A few weeks ago I published a long article on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, reviewing the available evidence on that notorious document of the very early twentieth century and attempting to evaluate its credibility and provenance.
My ultimate verdict was rather hum-drum. I concluded that the work was likely fictional, but probably reflected a widespread quiet understanding of the enormous hidden influence of Jewish groups across Europe, whether as bankers, political advisors, or revolutionaries.
A couple of generations earlier, the popular novels of Benjamin Disraeli, the very influential Jewish-born British Prime Minister, had made exactly that sort of claim, with a character representing Lord Rothschild explaining that a network of Jews operating from behind the scenes secretly dominated most of Europe’s major governments. These notions probably served as an important inspiration for the Protocols.
Around the time that the Protocols came to light, similar sentiments were widespread in even the most reputable circles. For example, Dr. David Starr Jordan, the founding president of Stanford University and one of America’s foremost public intellectuals, published Unseen Empire in 1913. In that work, favorably reviewed in the influential Literary Digest, he argued that a network of intermarried Jewish banking families had quietly gained financial control over all of Europe’s major countries and therefore exercised greater real influence over their government policies than did any of their various elected legislatures, kings, or emperors.
Indeed, the Protocols only began to attract widespread international attention after the top leadership of the Bolshevik Revolution was recognized as being overwhelmingly Jewish. That radical movement had seized control of the mighty Russian Empire in 1917, and then unsuccessfully attempted to do with the same in the rest of Europe, with failed uprisings in Germany, Hungary, and other locations.
Although I thought that the Protocols had probably been fabricated, I noted that many very highly regarded contemporaneous sources had at least initially regarded it as the factual record of a Jewish conspiracy seeking to overthrow all of Europe’s Christian governments and ultimately seize control of the world. For example, I passed along the account of Douglas Reed, a leading Times of London correspondent of that era:
As Reed told the story, the Protocols first gained attention in 1920 when the document was translated into English by one of Britain’s top Russia correspondents, who died soon afterward. His employer, the Morning Post, was one of the oldest and most sober British newspapers, and its editor then drew upon his entire staff to publish twenty-three articles on the document, calling for a thorough investigation. The Times of London then ranked as the world’s most influential media outlet and it took a similar position in a long May 8, 1920 article, while Lord Sydenham, a foremost authority of that day, later did the same in the pages of the Spectator.
The series of Morning Post articles was entitled “The Jewish Peril,” and later that same year it was collected together and published as The Cause of World Unrest. This book was released in both Britain and America and included a very lengthy introduction by the editor, with the contents now easily available online. As I explained:
These articles repeatedly cited the works of Nesta Webster, a British writer who had published a lengthy historical analysis of the French Revolution a year earlier, and two of her personal contributions to the Morning Post series on the Protocols were also included at the end of the volume, while she may have more heavily contributed to the entire anonymous series…
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The following year, Webster published World Revolution, her own much longer work on closely-related themes, describing the appearance and growth of secret, conspiratorial movements aimed at overthrowing all of Europe’s established Christian monarchies and replacing them with radical, socialistic governments. The author traced all of this back to the 18th century Illuminati movement of Adam Weishaupt, claiming that this project had gradually subverted the existing Masonic lodges of France and the rest of Continental Europe, then afterward used Freemasonry as the vehicle for its dangerous revolutionary plotting.
Although Webster argued that Jews had only been an insignificant early element of this conspiratorial movement, by the mid-nineteenth century they deployed their huge wealth to gain enormous influence in that project, probably becoming its leading force. She devoted much of the last chapter of her book to the Protocols, regarding its contents as an excellent summary of the secret plans of those subversive movements, whether or not the document itself was actually what it purported to be.
Based upon my own very mainstream historical reading, I’d always regarded talk of secret revolutionary plotting by the Illuminati, Freemasons, or any such similar groups as almost the epitome of crackpot lunacy, and I’d scarcely even heard of Webster, who had been the leading writer on such matters. However, I discovered that some of Webster’s prominent contemporaries had been very impressed with her scholarship and had reached somewhat similar conclusions.
The most notable example of such support for Webster’s research came from British Cabinet Minister Winston Churchill. Around the same time that the Morning Post was beginning its long series on the Protocols, Churchill published a major article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald that seemed to take a similar position on the dangerous plots of subversive international Jews, while singling out Webster for praise, especially noting her important research on the French Revolution.
Although I’d barely heard of Webster, during the early decades of the twentieth century she seemed to have been a far more influential figure than I’d ever imagined, with her research apparently becoming an important source for the views and writing of Winston Churchill, Douglas Reed, and others. I also discovered that she came from a very elite background, given that her father had been a top figure at Barclays Bank, one of Britain’s leading financial institutions.
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In 1924 she published Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, apparently summarizing her accumulated research on that controversial subject, and it included an Appendix sharply disputing the allegations of plagiarism in the Protocols that had appeared in the media during the previous couple of years. According to her Wikipedia entry, by then Hilaire Belloc, a leading British literary figure himself widely accused of antisemitism, had begun privately denouncing her as “antisemitic” and her work as “lunatic,” and she later became an active supporter of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.
I carefully read her 1924 book and found many of its theories to be outlandish and very doubtful. She argued for the existence of a centuries old conspiratorial movement dedicated to the destruction of Christian civilization, with its earliest roots stretching back to the infamous Order of Assassins of the Middle East. According to Webster, some of the doctrines of that notorious Muslim cult had been absorbed by the Knights Templar, the very wealthy and powerful organization founded during the Crusades.
In 1307 King Philip IV of France had suppressed the Templars, arresting many of their top leaders, torturing them into confessions of Satanism, and then burning them at the stake, with the Pope officially disbanding the order a few years later. My history books had always claimed that Philip’s motive had probably been to cancel the large financial debts he owed to that organization while also eliminating a powerful political rival. But Webster argued that the charges of the French king were true, and the top leadership of the Templars had indeed become secret worshippers of Satan.
Furthermore, following the killing of its leaders and its general suppression, the surviving secret society had eventually become a founding element of the later Freemasonry movement in Continental Europe, retaining a distorted legend of the betrayal and murder of its top leader and a bitter antipathy towards both the Catholic Church and the French monarchy.
According to Webster, another very important strand in these secret societies dedicated to subverting established European order was Jewish Cabalism, which was a major root of the support for magic and supernatural rituals often found in those organizations.
Webster’s book included nearly 900 footnotes referencing various Medieval texts and scholarly histories of that era written in English, French, and German, as well as works on the origins of Freemasonry. But I lacked the knowledge and inclination to investigate any of that material. And although the Masonic movement was indeed quite influential during the 18th and 19th centuries, its 16,000 word Wikipedia article only contained a single brief reference to Webster as an anti-Masonic writer. There were also related articles on Masonic conspiracy theories and Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory that covered such topics in greater detail, but these failed to include any mention of Webster or her works.
So based upon present-day evidence, Webster came across as very much a fringe crackpot, someone whose research would hardly be taken seriously in respectable circles, with the favorable if very brief mention by Churchill being merely a puzzling anomaly. However, I discovered that this was actually not the case.
During the early 2000s, I’d spent a number of years building a content-archiving system that contained the near-complete archives of a couple of hundred of our leading publications of the last 150 years, and it proved very useful in obtaining a much more balanced evaluation of Webster and her works.
I discovered that a long list of her books were in that system, together with their contemporaneous reviews, and the latter demonstrated that although quite controversial, she had hardly been regarded as a fringe figure at that point. The New York Times, the Nation, and Commonweal had reviewed her books, as had such very influential publications of that era as the Saturday Review of Literature, the Bookman, and the Outlook. Leading academic journals such as the American Historical Review and Political Science Quarterly had done the same, while Foreign Affairs had noted and briefly described a couple of her books.
Some of these reviews, especially those appearing in liberal or leftist periodicals, had been sharply critical, challenging her “conspiratorial” reading of historical events in much the same way that modern day writers almost uniformly did. But she had also had her strong defenders as well.
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For example, Wilbur Cortez Abbott, the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History of Harvard University, published a long and highly favorable 1920 review of her book on the French Revolution, which he characterized as “extraordinarily interesting” in his very first sentence. Although he went on to admit that her thesis was “not wholly new,” he emphasized that it had never “been worked out in such detail,” nor with such completeness. As a result, he said that the book must “be reckoned with by anyone who wishes to recognize and understand the springs of popular movements, then or now.” The long review in the New York Times also certainly accepted all of her research on the true history of that event as important and correct.
Academic periodicals were similarly mixed. The fairly brief review in Political Science Quarterly emphasized the “immense amount of contemporary material” she had brought to bear in support of her “most novel and astonishing interpretation of the great event of the 18th century. And although the discussion in the American Historical Review was rather negative, it still admitted that English publications had been “much impressed” by her book, explaining that the Spectator had declared it “a veritable revelation.”
This very wide divergence of verdicts on Webster and her works was emphasized several years later by Prof. Abbott, who opened his 1925 review on her Secret Societies book in the prestigious Saturday Review by declaring:
There is no person now engaged in writing history concerning whose work there is such sharp divergence of opinion as there is in regard to Mrs. Webster…she has been the object of more praise and of much more attack than almost any one since Macaulay. That circumstance is due alike to her choice of subject, her point of view, and her method of approach. Revolution is always an extraordinarily difficult topic for historical treatment. Its passions long outlive its events…the publisher who warned Mrs. Webster of the probable results of her labors observed to her, “Remember that if you take an anti-revolutionary line you will have the whole literary world against you.”
Thus, one hundred years ago a top Harvard historian writing in one of America’s most influential publications had repeatedly praised Webster’s research. But a century of relentless ideological pressure had subsequently marginalized her and her books to such an extent that they had become dismissed and almost forgotten as the conspiracy-nonsense of a fringe crackpot. This remarkable transformation has probably gone unrecognized by almost all of today’s mainstream academics , for whom Webster remained invisible.
Taken together, these appraisals by leading past scholars persuaded me to take her work seriously, especially her lengthy volume on the French Revolution that had so impressed Churchill.
The French Revolution certainly ranked as one of the greatest political watersheds of the last few hundred years of world history, inspiring the Russian Revolution that followed more than a century later and many others.
France had long been Europe’s greatest Continental power. Three generations earlier the absolutist monarchy established during the seventy year reign of the Louis XIV—the “Sun King”— greatly influenced all other European thrones, even as his armies came close to establishing his political hegemony over the entire continent in the long series of wars that he waged. French became the widespread language of diplomacy and royal courts, spoken by both Frederick the Great of Prussia and the Russian Czars, giving that country the sort of cultural hegemony that the Sun King had narrowly failed to achieve militarily. Meanwhile, during the Age of Reason of the 18th century, the great French philosophes such as Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau had exerted a great deal of intellectual influence over Europe’s leading thinkers.
Thus, when revolution finally came to France, the international impact was far greater than it would have been in any other country. The sudden transformation of Europe’s most powerful absolutist monarchy into its first large-scale republic also soon launched a series of wars that lasted for a full generation, first under its new republican government and then under Napoleon, with France making a powerful bid to subjugate all of Europe, until it was finally defeated by an alliance of all the other major powers.
The French Revolution gave us the ideological terms “left” and “right” based upon the coincidental seating arrangements of the more and the less radical members of the Constituent Assembly. In their eagerness to expunge all traces of the hated feudal regime they had overthrown, the revolutionary leaders created the Metric System of meters, liters, and grams, now used almost everywhere in the world outside the U.S.
Yet despite the immense importance of the French Revolution, prior to reading Webster’s long and conspiratorial history of that event, I don’t think I’d ever read a single book on the subject, with my previous understanding coming from the short treatments in my introductory history textbooks and what I had subsequently absorbed from decades of occasional coverage in the media.
As I vaguely remembered, the roots of the revolution had been the French intervention in the American Revolutionary War. Although France had been militarily successful in weakening its British arch-rival by assisting the American colonists in their bid for independence, the financial costs of the long war had been ruinous, pushing the monarchy towards fiscal insolvency. As a result of that financial pressure, Louis XVI, the rather weak-willed great-great-grandson of the absolutist Sun King, had called France’s vestigial parliament into session for the first time in two centuries, hoping to enact tax reform and put his country on a sounder financial footing.
Inspired by the intellectual ferment of Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers, who had promoted “the Rights of Man,” the more radical parliamentarians had clashed with their king, demanding an end to absolutist monarchy. Although these concessions were made, generations of accumulated anger at aristocratic privilege soon led to a violent, full-fledged revolution, marked by the famous “Storming of the Bastille,” a government fortress in Paris that symbolized oppression, with that incident considered as the start of the revolution.
Over the next few years, the revolution steadily became more and more extreme, with each dominant political faction being pushed aside and overthrown as too moderate by more radical and bloodthirsty elements. The guillotine was invented as a new and very efficient means of execution, and the ensuing Reign of Terror soon gave it a great deal of use. King Louis, his queen, and their various relatives were eventually beheaded, along with monarchists, aristocrats, and moderates. Once only the radical revolutionaries were left, they soon began freely purging and beheading each other, until almost every prominent figure from the revolution—whether monarchist, moderate, or radical—had been killed. Fear and exhaustion then caused things to quiet down a little, until a successful general named Napoleon seized power and then later proclaimed himself emperor, thereby reestablishing the same sort of autocracy that had been overthrown a decade earlier.
The rough basic facts contained in these few sentences were confirmed at far greater length when I read Webster’s 600 page volume. But the problem I faced was that my knowledge of the French Revolution was too rudimentary to separate her wheat from her chaff. I knew that her work taken as a whole was considered highly controversial and unorthodox by current historians, but without a good understanding of the standard narrative, it was difficult for me to judge which parts of her account fell into which category.
Our very lightly moderated website attracts an extremely wide diversity of commenters, ranging from the erudite to the deranged, even including some overlap between those two categories. One longtime participant calls herself “Alden” and my mention of Webster’s conspiratorial theories prompted the following exchange:
Nesta Webster is absolutely correct…Problem is, virtually every history of the French Revolution in English is written from the Masonic and British supremacy point of view…Interesting. I’d never previously encountered Webster’s theory of the French Revolution and based upon her references, it sounded like she was the first modern English-language author to present it.
So what had been your own sources for that same theory?
There’s a recent book about the French Revolution by Simon Schama. It doesn’t go into Orleans role much. But it’s much much better than the usual Masonic propaganda. It’s a quick read..
Hmmm… It sounds like you must be talking about Citizens. But it’s not that recent since it was published in 1989 and given that it runs 948 pages, I wouldn’t exactly call it a “quick read.”
That’s right citizens. 35 years ago not recent it’s a quick read even if long. You check everything don’t you? Good for you. Your scientific math mind.
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As a British-born Harvard professor, Schama had published his magisterial narrative history Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution in 1989, timed for the two hundredth anniversary of that landmark event. When it appeared it had been very widely praised in all my newspapers and magazines and a few years ago I’d picked up a pristine copy for a couple of dollars at a used book sale. But intimidated by its massive, doorstop length I’d never considered reading it.
However, I now sought to better understand today’s standard history in order to determine where Webster deviated from it, and Schama’s book seemed ideally suited for that purpose. The combination of its great length, its huge sales, and its glowing reviews suggested that it had become a leading basis of our current understanding, even having its own short Wikipedia page. So I finally decided to tackle it, devoting a number of days to reading the very long text.
According to one of the most knowledgeable reviewers, Citizens caused a major stir by sharply breaking with a decades-long Marxist-influenced academic tradition, which had presented the French Revolution in an overwhelmingly favorable light. Under that previous narrative, the violent upheaval had been the absolutely necessary overthrow of a despotic, insularly aristocratic regime by the rising classes of the bourgeoisie and the proletarian workers. Meanwhile, coverage of the extreme bloodshed unleashed had been brushed aside or minimized.
Schama’s portrayal was very different. According to him, French society had been well on its way to replacing traditional feudal privilege by a much more meritocratic system based upon financial success. Not only had there been rapid economic development and the growth of trade and early industry, but successful entrepreneurs could easily enter the nobility, a situation strongly contradicting the notion of a closed and arrogantly backward aristocratic caste.
Indeed, much of the crucial early revolutionary pressure to transform France into a constitutional monarchy came from progressively-minded French aristocrats, and even after the revolution eventually took a radical and bloody turn, a surprising number of the fervent revolutionaries were still formerly titled aristocrats.
The most extreme example of this was surely the king’s own cousin, Louis Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, enormously wealthy and one of France’s greatest noblemen, just a couple of spots removed from the heir to the throne. Louis Philippe had been a leading revolutionary patron and soon renamed himself Philippe-Égalité (“Equality”). As an elected deputy, he personally voted for the king’s execution.
Along with a large fraction of all the other prominent political figures of that era caught up in the revolution, regardless of radical or moderate ideology, Philippe himself had also eventually been beheaded. But although his particular story was minimally discussed by Schama, the massive violence, both organized and unorganized, that his ultimate fate exemplified was a central theme of the entire book.
The author even argued that the rapid growth of government executions, culminating in the infamous Reign of Terror, had probably been partly intended to reduce the enormous amount of spontaneous violence by the wild and bloodthirsty Parisian mob, which was responsible for numerous massacres and much destruction, despite the unsuccessful efforts of elected revolutionary officials to curtail this unauthorized mayhem.
To a considerable extent this latter situation played an important role in propelling the successive revolutionary regimes in a steadily more radical direction. Once each revolutionary government came to power, it had reasonably attempted to reestablish order by asserting its monopoly on lethal violence and curbing the depredations of the urban mob. But this usually provided an opening for a more radical faction to ally itself with those violent popular elements and overthrow the reigning faction, only to soon find itself facing the same dilemma as its predecessor. This political pattern seemed to have occurred several separate times in Schama’s narrative.
The Execution of the Girondins
In one very notable example, an armed and violent Parisian mob forced its way into the National Convention and demanded that more than two dozen of the Girondin leaders, the faction that had previously dominated the revolutionary government, be removed and arrested for their “treachery,” successfully intimidating the elected deputies into doing so.
The wholesale execution of these Girondins that followed is often considered the beginning of the Reign of Terror, and it soon prompted a wave of uprisings across the country by regional elements favorable to the Girondins, outraged at what they regarded as the illegitimate and undemocratic Parisian control of the national government. Charlotte Corday, a 24-year-old Girondin from Normandy, traveled to Paris and famously assassinated Marat, one of the Jacobin leaders she considered most responsible for those ongoing massacres.
One interesting aspect of the situation that Schama’s narrative brought home to me was the complete absence of organized political parties, which had not yet come into existence. Thus, the various factions often vying in lethal fashion for political control were informal and very loosely organized, usually centered upon one or more particularly influential or charismatic leaders and those who followed them, being often based upon the particular political clubs they jointly attended, the publications they read, or where they took their meals.
The notoriously radical Jacobins were merely those political activists who regularly attended the Jacobin clubs, and the even more radical Cordeliers attended those rival clubs. The moderately radical Girondins had dominated one period of the revolutionary government and I had always vaguely assumed they were organized in some fashion, but they had merely been given that informal name because many of their elected deputies happened to come from the Gironde region of the Southwest, and they were also sometimes called Brissotists after the influential editor and publisher whom they generally followed. The much more radical Montagnards (“Mountainers”) had been named because they generally sat together in the highest seats of the National Convention hall.
Given these loose and informal political associations, friends and allies could often rapidly change. In early February 1794 Robespierre still regarded Danton as one of his closest revolutionary allies, but just a few weeks later, he ordered the latter’s arrest and execution, before he himself then suffered the same fate several months later.
This entire situation was totally different from that of the Russian Revolution, when relatively organized political parties such as the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, the Social Revolutionaries, the Cadets, and others directly contested control of the political system and the country.
I had also largely forgotten some of the extreme ideological radicalism of the French revolutionaries. Not only had they replaced the traditional system of weights and measures with the more rational Metric System, but they attempted to do the same with their calendar as well, replacing seven-day weeks with ten-day decades, and declaring their revolution to be Year One of an entirely new chronological dating system. Traditional Catholic Christianity was widely regarded as an bitter enemy to be eradicated, with some of the radicals favoring eliminating all religions, while Robespierre sought to replace Christianity with a Deist cult of the Supreme Being.
Some regions of rural France were deeply committed to their traditional religious beliefs and led by their local Catholic priests they rose in rebellion partly for that reason. The bloody counter-revolutionary War in the Vendée of western France was the most notable example of this, finally suppressed by the revolutionary government after years of brutal fighting in what amounted to a war of extermination. By some estimates, at least a couple of hundred thousand victims were massacred, perhaps one-third of the entire local population.
Given its great length, Schama’s account provided an enormous amount of detail on the French society of that era and the course of the revolution that suddenly upended it. But his narrative very conspicuously lacked any direct explanation of why that colossal upheaval occurred, instead suggesting the French Revolution resulted from a combination of unforeseen, contingent factors and events. Two years of bad harvests had driven up the price of bread and the blunders of the king and some of his ministers provoked the spontaneous political combustion that brought down their thousand-year monarchy, while further mistakes gradually moved the revolution in an increasingly radical and bloody direction.
This constituted the major contrast with Webster’s account, which instead presented a very different interpretation of roughly the same historical facts. She portrayed the French Revolution in strictly conspiratorial terms as the deliberately planned outcome of particular political plots.
Some of her theories seemed quite unlikely. Her book was written during the height of the anti-German propaganda of the First World War. Therefore, on the basis of extremely thin evidence, she suggested that prior to his death in 1786, Frederick the Great of Prussia had sought to weaken the French monarchy and its Austrian alliance by promoting Masonic propaganda against Queen Marie Antoinette, the daughter of Austrian Empress Marie Theresa, who for decades had been his foremost geopolitical adversary.
But the main conspiracy that Webster described was hardly an implausible one, with neither the motive nor the means being outlandish, and she drew heavily upon contemporaneous sources for her analysis. The individual whom she fingered as the primary orchestrator of the French Revolution had also been discussed by Schama but only given glancing coverage.
As I had mentioned earlier, Philippe, the enormously wealthy Duc d’Orléans, was the king’s cousin and a close heir to the throne, ranked just behind the youngest brother of Louis XVI. Yet rather remarkably, he became one of the major early patrons of the revolutionary movement, even officially renaming himself “Égalité” as a sign of his support.
Among his large personal holdings was the Palais-Royal estate in Paris. Both Schama and Webster emphasized that he allowed it to be used as a hotbed and staging area for revolutionary activism, its private grounds being off limits to the French police authorities. Schama treated this as merely due to his liberal, open-minded tendencies, but according to Webster it was only one of the many actions he took deliberately aimed at destabilizing the ruling monarchy and then replacing his cousin on its throne. Whether or not her analysis was correct, the important role of the Palais-Royal in the early stages of the revolution appeared on dozens of pages of Schama’s text, and indeed many members of the National Assembly later described it as the “birthplace of the Revolution.”
One of the earliest cases of mass urban violence in Paris was a major riot at a wallpaper factory, leading to more than two dozen deaths, and this important story was covered at length by both Schama and Webster. Philippe visited the scene during that incident and threw small bags of money to the cheering rioters. Their attack on the factory was initially blocked by government troops, but after the latter were forced to open their lines to allow the carriage of Philippe’s wife to pass, the rioters poured through that gap and destroyed both the factory and the home of its influential owner. Both authors reported all these same facts, but only Webster treated them highly suspicious.
According to Webster, this was only one of many such examples. She argued that Philippe deployed his vast wealth to recruit thousands of violent brigands, who launched attacks against government facilities and civilian infrastructure, all aimed at fostering the spread of lawlessness, violent unrest, and the resulting wild rumors that would weaken the hold of the king and provoke an uprising. In fact, at one point Schama freely admitted that “later generations of royalist historians” had claimed that many of these incidents were orchestrated by Philippe and his fellow plotters in order to undermine government authority and allow him to seize the throne. But the author then made no effort to either explore or refute those accusations.
A couple of months after that first large riot, Philippe played a crucial role in leading the political revolt of most of the traditional French parliament against monarchical authority, and these members soon formed the new National Assembly in its place.
Later that same year, a mob of Parisian protesters led by women marched on Versailles and violently stormed the residence of the king and queen, who narrowly escaped with their lives. Philippe was later accused of having planned their murder by funding those rioters, who allegedly chanted his name as their new king. Once again, Webster heavily emphasized these facts, while Schama minimized them.
Webster also noted that the colors adopted early on by the revolutionary forces—white, blue, and red—happened to exactly match the colors of Philippe’s Orléans family. Perhaps this was mere coincidence, but perhaps not.
Given her future areas of historical interest, Webster also naturally emphasized that Philippe served as the Grand Master of French Freemasonry, presumably giving him a great web of hidden influence over the elite elements of his society, something obviously very helpful in overthrowing a regime. Schama entirely omitted that potentially important fact, and instead explicitly dismissed all such conspiratorial notions in just a few sentences:
To counter-revolutionary writers, looking back on the disaster of 1789, the proliferation of seditious and libelous material seemed even more sinister, evidence of a conspiracy hatched between godless followers of Voltaire and Rousseau, Freemasons, and the Duc d’Orléans. Was not the Palais-Royal after all one of the most notorious dens of iniquity, where even the police were forbidden from pouncing on peddlers of literary trash?Understandably, modern historians have steered clear of anything that could be construed as subscribing to the literary conspiracy theory of the French Revolution.
Wikipedia is notorious for representing the establishmentarian perspective on historical events and shying away from any questionable conspiratorial claims. But although the page on Phillipe makes no mention of Webster, the factual account it provided seemed closer to her analysis than that of Schama.
We should also not entirely ignore an interesting historical echo that came decades later. After the final defeat of Napoleon, the Bourbon monarchy was restored in France, and two of Louis XVI’s younger brothers then successively held the throne. But in the Second French Revolution of 1830, Charles X was overthrown and replaced by his cousin Louis Philippe d’Orléans, Philippe’s surviving son, who thus finally achieved the goal that his late father had allegedly sought.
Judging Webster’s work and weighing her conclusions against those of Schama is obviously difficult for a non-specialist such as myself, but I can certainly understand why her book was so highly regarded by at least some scholars when it appeared in 1919. Her main historical analysis seemed solidly based upon reliable sources of that era, many of which were only available in French, and she made an effort to weigh these against each other and evaluate their credibility. Her text included well over 1,000 footnotes to such crucial source material, while Schama’s provided none at all, instead merely listing the main works he drew upon for each individual chapter. So to some extent, Webster’s book represented new academic research, while Schama had produced what amounted to a very hefty synthesis and presentation of preexisting material.
All of this raises the interesting question of why Schama’s massive volume so casually dismissed and ignored the conspiratorial analysis that had been advanced by Webster more than three generations earlier. The possibility that one ambitious member of a ruling dynasty might seek to subvert the reign of another and replace him on the throne is hardly unknown to history. Webster had gathered together a great deal of detailed evidence in support of that hypothesis, evidence that had seemingly impressed some of the leading scholars of her era.
Credit: Maksim Sokolov/Wikimedia Commons
Throughout much of the 20th century, a lengthy series of very thick historical volumes occupied a prominent place on the bookshelves of many educated households, even if most of their members may have rarely if ever actually read the text. Published between 1935 and 1975, The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant ultimately included eleven volumes, each running a thousand pages or longer, with their narrative extending from the Near Eastern roots of Western Civilization to the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. This gigantic historical opus represented the absolute height of mainstream, respectable thought.
The penultimate volume, Rousseau and Revolution won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and the recent discussion of Webster’s conspiratorial theories prompted a knowledgeable commenter to quote some of its contents, which I subsequently confirmed:
In these angry mobs the Duc d’Orleans saw a possible instrument for his ambitions…(his marriage) made him the richest man in France…after 1789, through his advocacy of popular causes, he was known as Philippe Egalite…Soon back in Paris, he determined to make himself an idol of the people, hoping that he might be chosen to succeed his cousin Louis XVI in case the harassed King should abdicate or be deposed. He gave largesse to the poor, recommended nationalization of ecclesiastical property, and threw open to the public the garden and some rooms of his Palais-Royal in the very heart of Paris…(which) became the hub of the Revolution…His fellow Freemasons gave him substantial support…It is alleged and probable, but not certain, that the money of the Duke…played a part in organizing the attack upon the Reveillon factory in the Rue St.-Antoine.
Thus, such Websterian conspiracies were still considered fully mainstream and respectable in 1968, but had become too extreme and implausible by 1989 to warrant more than a dismissive sentence or two in Schama’s magisterial volume, let alone a serious treatment in any of my own introductory textbooks.
One possibility is that by 1989 a great deal of more recent academic scholarship known to Schama had somehow overturned and conclusively debunked those ideas despite the strong historical evidence that seemed to support them. But I doubt this was the case given Schama’s explicit statement that modern historians had carefully “steered clear” of any such “conspiracy theory of the French Revolution.” Instead, I think those ideas had come to be regarded as too ideologically toxic to consider or even attempt to refute rather than to merely ignore.
Schama wrote Citizens while he was still in his early 40s, and a reviewer noted that his work sought to challenge and overturn the long-established, Marxian-influenced hagiography of the French Revolution that had dominated the academic community for decades. So Schama may have very reasonably believed that substantially including any of the conspiratorial notions once advanced by Webster and others might push his difficult project past its breaking point. His weighty historical volume became a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, thus automatically guaranteeing him a half-million sales, and perhaps he might have lost that opportunity if he had given any serious consideration to controversial conspiratorial possibilities.
In 2016 I published an article noting that in the aftermath of World War II, an important shift in political theory had caused a huge decline in the respectability of any “conspiratorial” explanation of historical events:
For decades prior to that conflict, one of our most prominent scholars and public intellectuals had been historian Charles Beard, whose influential writings had heavily focused on the harmful role of various elite conspiracies in shaping American policy for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, with his examples ranging from the earliest history of the United States down to the nation’s entry into WWI. Obviously, researchers never claimed that all major historical events had hidden causes, but it was widely accepted that some of them did, and attempting to investigate those possibilities was deemed a perfectly acceptable academic enterprise.
Beard had long been a towering intellectual figure, serving as both the president of the American Political Science Association and the president of the American Historical Association. But after his 1948 death his views became extremely marginalized, and many younger scholars of a similar ilk were purged from the media and even the academic community.
This widespread condemnation of conspiratorial notions further accelerated in the wake of the 1963 JFK Assassination:
By 1964, this intellectual revolution had largely been completed, as indicated by the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the famous article by political scientist Richard Hofstadter critiquing the so-called “paranoid style” in American politics, which he denounced as the underlying cause of widespread popular belief in implausible conspiracy theories. To a considerable extent, he seemed to be attacking straw men, recounting and ridiculing the most outlandish conspiratorial beliefs, while seeming to ignore the ones that had been proven correct. For example, he described how some of the more hysterical anti-Communists claimed that tens of thousands of Red Chinese troops were hidden in Mexico, preparing an attack on San Diego, while he failed to even acknowledge that for years Communist spies had indeed served near the very top of the U.S. government. Not even the most conspiratorially minded individual suggests that all alleged conspiracies are true, merely that some of them might be.Most of these shifts in public sentiment occurred before I was born or when I was a very young child, and my own views were shaped by the rather conventional media narratives that I absorbed. Hence, for nearly my entire life, I always automatically dismissed all of the so-called “conspiracy theories” as ridiculous, never once even considering that any of them might possibly be true.
Historian Will Durant had been born in 1885 and his views had been shaped long before that ideological transition, while his public stature and that of his series were sufficiently great by the late 1960s that the few conspiratorial sentences in his 1968 volume passed without challenge. But a much younger scholar like Schama, writing directly about the French Revolution in the late 1980s was faced with entirely different pressures.
Thus, Webster’s highly plausible conspiratorial analysis of a historic event of such landmark importance as the French Revolution was entirely airbrushed out of our history textbooks and media coverage. Given this example, we should become very cautious about accepting our other present-day narratives without question. Instead, we should regularly seek out works from fifty or one hundred years ago as potentially providing useful correctives to our current historical biases and blind spots.
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