THE RUINED TEMPLE
By D. W. BROGAN
IT is one of the oldest and most successful methods of revolu- tionary propaganda to destroy or, better still, to make ridiculous the sacred mysteries .of the old order. So Henry VIII treated the great shrine of Walsingham ; so the Bolsheviks treated the monas- teries and shrines of Kiev. So did the feeble parodists of revolution in Paris in the autumn of 1940 treat the arcana of the fallen Republic. They seized the Masonic temples in Paris, in Rouen, in other cities ; they profaned the shrines ; they exposed to inspection and ridicule the rituals, the emblems, the archives of the Grand Orient, just as the spiritual ancestors of the French Freemasons had profaned NOtre Dame and destroyed the sacred ampoule of Rheims, which was the visible sign of the divine favour shown the Kings of France since the conversion of Clovis. Tourists were conducted round the premises once occupied by the Lodges ; the articles of the cult were exposed to irreverent eyes, and many a French Catholic must have enjoyed the ambiguous pleasures of Schadenfreude as he saw the tables thus turned. What was done in France had already been done in Germany, in Italy, in Russia. At the present moment Masonry is banned and persecuted in every country of Continental Europe except Sweden and Switzerland. In enmity to the Craft Moscow and Berlin are united, and the brethren, so powerful, so prosperous, so confident in 1914, are now the most friendless victims of the revolutionary storm.
Whatever survives the flood, the old political organisation of Freemasonry hardly can. Its day is over, whether that day goes back to the age of Solomon or to the Middle Ages or to the first stirrings of the fairy-tali romanticism of the eighteenth century or to the age of Cagliostro and Casanova. But whatever the historical validity of the Masons' own view of their history—a nice question— the Masons have played a very important role in European history. We all know that English Masons are not in communion with the most important European Masonic organisation, the Grand Orient. But English Masonry is not very secretive, not very important, not very interesting. Across the Channel we are in a different world. And we always have been. One of the few hard facts about Masonic history is that the Craft was an export from Britain in the eighteenth century, that it survived among the competing organisations of the same type, the Illuminati and the rest, and that in the nineteenth century it became, above all in Catholic countries, the Jesuit Order of the Counter-Counter-Reformation. Ecrasez l'infeime was its motto, and its methods were often not much more straightforward than those employed by M. de Voltaire to forward his cause and his interests..
No doubt in its early days Continental Masonry was more positive than that. It seemed to offer to generous, if not to critical, souls a religious sanction for well-doing that orthodox Christianity had ceased to provide. We should not forget that Tolstoy thought the role of the Craft worthy of a central theme in War and Peace, and that Mozart composed The Magic Flute to a Masonic text as he composed Masses to the texts of the Liturgy. The Magic Flute as music is not notably or at all inferior to the religious music of Mozart, but the absurdity of the plot and the banality of Shickaneder's libretto should not keep us from appreciating that, in 1791, there was something moving, faith-creating even in the libretto.
In diesen heilgen Mauern
Wo Mensch den Menschen liebt, Kann kein Verrater lauern, Well man dem Feind vergibt.
These were warming sentiments in the caste-ridden Europe that was being shaken by the French Revolution. In a few years' time the dream of a band of brothers, united by philanthropy or by Theophilanthropy, died. " Since I have seen the results of calling everybody ' Brother,' I should call my brother 'Cousin,'" said Metternich. More amiable and more credulous characters felt the Same.
It is from the time of the Revolution that Continental Masonry took its fixed character. The great schism found the Masons definitely on one side of the gulf. Despite condemnations by Po Catholics had not uniformly felt themselves debarred from Masons. Freethinkers and moderately zealous Catholics could in in the Lodges as they met in the Academie' Francaise. But t mutual tolerance ceased. Long before the French Grand Orient expunged all references to " the Grand Architect of the Unive and given English Masonry an occasion, or an excuse, for bre off fraternal relations, French Masonry and Italian Masonry w vigorous and unscrupulous enemies of " spiritualism." They mi have in their ranks orthodox Protestants and orthodox Jews, that did not matter. For these Latin versions of Mr. Thwack by religion meant the Catholic religion, and by the Catholic religi the religion of the Church of Rome. To destroy its power discredit its doctrines was the main business of the Masons.
There is something particularly unjust in Vichy's condemnati of Masonry, for the Craft was decidedly attenaiste in its poli The most romantic conspiratorial hero of the century, Garibal was a Mason, but few Masons were Garibaldis. In France it w not even dogmatically Republican. It made terms with the Seco Empire (the Empire of Pri...3ce Napoleon and Sainte-Beuve, not Empire of the Empress and Monseigneur Dupanloup). But Third Republic (and the Parliamentary Monarchy in Italy) we deeply marked by Masonry. Of course, the role of the Masons exaggerated by their enemies. The gens bien in France has always been puzzled and angered by the fact that the mass of th French people do not trust them as leaders. Faced with the proble of their unpopularity, the French Right look for causes or excus Masonry was one of them and, and Masonry was, they insist an English invention. It was in vain that the British Craft wash its hands of the Grand Orient or pointed with pride to the mo ,respectable Scottish Rite. Masonry embodied the Revolution an was the characteristically British contribution to the ruin of Franc that began in 1789. This superstition was—and is—a fact importance in Anglo-French relations.
In France the widespread national view that all politics was racket was fostered by the activities of the Masons. It wa notoriously profitable to be a member of the Craft if you were a official. After the Dreyfus case it was for a while profitable to
a Mason if you were an officer. No doubt the influence of th Masons was exaggerated. When accident revealed the workin of the system to the public eye, they were not much liked. Th system of espionage organised by the Grand Orient against arm officers who were practising Catholics was one of the ugliest scandal of the. Republican era. And the role of Grand Master Laferre in the Chamber was another. For it was believed that Lafeire owed his political importance solely to the fact that he was Grand Master, and that some important votes in the Chamber had already been decided on in the couvent of the Grand Orient.
But even before 1914 political Masonry was declining in France and Italy. In Italy, Nathan was defeated in his Roman bailiwick, and General Cadorna, although the son of the ex-priest who had taken Rome from the Pope, was regarded as an anti-Masonic general. In France, it was harder and harder to represent le clericalisme, wild l'ennemi as an adequate political programme. New social problems, new philosophical ideas were dissolving the old cadres. I can give an instance from my own knowledge. The son of one of Laferre's most important predecessors is a friend of mine. He is croyant et pratiquant and, in politics, mildly centre gauche. His son is also croyant et pratiquant, and was not only a member of the Action Francaise, but was sufficiently trusted by his leaders to be made one of the bodyguards of M. Maurras after the murderous assault on M. Blum. The same drift of the haute bourgeoisie from Masonry could be illustrated by other instances.
The typical Masonic politician in France was the embodiment of that republique des camarades which nobody but its bene- ficiaries liked. Much of the harm done by the Stavisky affair was due to the belief that M. Camille Chautemps, the most exalted Mason in the Chamber, was protecting the interests of his Masonic brethren as well as of his brother-in-law. This view may_have been groundless, but there was nothing in M. Chautemps's career before or since to make it implausible. To many sincere patriots of the Right' the affair Malvy in 1917 seemed to show that Republicanism the pure Masonic variety was near-treason. And M. Malvy, as aybody in France knows, is the father-in-law and patron of Peyrouton. The Masons did not invent the French taste for puting motives or seeing treason everywhere, but their conduct
nothing to weaken that taste.
In the French provinces Masonry kept some of its old power. the academic world it was wiser for a leading " Republican cssor or administrator to belong to the less belligerent Scottish But the Republican instituteur (unless he was a Communist) often a Mason and a zealous guardian of the spirit of the t. So I have known a group of schoolmasters organise a sonic censure of a mayor who had permitted, after twenty-five , the revival of a famous religious procession. The mayor died tly afterwards, unabsolved by his brethren, but not, I am sure, isoned by them. Such activities made many enemies for the Craft d did not win much respect from open fighters for la Republique. at Mussolini, and then Hitler, had banned Masonry was one of eir claims to respect on some French Catholics. That Communism banned Masonry was one of its claims on the respect of another up of French Catholics. So Vichy banned the Masons (though had its pet Masons as Goering had his pet Jews). Every week so Vichy announces that " M. Untel " has been dismissed for ncealing the fact that he once belonged to the Craft. And the Sting of a history of France for schools, free from Jewish and asonic influence, has been entrusted to- that hammer of the sons, M. Bernard Fay, keeper, since July, 1940, of the Biblio- Ique Nationale and sometime Professor of American History and stitutions at the College de France by the grace of M. Tardieu. his fa change ; there are more ways of being a Mason than by g initiated. Only Vichy could make the fall of the Grand ent dignified. There is possibly even some danger that the sons may appear as the " Men of Good Will " that M. Romains's ro took them to be. They were neither black nor white angels, an interesting political machine now as out of date as the ewcomen engine.
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