Augustin Barruel

Abbé Augustin Barruel

Augustin Barruel , SJ (born October 2, 1741 in Villeneuve-de-Berg , today in the Ardèche department , † October 5, 1820 in Paris ) was the Abbé and Canon in Paris, French Jesuit , conservative journalist and historian.

Youth and first appearance

Barruel came from an old noble family and joined the Jesuits as a novice at 14 , where he worked as a teacher in Toulouse until the order was abolished in France. He then taught in Bohemia and Moravia until the Jesuits were banned in Austria in 1773 . Now he returned to France, where he found a living as a tutor in noble houses.

Several publications that have come down to us from this period show his loyal, anti-Enlightenment sentiments, which he also demonstrated through his work on the conservative magazine Année littéraire . In the early years of the French Revolution he published the journal Ecclesiastique , loyal to Rome , in which he equated the ecclesiastical policy of the revolutionary government with Protestantism and railed against the "sect" of the Enlightenment philosophers . Here he also fought against the oath on the constitution, which was demanded by all priests in the country and which led French Catholicism into a deep crisis. Abbé Barruel edited all the Catholic pamphlets in this dispute in his Collection Ecclésiastique , the ninth volume of which appeared in 1793. Up to this point he had not yet explained the revolution with a conspiracy theory, but with the wrath of God caused by the Enlightenment, moral decline and the lukewarmness of the priesthood.

Memories of the history of Jacobinism

Signs of a vague conspiracy theory appear in his then famous Historie du Clergé pendant la Revolution Française (history of the clergy during the French Revolution) , in which he spread the horror tale that during the September massacre in 1792 Jacobin fanatics roasted and ate Catholic priests . This work was published in London in the same year, where Barruel, like many other clergymen loyal to Rome , had to flee from the increasingly bloody pressure of persecution in 1792. In London, where he worked as alms-keeper for a French nobleman who had also fled the Revolution and was patronized by Edmund Burke , among others , he also published the work that was to make him famous in 1797/1798: The four-volume Mémoires pour servir à l ' histoire du Jacobinisme , which were widely used and translated into many languages. 1800–1804 they appeared in German under the title Memories on the History of Jacobinism . Translations into seven other languages ​​followed quickly. The Memoirs became one of the best-selling books of the first half of the nineteenth century.

The work deals with the question of how the French Revolution came about. It is the expression of an integral Christian worldview in which democracy is equated with godlessness. Barruel took the initial hypothesis from the German-language pamphlet literature . It is sketched on the first pages of the work:

“In the French Revolution […] everything, except for its most appalling crimes, was foreseen, considered, combined, decided, prescribed; Everything was the effect of deep wickedness, because everything was prepared and initiated by men who alone held the thread of the conspiracy, which had long been spun in secret societies, and who knew how to choose the most favorable moment for their conspiracies and how to hasten them. "

Barruel assumed a threefold conspiracy: in volume one, The Antichristian Conspiracy , the Enlightenment philosophers are accused of deliberately undermining the throne and altar with their teachings because they are “completely possessed by the devil ”; in volume two, The Sophists' Conspiracy and the Insurrection against kings he accuses the Freemasons of similar things , but also protects them against accusations that their secret celebrations and rites would lead to sexual debauchery. He himself claims to have become a Freemason "after dinner" in a friend's house, and derives Freemasonry from the Manichaeans and Knights Templar . He only describes the innermost secret of Freemasonry as downright criminal, which he defines in the doctrine of the freedom and equality of all people.

The following volumes then focused on the Illuminati Order, which was banned in 1785 . In contrast to Enlightenment philosophers and Freemasons, Abbé Barruel did not know him firsthand - after all, the order had only spread to any significant extent in Germany and had already been banned before Barruel became interested in conspiracy theories. In the absence of Barruel's own view of things, the last two volumes of the Mémoires are factually and literarily much weaker than the first two, which, however, did not detract from their success.

In the third volume, Barruel describes the third conspiracy: Here the Illuminati, whom he drastically portrays as anarchists and satanists , are directly responsible for the revolution. In the fourth volume a conspiratorial arc is then drawn through the entire history of the world, from the Bavarian Illuminati back to Mani , a Persian founder of religion in the third century. With this Barruel followed the heretic understanding of his church, which Mani regarded as the arch heretic par excellence, to which all later heresies can be traced back.

In 1806, an Italian soldier named Giovanni-Battista Simonini informed Barruel in a letter of an even larger conspiracy that would control even the powerful Illuminati order: the Jews . Although he agreed to this, he refrained from publishing an anti-Semitic fifth volume that had already been completed because he feared it would trigger a pogrom . It cannot be determined with certainty whether this information is correct. Since the letter was not published until 1878 by Le Contemporain , a French anti-Semitic magazine, several researchers suspected that it could be an invention by conspiratorial anti-Semites who wanted to gain a share in Barruel's nimbus. This contrasts with several surviving copies with marginalia in Barruel's hand, which prove that the letter was written during his lifetime. Other researchers suspect that it was made by the police under Joseph Fouché , who wanted to use it to disrupt the Great Sanhedrin of 1806.

Late years

In 1802 Barruel was able to return to Paris, where he was made an honorary canon at Notre-Dame de Paris . This sinecure left him time for further publications, including a large work on the Concordat between Napoleon and Pope Pius VII , which he defended against attacks by Catholic ultra-conservatives. Other large-scale projects such as a refutation of Kant's philosophy or a history of secret societies in the Middle Ages remained unrealized because the Abbé died in 1820.

effect

Barruel's work was quickly translated into various European languages ​​and had an extraordinarily wide impact. In 1798 it contributed to a downright Illuminati panic in the United States when conservative clergymen accused the Democratic Republican Party, and in particular its founder Thomas Jefferson , of being agents of the clandestine Illuminati and of intending to be not only the ruling Federalist Party around president John Adams but wanting to overthrow all of Christianity in the US. In Germany, the Lutheran theologian spread Johann August Starck in his 1803 anonymously published work triumph of philosophy in the eighteenth centuries Barruels thesis, although he criticized in detail as too sweeping, as a result, but confirmed:

"The assertion, however, that the principles first established by the philosophers, were further expanded through the vehicle of Freemasonry and were blown up by the Illuminati, contains nothing that contradicts each other."

For the historian Andreas Wirsching , Barruel stands at the beginning of the long anti-revolutionary tradition in France, which extends from Joseph de Maistre to the totalitarian and anti-Semitic movement Action française . His thesis that the Illuminati were behind all evil in the world is echoed in numerous later conspiracy theories, for example those of Gary Allen , Jan Udo Holey or David Icke .

literature

• Claus Oberhauser, The conspiracy-theoretical triad: Barruel-Robison-Starck, Innsbruck-Vienna-Bozen 2013, ISBN 978-3-7065-5307-0 .
• Daniel Pipes : Conspiracy. The fascination and power of the secret . Gerling Akademie-Verlag, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-932425-08-1 .
• JM Roberts: The Mythology of the Secret Societies . Secker & Warburg, London 1972, ISBN 0-436-42030-9 .
• Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein : The thesis of the conspiracy 1776-1945. Philosophers, Freemasons, Jews, Liberals and Socialists as conspirators against the social order . Lang et al., Bern et al. 1976, ISBN 3-261-01906-9 , ( European university publications series 3: History and its auxiliary sciences 63).
• Sylvia Schaeper-Wimmer: Augustin Barruel, SJ (1741-1820). Studies of biography and work . Peter Lang Verlagsgruppe, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1985, ISBN 3-8204-8730-1 , ( European university publications , series 3: History and its auxiliary sciences 277).

Web links

• Literature by and about Augustin Barruel in the catalog of the German National Library
• http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02310a.htm
• http://www.comlink.de/cl-hh/m.blumentritt/agr226s.htm

Footnotes

1. ^ Rolf Reichardt and Eberhard Schmitt (eds.), Handbook of political-social basic concepts in France 1680–1820 , issue 4, Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1986, p. 98.
2. ↑ Helmut Reinalter : The World Conspirators. All of which you should never know . Ecowin Verlag, Salzburg 2010, p. 37 f.
3. ↑ Augustin Barruel: Memoirs of the History of Jacobinism , Vol. 1, Hanover 1800, p. 6
4. ^ Jean-Jacques Langendorf (ed.): Pamphletists and theorists of the counter-revolution (1789–1799) , Matthes & Seitz, Munich 1989, p. 38
5. ↑ See e.g. B. RPLaurentii Alticottii Cortonensis SJ Presbyterii Dissertatio Historico-Critica de Antiquis, Novisque Manichaeis . Graecii (Graz) 1766. This 223-page dissertation was written under the care of Joseph de Maistre .
6. ↑ About him cf. Reinhard Markner, "Giovanni Battista Simonini: Shards from the Disputed Life of an Italian Anti-Semite", in: Kesarevo Kesarju. Scritti in onore di Cesare G. De Michelis. Ed. V. Marina Ciccarini, Nicoletta Marcialis u. Giorgio digit. Florence 2014, pp. 311-319.
7. ↑ Norman Cohn : "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy. Elster Verlag, Baden-Baden 1998, p. 29 f.
8. ↑ Claus Oberhauser: Simonini's letter (1806) . In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus . Writings and periodicals. De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2013, pp. 645 ff. ISBN 978-3-11-030535-7 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
9. ↑ Jeffrey L. Pasley: Illuminati . In: Peter Knight (Ed.): Conspiracy Theories in American History. To Encyclopedia . ABC Clio, Santa Barbara, Denver and London 2003, Vol. 1, pp. 337 ff.
10. ↑ Helmut Reinalter : The World Conspirators. All of which you should never know . Ecowin Verlag, Salzburg 2010, p. 39.
11. ^ Johann August von Starck: Triumph of Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century. To understand the present revolutionary condition in church and state . 3rd edition, G. Joseph Manz, Regensburg 1847, p. 271.
12. ↑ Andreas Wirsching, From World War to Civil War? Political extremism in Germany and France 1918–1933 / 39. Berlin and Paris in comparison (= sources and representations on contemporary history, published by the Institute for Contemporary History, vol. 40), R. Oldenbourg Verlag Munich 1999, p. 272