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FREEMASONRY

FREEMASONRY. Organized locally in secret societies known as lodges, freemasonry attracted adherents in every major European state over the course of the eighteenth century. Freemasonry, with its humanitarian emphasis on moral improvement, religious toleration, and universal brotherhood, showed clear traces of Enlightenment influence. Although freemasons were avowedly nonpolitical in their aims, some scholars have linked them in France and elsewhere with proto-democratic movements of the later eighteenth century.

ORIGINS

The origins of freemasonry are shrouded in colorful myths passed down by generations of masons. Some masons traced their beginnings back to the building of Solomon's temple in biblical times. Others dated their order back to the Templars, the knightly crusading order of the twelfth century. But most historians now see eighteenth-century freemasonry as evolving out of English and Scottish stonemason guilds of the seventeenth century. Master stonemasons were highly skilled craftsmen whose trade demanded considerable technical knowledge in engineering and architecture. Taking pride in their craft, they had developed over the centuries a rich repository of legends and rituals highlighting their history as the builders of palaces and churches. In the seventeenth century their myths and ceremonies began to attract the attention of individuals outside the guild, including those with philosophical and scientific interests who saw masonry as a fount of ancient wisdom. By the early eighteenth century masonic organizations had begun to lose their identity as occupational associations and had evolved into fraternal lodges devoted to charitable activity and the provision of fellowship and mutual aid to their members. As such, the rise of freemasonry was symptomatic of the more general proliferation of clubs, reading societies, salons, and other institutions of sociability that occurred throughout Europe in the age of Enlightenment. Those from the middling ranks of society, especially merchants, comprised a large segment of British freemasons, although members also included aristocrats and even royalty (at the end of the eighteenth century almost all male members of the royal family were members). By 1725 London lodges, which in 1717 had confederated themselves into the Grand Lodge of London, numbered thirty-seven, and by 1780 England as a whole boasted almost four hundred.

EXPANSION

With a social base that was urban, mercantile, and hence geographically mobile, freemasonry spread quickly to the Continent. A Parisian lodge was in existence by 1725, and on the eve of the French Revolution there were an estimated 600 lodges in the monarchy as a whole. In 1770 Paris alone had some 10,000 freemasons, and in 1789 France's masonic population ranged between 50,000 and 100,000. In the Dutch Republic lodges were established in The Hague and in Amsterdam in the 1730s, and in Germany some 450 lodges were founded between 1737 and 1789. Freemasonry took root somewhat later in Austria, where the devoutly Catholic Maria Theresa (ruled 1740–1780) was hostile to the order after the papacy formally condemned it (1738) on the grounds of its alleged deism. But her son and successor, Joseph II (ruled 1780–1790), himself joined a lodge and encouraged the movement during the early, liberal years of his reign. By 1784 there were sixty-six lodges in the monarchy, although Joseph's successor, the archconservative Francis II, outlawed freemasonry in 1794 as a subversive Jacobin import. The spread of freemasonry was also belated elsewhere on the European periphery. Madrid's first lodge was founded relatively early (1728) by an exiled English Jacobite, but opposition by the church curbed the growth of Spanish freemasonry until the enlightened reign of Charles III (ruled 1759–1788). Russia's first lodges were founded by and for foreigners, but under Catherine the Great (ruled 1762–1796) freemasonry for a brief time became fashionable among enlightened circles at the University of Moscow. But by the 1790s Catherine, like her Austrian counterpart, had begun to suppress freemasonry as politically subversive.

SIGNIFICANCE

Such official persecution has led some to see freemasonry as a proto-democratic, egalitarian, and even revolutionary movement. In her 1991 study of British, Dutch, and French freemasonry, Margaret Jacob argued that masonic lodges served to spread British constitutionalist ideas and practices throughout the Continent. Masons called the rules of their lodges "constitutions" and practiced principles of majority rule in elections of officers and members. Masonic sociability and ceremony also had a distinctly egalitarian flavor. Masonic meetings, where titles were dropped and members referred to each other as "brother," momentarily suspended differences in social rank. Inspired in part by the work of the Catholic royalist historian Augustin Cochin, who found organizational and ideological parallels between pre-Revolutionary French lodges and post-1789 Jacobin clubs, other scholars have viewed freemasonry in a more ominous light. Reinhart Koselleck and François Furet have seen the abstract moralism and egalitarianism of freemasonry as foreshadowing a modern totalitarian quest for ideological purity and unity.

These interpretations vary in details, but all tend to see freemasonry as inherently antagonistic to the social and political structures of the Old Regime. Yet freemasonry looked to the past as well as to the future, and its political manifestations were varied. Like the Old Regime itself, lodges were hierarchical in structure, with members advancing from a lower to a higher rank through service to the order and mastery of its secrets. Admission to and advancement within the order were ostensibly based on merit, but initiation fees, membership dues, and literacy requirements in practice made membership a preserve of the propertied. Freemasonry was also overwhelmingly male in composition, although there is evidence that some French lodges admitted women as well as men. The more traditional features of eighteenth-century freemasonry are also evident in the order's quasi-religious character. In some ways lodges hearkened back to lay confraternities and religious orders in providing members with fellowship, mutual aid, and outlets for charitable work. As with a church, freemasonry's elaborate ceremonies and esoteric symbolism fostered a sense of spiritual mystery as well as a belief that members had access to a higher wisdom closed to those outside the order. Finally, lodges could be found across the political spectrum. In the 1760s many British masons became associated with the cause of popular radicalism through their support of John Wilkes and his demands for parliamentary reform, but by the 1790s British lodges had become solidly loyalist and conservative in character. In France, not all lodges were sympathetic to the Revolution: in Toulouse about one-third of the 250 individuals who can be identified as freemasons were royalist in their sympathies, and some Parisian lodges were hostile to the Revolution from its very inception.

Eighteenth-century freemasonry was innovative not so much for its politics, but rather as a prototype for the voluntary associations and clubs that democratic political theorists have viewed as defining features of modern civil society. Freemasonry was the first secular, voluntary, and pan-European association in modern times, and as such became a model for civic organizations and clubs throughout the West.

See also Enlightenment; Guilds; Revolutions, Age of.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dülmen, Richard van. The Society of the Enlightenment: The Rise of the Middle Class and Enlightenment Culture in Germany. Translated by Anthony Williams. New York, 1992.

Furet, François. Interpreting the French Revolution. Translated by Elborg Forster. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1981.

Halévi, Ran. Les loges maçonniques dans la France d'ancien régime: Aux origines de la sociabilitédémocratique. Paris, 1984.

Jacob, Margaret C. Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry in Eighteenth-Century Europe. New York, 1991.

Koselleck, Reinhart. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge, Mass., 1988.

JAMES VAN HORN MELTON