bonds of solidarity, namely friendship. For Garnier de Saintes and others like him, Masonic friendship, imbued with secrecy and exclusivity, was seen not only as incompatible but dangerous to a new order that was nominally anchored in inclusivity and transparency. Of course, private friendship remained important to the Jacobins, but they viewed friendships as potentially corrosive to the body politic when these relations were formed in settings like Freemasonry that lay beyond their purview.79 Revolutionaries thus recognized that friendship had real power: it could form the bedrock of a new state, but it could just as easily give birth to and nurture contrary political allegiances. it was for this very reason that Saint-Just took so much care in his utopian Institutions républicaines to stress that while friendship was to be prized because it could serve as the sound basis of civil society, it was also to be subject to periodic rigourous scrutiny by the public.80 it is therefore clear that while friendship and private life at first glance may appear to be quite unrelated to the political history of the Revolution, they in fact lie at the heart of one of the most fundamental challenges facing France in these most turbulent of times: how to preserve the freedom of individual action while assuring the structural vitality of the burgeoning state.81

79 Beyond the work of Linton, the importance of friendship amongst Jacobins is also touched upon in P. Higonnet, Goodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution (Cam-bridge, MA, 1998), 187–8.

80 Saint-Just remarks that friendship could be a panacea to hold together armies, reduce litigation and curb crime. Friendship was important enough in the Institutions for Saint-Just to proclaim it as a chief criterion of citizenship: ‘He who will have said that he does not believe in friendship will be banished … if a man has no friends, he is banished.’ All friendships between adult men (including those that had been dissolved) were to be publicly declared every year during the month of Ventôse: L. A. Saint-Just, Oeuvres complètes, ed. M. duval (Paris, 1984), 983–4. On friendship in the thought of Saint-Just: F. Fortunet, ‘L’amitié et le droit selon Saint-Just’, AHRF, 54 (1982), 181–95 and P. Rol-land, ‘La signification politique de l’amitié chez Saint Just’, AHRF, 56 (1984), 324–38.

81 On this issue, see the illuminating H. G. Brown, Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville, VA, 2006).

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Living the Enlightenment in an Age of Revolution: Freemasonry in Bordeaux, 1788-1794

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