In the famous speech of the Chevalier Ramsay already quoted, which was delivered at Grand Lodge of Paris in 1737, the following passage occurs:
The fourth quality required in our Order is the taste for useful sciences and the liberal arts. Thus, the Order exacts of each of you to contribute, by his protection, liberality, or labour, to a vast work for which no academy can suffice, because all these societies being composed of a very small number of men, their work cannot embrace an object so extended. All the Grand Masters in Germany, England, Italy, and elsewhere exhort all the learned men and all the artisans of the Fraternity to unite to furnish the materials for a Universal Dictionary of all the liberal arts and useful sciences; excepting only theology and politics. The work has already been commenced in London, and by means of the unions of our brothers it may be carried to a conclusion in a few years.[419]
So after all it was no enterprising bookseller, no brilliantly inspired philosopher, who conceived the idea of the Encyclopédie, but a powerful international organization able to employ the services of more men than all the academies could supply, which devised the scheme at least six years before the date at which it is said to have occurred to Diderot. Thus the whole story as usually told to us would appear to be a complete fabrication--struggling publishers, toiling littérateurs carrying out their superhuman task as "independent men of letters" without the patronage of the great--which Lord Morley points out as "one of the most important facts in the history of the Encyclopædia"--writers of all kinds bound together by no "common understanding or agreement," are all seen in reality to have been closely associated as "artisans of the Fraternity" carrying out the orders of their superiors.
The Encyclopédie was therefore essentially a Masonic publication, and Papus, whilst erroneously attributing the famous oration and consequently the plan of the Encyclopédie to the inspiration of the Duc d'Antin, emphasizes the importance of this fact. Thus, he writes:
The Revolution manifests itself by two stages:
1st. Intellectual revolution, by the publication of the Encyclopédie, due to French Freemasonry under the high inspiration of the Duc d'Antin.
2nd. Occult revolution in the Lodges, due in great part to the members of the Templar Rite and executed by a group of expelled Freemasons afterwards amnestied.[420]
The masonic authorship of the Encyclopédie and the consequent dissemination of revolutionary doctrines has remained no matter of doubt to the Freemasons of France; on the contrary, they glory in the fact. At the congress of the Grand Orient in 1904 the Freemason Bonnet declared:
In the eighteenth century the glorious line of Encyclopædists formed in our temples a fervent audience which was then alone in invoking the radiant device as yet unknown to the crowd: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." The revolutionary seed quickly germinated amidst this élite. Our illustrious Freemasons d'Alembert, Diderot, Helvétius, d'Holbach, Voltaire, Condorcet, completed the evolution of minds and prepared the new era. And, when the Bastille fell, Freemasonry had the supreme honour of giving to humanity the charter (i.e. the Declaration of the Rights of Man) which it had elaborated with devotion. (Applause.)
This charter, the orator went on to say, was the work of the Freemason Lafayette, and was adopted by the Constituent Assembly, of which more than 300 members were Freemasons.
But in using the lodges to sow the seeds of revolution, the Encyclopædists betrayed not only the cause of monarchy but of Masonry as well. It will be noticed that, in conformity with true masonic principles, Ramsay in his oration expressly stated that the encyclopædia was to concern itself with the liberal arts and sciences[421] and that theology and politics were to be excluded from the contemplated scheme. How, then, did it come to pass that these were eventually the two subjects to which the Encyclopædists devoted the greatest attention, so that their work became principally an attack on Church and monarchy? If Papus was right in attributing this revolutionary tendency to the Encyclopédie from the time of the famous oration, then Ramsay could only be set down as the profoundest hypocrite or as the mouthpiece of hypocrites professing intentions the very reverse of their real designs. A far more probable explanation seems to be that during the interval between Ramsay's speech and the date when the Encyclopédie was begun in earnest, the scheme underwent a change. It will be noticed that the year of 1746, when Diderot and d'Alembert are said to have embarked on their task, coincided with the decadence of French Freemasonry under the Comte de Clermont and the invasion of the lodges by the subversive elements; thus the project propounded with the best intentions by the Freemasons of 1737 was filched by their revolutionary successors and turned to a diametrically opposite purpose.
But it is not to the dancing-master Lacorne and his middle-class following that we can attribute the efficiency with which not only the Encyclopédie but a host of minor revolutionary publications were circulated all over France. Frederick the Great had seen his opportunity. If I am right in my surmise that Ramsay's speech had reached the ears of Frederick, the prospect of the Encyclopédie contained therein may well have appeared to him a magnificent method for obtaining a footing in the intellectual circles of France; hence then, doubtless, an additional reason for his hasty initiation into Masonry, his summons to Voltaire, and his subsequent overtures to Diderot and d'Alembert, who, by the time the first volume of the Encyclopédie appeared in 1751, had both been made members of the Royal Academy of Prussia. In the following year Frederick offered d'Alembert the presidency of the Academy in place of Maupertuis, an offer which was refused; but in 1755 and again in 1763 d'Alembert visited Frederick in Germany and received his pension regularly from Berlin. It is therefore not surprising that when the Encyclopédie had reached the letter P, it included, in an unsigned article on Prussia, a panegyric on the virtues and the talents of the illustrious monarch who presided over the destinies of that favoured country.