The History of the Illuminati

How did a failed Bavarian order become history’s most pervasive conspiracy theory? In 1776, a Bavarian law professor founded a secret order to fight religious censorship. A decade later it was completely extinct, smashed by royal decrees and internal betrayals. So why has the Illuminati been blamed for every major crisis since, from the French Revolution to the New World Order? Historian Michael Taylor, author of 'Illuminati: The History of a Conspiracy Theory', joins us to contrast the grand conspiratorial myths with the messy, short-lived reality. Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Matthew Wilson. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Dan Snow's History Hit is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  This is Stugatz from Stugatz and Company Live. Buy smart, drive for less and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it all starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla sedan with the latest features N-Tech or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops. While Toyota's legendary resale value means you can get more at TradeIn, get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  It's September 1939. Hitler has plunged Europe into war. Canada is scrambling to support Britain, while the US insists they will remain neutral until the conflict expands and they're forced to act. What happens next creates an extraordinary partnership between two great nations that now, nearly a century later, seems increasingly in peril. I'm David Boris. I'm a military historian and the host of Hostile History. Join me for our special episodes on World War II. Search for and follow Hostile History now, wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  It's time for the Illuminati. If you were the founder of a secret order, hell-bent on infiltrating every level of European society, what would you name it? It's a tough brief. It needs to sound discreet, yet ominous. You need a name that sounds good when spoken in a hushed whisper. You can't call yourselves the guys who control the world. That just gives the game away. In the late 18th century, a Bavarian professor named Adam Weishaupt faced this exact problem. First, he pitched the League of Perfectibilists, which sounds less like an elite shadowy cabal and more like an after-school club for neat freaks.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  When that didn't stick, he briefly championed the Society of the Bees, because nothing strikes fear into the heart of the global roots elite like a handful of Enlightenment nerds buzzing around in dank Bavarian cellars. Eventually, though, he settled on the Order of the Illuminati, which, to be fair, is a solid name. And while Weishaupt's grand experiment was completely stamped out less than a decade and really came to nothing, somehow the ghost of his short-lived society managed to achieve immortality, morphing into the master blueprint for every modern conspiracy theory.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  So today, we're separating 18th-century reality from 250 years of wild pop culture paranoia. What's the real history of this obscure order? And how did it become the most pernicious and persistent conspiracy theory of the modern era? Here to break it all down for us is Michael Taylor, historian and author of Illuminati: The History of a Conspiracy Theory. Strap in, folks. It's time to talk Illuminati.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Michael, thanks so much for coming on.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  Thank you, Dan. I'm delighted to be here.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  They, is there a, is there a hard beginning of the Illuminati? Do they, do they come into being on a certain day at a certain time?

• 3:45Speaker 03

  There is. You can actually pinpoint it to the 1st of May, 1776. It's a very, very precise beginning. So in the spring of 1776, the founding fathers are not the only cabal of people apparently plotting rebellion. So at the very same time, in Bavaria, in Ingolstadt, which is a university city on the Danube, the legal professor Adam Weishaupt has gathered four of his most loyal and capable students around him, and they form this secret society. The purpose of the secret society is to propagate Enlightenment values. And that sounds pretty milquetoast, but really what they are planning to do, because in Bavaria

• 4:27Speaker 03

  there is no print culture, there's no representative democratic political culture, there's not even the kind of salon that's flourishing in Paris, they have adopted the secret society as the vehicle for their political ambitions. So they are going to bring people into their society, teach them Enlightenment values, and assume that over time, they will rise to positions of influence within the state and then change the direction of state as they go.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  Wow. I mean, that is a, that is the deep, that's the deep state for you. They want to be the deep state. Anyway, they, they're aspirant deep stateers. Is the sentiment, it's important, you mentioned, you said there at the beginning, wow, as they're, as they're meeting in Philadelphia to, to abolish the link between Britain and its North American colonies, are they influenced by that same revolutionary wave, do you think?

• 5:15Speaker 03

  Not directly by the Americans, although they are very much aware of what's going on across the Atlantic. But these are arguably the high points, you know, the salad days of the Enlightenment itself. And Weishaupt is an Enlightenment scholar, and he is vastly frustrated, not only by the general conservatism that is inherent in Bavaria, where the Catholic Church is absolutely dominant, and the Wittelsbach Dukes of Bavaria are extremely conservative themselves. His main problem is with the university, which is populated and controlled by ex-Jesuits, who are really, really unhelpful when it comes to bringing in new literature or new teaching methods and propagating the kind of ideas that Weishaupt has been reading

• 6:00Speaker 03

  in private and that are available elsewhere in Europe.

• 6:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, like Edinburgh, it's all happening.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  It is.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  So we, we want to be more like Edinburgh, basically. We're meant to be a university, for Christ's sake.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  But Enlightenment is not an event. It's a process.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  Right. Well, that's my next question is what, what do we mean by Enlightenment? What's it mean in that context?

• 6:18Speaker 03

  Well, it might mean the promotion of rationalism over inherited beliefs or taught beliefs. So it might be examining the natural world to deduce the causes of events, rather than simply assuming that God is directing matters.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  And this is revolutionary stuff in Europe at the time, still?

• 6:35Speaker 03

  Certainly in conservative places like Bavaria, it is, because this is a deeply conservative Catholic part of Germany. And there are more than 300 different German states at this time. So there are lots of very, very different approaches to politics and religion all across the Holy Roman Empire. But within Bavaria, the Church owns more than half of the farmland. There are supposedly only three people who can dare to live openly as Protestants in Munich. The very name of Munich means little monk, which is a nod to the entrenched Catholicism of the place. So whenever we expect, or whenever we talk about Enlightenment, we will imagine, you know, people huddling by candlelight, drinking coffee, discussing Voltaire or the newest political economy.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  There isn't much of that happening in Bavaria. And even suggesting those kinds of ideas could be politically very, very dangerous because you would be undermining the authority of both the Church and the state.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  And so he's experiencing censorship within this, we talk about today, about free speech on campus. He's experiencing his ability to teach to lecture is being curtailed by the authorities at the university.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  He can't teach what he wants to.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  And so he looks around, he can't lecture, he can't petition Parliament, he can't establish a kind of radical magazine in Munich through which he can propagate these ideas. So learning a little bit about the Freemasons, as he does, and the existence of secret societies throughout European history, he thinks, well, okay, that's what I'm going to do. This is how I'm going to change the world.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  And the reason that there are secret societies, and as they're, well, there may be now, but they're secret, I don't know about them. But the reason they're secret societies is because the penalties for joining up to this group are severe. You could be punished, killed, tortured, questioned, sacked, experienced professional sanction.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  All of these things. It's not just the ideas that you might be circulating within the secret society. So for Weishaupt, it would be, well, let's perhaps change the way that the Church dominates religion, maybe give a little bit more freedom or religious toleration within Bavaria. He might look at other types of philosophy and think, well, shouldn't we possibly teach this instead of just Aquinas or Jesuits? It's the very nature of forming a secret society, of placing yourself apart from the rest of society, of saying to the state and to the Church, in this little association that I have created, we are going to live by our own rules. And that is an inherent threat to the authority of both Church and State.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  And is that, is it exciting as well? Are they looking for?

• 9:08Speaker 03

  There are lots of people who, who are promised to the world, who said, well, you know, this is a form of intellectual espionage. We're going to deal in all of these incredible secrets, and we're going to promise you this esoteric higher wisdom at the same time. And yeah, they think this is going to be an adventure. There are some people who are sincerely interested in the philosophy and the ideas and changing the state. But really, I think lots of young men in Germany are a bit bored and they think, well, this sounds like fun.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  And the weird thing is, they're right in a way about higher knowledge, aren't they? I mean, if there are advances going, people, Adam Smith is trying to understand more about the system of capitalism or markets, what actually drives prices. And for people to be able to explore that would have been quite exciting, they would have had their eyes opened. I mean, this is, and indeed, the scientific research in the natural world as well.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  Well, they are certainly, the early recruits, both in Ingolstadt and across the rest of Bavaria, are looking at other parts of Europe and the world. And they are seeing these new ideas take root and have effect. So you have the development of market economies through Smith. In what becomes the United States, you have ideas about representative government, which are being given revolutionary effect. You have in other parts of northern, western Germany, religious toleration whereby you can begin to criticize the church, or whichever church you belong to, and not suffer severe penalties. So these are the ideas, these exciting ideas, that they want to bring in and develop and

• 10:41Speaker 03

  secretly inculcate within the elites of Bavarian society.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  I like the way they chose the owl of Minerva or Athena, the goddess of wisdom, as their symbol.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  They are all incredibly aware of what they regard as their classical inheritance. So they think that they are the heirs to ancient Greece. They can't see anybody else in Bavaria who's going to do it. So they are going to harness the lessons of the classical scholars and philosophers. And they are going to keep that flame alive. And it's maybe not a coincidence that, what is it, 50 years later, it's the Germans, and actually the Bavarians, who are the great champions of the new Greek monarchy in independent Greece. And it's a Bavarian prince who becomes the first king of independent Greece.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  I love it. And they imagine themselves like Socrates, sitting around in the agora, chatting, dangerous as well, dangerous business to free the minds of the young.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  Well, they absolutely believe this Weishaupt promises to act with Socratic prudence. And they all give themselves secret code names. So you have to do this in a secret society. You get to choose your own if you're one of the big guys, or you're given one if you're a novice. So Weishaupt becomes Spartacus, the leader of the slave rebellion against injustice. Others become known as Cato, after the Stoic philosopher. There's Xenophon. I think somebody gets called Socrates himself, which is quite a big deal. Alcibiades is there as well. So all of these people from Greek and Roman history are the role models for the Illuminati.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  And they even take place names from classical history and give it to the other parts of Central Europe. So Bavaria itself is Achaia. Munich becomes Athens. But all of these different places are branded in this, with this classical terminology.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  And it wasn't the first name, the Illuminati. Well, tell me, what does it mean? And also, did they have to, did they went through a few, cycled through a few other names?

• 12:37Speaker 03

  They did. Weishaupt didn't have an enormous gift for branding. So they began with the name of the perfectibilists, because they were obsessed with the process of perfecting humankind.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  Society can be perfected.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  It was, if you can improve the man and his ideas, and if you can improve society and the way that society operates, then maybe eventually we'll lose the need for repressive police states, and maybe for the state itself. They were idealistic dreamers in that sense. They believed that they were shining a light into the darkness of Bavarian and European society. And that's where we get the Illuminati, which means literally the enlightened ones. There was also a name in between the perfectulus and the Illuminati, and that was the Society of the Bee. Because I think Weishaupt seemed to think that if he could put his hive in order, and he had all of these worker bees, and he would be the queen dictating how everything went, then that would reflect the kind of system he wanted to develop.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  But I'm not sure anybody's going to sign up for the Society of the Bee.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  No. And the key thing about this for me to understand is that this is not a sort of populist, not public facing, not like those 19th century subscription things. They're trying to identify people within the existing elites. It's not a numbers game, it's a clout game.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  It is. Weishaupt begins looking for promising students at Ingolstadt. So who are the bright sparks who have shown an interest in this contraband literature? And he himself has friends and contacts. So they can look around Munich society and say, well, this chap's got an important job in the Foreign Service, or this guy's an influential civil servant, or a judge, or an experienced soldier. These are the types of men that we need to build this society. We want to be able to place them in prominent positions in civil society. And that's how we can influence the direction of the Bavarian state. I did say men there, and it is important to note that Weishaupt had no place for women

• 14:37Speaker 03

  in the society. He would later be accused of atheism, but he was also insistent that there shouldn't be any atheists, there shouldn't be any infidels. These had to be smart, upstanding, good, well thought of men, that he would describe as cavaliers. These were the kinds of people he would send into secret battle.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  Well, let's talk about the battle, because initially, what, it's just a sort of upscale, posh book club, salon? The education bit is happening, is it? Lectures, discussion?

• 15:07Speaker 03

  Oh, so he develops, Weishaupt develops, an incredibly detailed syllabus that everybody should read. So there's ancient philosophy, there is modern philosophy. So people are reading Smith and Pope. They're reading lots of Enlightenment history. So the story of how different societies across the world have developed and progressed over time, because these are the halcyon years of that idea of society progressing through different stages. And Weishaupt would take this lesson, and he hoped to apply it to Germany. But you're right, this is little more than a clandestine book club for the first few years.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  Sounds nice.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Everybody has to get the right ideas in their head if they're to implement the right lessons whenever they reach positions of influence. There's an awful lot of homework involved as well. So whenever these promising new candidates are recruited, they are told to analyze themselves, to analyze historical figures, to read all of these books, if they can get hold of them. Because that's still the danger, that a lot of this Enlightenment literature is banned in Bavaria. So they have to source it from outside the country, from anywhere they can get it in Europe. And they are constantly writing these secretive reports and what they think are the best passages, and what lessons they can take, all in their own little code. So if any of the letters are discovered, nobody can work out what it says.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  I love that. A little bit of cheeky Montesquieu being swapped between.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  Oh, I know, I know.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  We've got more coming up after this, don't go anywhere.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us, mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 17:30Speaker 04

  Hey, it's Lunchbox from the Bobby Bones Show. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability, and it starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla sedan with the latest features in tech. Or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander, or an adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops. While Toyota's legendary resale value means you could get more at trade-in. Get a deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.

• 18:08Speaker 05

  As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Betwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors, and even more importantly, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history. Kings, queens, mistresses, servants, and everyone in between. We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodisiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines, and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits. In other words, it's the best bits of history with me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal, and Society, twice a week, every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts.

• 18:52Speaker 05

  Brought to you by the award-winning network, History Hit.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  It's September 1939. Hitler has plunged Europe into war. Canada is scrambling to support Britain, while the US insists they will remain neutral until the conflict expands and they're forced to act. What happens next creates an extraordinary partnership between two great nations that now, nearly a century later, seems increasingly in peril. I'm David Boris. I'm a military historian and the host of Hostile History. Join me for our special episodes on World War II. Search for and follow Hostile History now, wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  What is the first whisper that the authorities get about these people? And do the authorities give a hoot?

• 19:42Speaker 03

  Well, this is quite difficult.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  You might not think it, given it's a secret society, but there is an incredible amount of evidence that the Illuminati left behind, because they are writing down everything.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  Very interesting.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  And Weishaupt wants copies of everything. So for the first five or six years, from 1776 onwards, there seems not to be much notice taken of them by the authorities. But we have to assume there was some knowledge, because they were attempting to recruit people from within the Bavarian government. And some people will have said, no, I don't like that. Some people will have joined the order and then left it. And they will also have created all of this evidence, some of which was found and left alone. But it's not really until 1785, or 1784 or 1785, when the rumours really begin to circulate about the Illuminati and when rival secret societies like the Rosicrucians and the Jesuits, who are influential within the Bavarian government,

• 20:39Speaker 03

  begin to start a campaign of dark whispers about the Illuminati.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  And by the same way, when did the Illuminati do anything that looks like an attempt to move in the deep state?

• 20:55Speaker 03

  So this is again one of the more difficult questions to answer, because whenever you get to the mid 1780s, by this stage, they've recruited 2,000, maybe 2,500 prominent people across Germany. They've got the rulers of Goethe, Brunswick and Weimar. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is a member of the Illuminati. They tried to tap up Friedrich Schiller, but he said no. There's some evidence that Mozart was aware of them, or at least approached by them. But whenever you look at anything they might have achieved in concrete, it's quite difficult to discern anything. These are still castles in the air. And Weishaupt knew that it wouldn't be a matter of years, because he wanted to plant these seeds of enlightenment. He knew that it might take decades or generations for them to blossom.

• 21:40Speaker 03

  So they were prepared to wait. They were prepared to play a very long game.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  That's fine. So he's not a Leninist. He's not going, we are going to move and we're going to take over this organ of state.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  No, he knew that it might not be in his lifetime before he saw the fruits of his labour.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  So, okay, so actually, but they are recruiting. They recruit sitting on interesting committees and beginning to make decisions, as people do, that do affect the lives of the fellow citizens. What happens when the whispering campaigns begin? There's nothing like reactionary German governments of this period to be trigger happy.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Well, they begin to panic, both the government in Bavaria and the Illuminati themselves. And what they decide to do at a moment of tense relations between Bavaria and Austria is to approach the diocesan Duchess of Bavaria, who has made enemies of the Bavarian Elector and the Emperor. And because of that, she has found that her second secret husband has been imprisoned by the rulers of Bavaria and Austria. So the Illuminati think, well, she could be a powerful patron of ours and we've got friends in Austria. So why don't we go to her and we can say, we'll get your husband out of prison. We'll sort this out for you. But they miscalculate. The Duchess assumes that they are actually loyal to Austria rather than to Bavaria.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  And she runs to her nephew, the Elector of Bavaria, and says, I think we've got a problem with these guys. So there is an edict issued in 1784 suggesting that members of secret societies should perhaps desist from this subversive behaviour. Weishaupt himself, at this stage, begins to realise that the game for him is probably up. I mean, if any rumours have been circulating, they've been circulating about him. So he's still at the University of Ingolstadt. Lots of Jesuits are still there, causing trouble for him. So he decides upon martyrdom. He says, well, if you're going to go after my secret society, I am going to stand up. I'm going to take the slings and arrows and I will ride into heroic exile in Regensburg to the north. So he does that.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  And does he say, you're right, I have been leading this very daring group of intellectuals. I'm going to exile.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  We don't know precisely what he says, but he refuses to bow down to the conservative Jesuits. And he says, no, I'm going to keep doing what I want. I'm going to keep teaching what I want to do. I'm my own man. Looked at another way, you might think that he's abandoning the Illuminati. So he disappears off to Regensburg, where he's living in exile in Penury. And what really changes the pace of events that are developing against the Illuminati is a trip that he has paid by one of their members, a priest called Lands. And they're walking around Regensburg, just outside the old town, when Lands is struck by lightning and struck dead. So Weishaupt sees this, panics, runs away.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  The civil authorities, they pick up the body. They conduct a post-mortem of sorts. And during the search of Lands's clothes, they find written confirmation. They find documents detailing the names of the Illuminati, their codenames, and instructions that Lands had to go and had to start recruiting other people. So there had been these whispers beforehand, but now they've got written proof that the Illuminati existed and that certain particular people were involved.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  There's been a big data breach.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  There has been, but it gets worse from there. So they can identify one of Weishaupt's chief lieutenants, a guy called von Zwack. And he is expelled from Munich, but then decides that he will rush back and defend his honour. When he does that, he leaves a chiffre of Illuminati documents in a chest of drawers underneath his wife's underwear. And that ridiculously is how the Bavarian authorities come upon all of the evidence.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  The first place to look is the underwear drawer. Come on, don't put your passport in there, folks. Okay, so this is blown wide open now.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  It is. So through the winter of 1786, 1787, the Bavarian state gathers all of these papers together and decides to publish them as a compendium, to say, look, the Illuminati are real. They are a danger. They are a threat. They've been trying to subvert good Catholic morality. They've been trying to undermine the foundations of the Bavarian state. These are all the horrible, dangerous things they've been talking about. So if you're a member of the Illuminati now and you've been identified in these documents, you scarper. Some of them decide to accept prison sentences. They sacrifice some parts of their estates. Others go off to other parts of Germany and try to rebuild their lives there.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  And is that the end of the Illuminati?

• 26:17Speaker 03

  Well, some people would say otherwise, but yes, this is effectively.

• 26:20Speaker 00

  That is such an amazing, okay, that's amazing. So they've achieved, quite literally, the square root of nothing, effectively. I mean, they've broadened their minds. They've had it, and indeed, some of those people, there's an intellectual tradition there in Bavaria that will deliver, no doubt, some things.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  And 10 to 15 years later, some of the guys who scarpered and have hidden in exile come back and they achieve office in Bavaria. And then they begin to actually implement the ideas of 1790s and 1800s. So they develop educational reforms. They change economic systems.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  So in terms of a gentle dissemination of new ideas and radical thinking, it works, roughly speaking, but it's.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  In very specific circumstances. But what they've achieved by the time that they are outlawed in 1787 is absolutely nothing.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  And yet, here we are talking about them.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  We are.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  Why?

• 27:16Speaker 03

  Well, something happens in France a couple of years later. There are events. And by the 1790s, by the middle of the 1790s, if we skip forward a bit.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  So the French Revolution happens. The roof is blown off. It's turbulent ideas, chaos.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  So from 1796, if you're looking back to the spring of 1789, the world has changed utterly. So the French monarchy is gone. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette have been executed.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  The French state becomes atheist briefly.

• 27:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the Catholic Church is effectively extinct in France. And we have what looks like an atheistic, democratic, egalitarian republic waging ideological warfare on Europe. And Western Europe is on fire. In Britain itself, there is fear not only of the ideological contagion of the revolution, but they think there might also be practical consequences to it. Because in 1797, there are naval mutinies at Spithead and the Noor. And the next year, there is a revolution in Ireland with the United Irishmen seeking on roughly Jacobin lines to establish their own republic. So people begin to look around for explanations as to what the hell has gone on.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  Who could possibly have affected such ghastly and awful changes in the most powerful nation in the world at that time?

• 28:38Speaker 00

  And yeah, and by the way, there must be a guiding hand. It can't just be a sort of arbitrary collection of individuals and happenstance.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  Well, on the one hand, it could just be pure accident, but nobody really wants to believe that. On the far end of the scale, you could possibly suggest that God had been directing events, but he wouldn't be directing those events.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it seems unlikely.

• 28:59Speaker 03

  So you're left with human agency.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  And you're left with the idea of conspiracy. Now, conspiracy and conspiracism are inherent within the French Revolution. Everybody is constantly alleging counter-revolutionary treachery. So the idea that Corde could have been sent to assassinate Mara by a League of Girondins in Normandy isn't true. But there really was a conspiracy between royalists and the British to land an invasionary force in Britain. There's lots of all the time. And if you look back over the last 100 years, let's say, of British history, there is lots of conspiracy. So 1776, American independence could have been ascribed to the conspiracy of the founding fathers. 20 years before.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  The Adams Brothers.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, the Jacobite Rebellion was literally a conspiracy between the French and the Sturts.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  Well, 1688, glorious revolution. That was a proper.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  The Anglican bishops and the Dutch state definitely conspired to overthrow the Sturts. So conspiracy as a means of affecting historical change is established. But who, people begin to wonder, could possibly have affected this change from monarchy to republic, from Catholicism to atheism, from autocracy to democracy?

• 30:15Speaker 00

  Who indeed?

• 30:17Speaker 03

  Well, apparently, the Illuminati had those kinds of ideas. And by the very fact of the Bavarian state publishing all of those documents, they become the best known secret society in history. This has never happened before. So people know about the Freemasons, but the documents of the Freemasons are never made available in this way. The same with the Jesuits and the Rosicrucians. So you have these apparently very powerful, very secretive people championing precisely the same causes that the French Revolution appears to espouse.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  Ironically, the Bavarian government in clamping down on them were much better in marketing and branding than their founder, because they turned it into a.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  It was the most glorious Streisand effect of all time.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  And so you have leaders of the French Revolution, or people who've become leaders of the French Revolution with tenuous connections to Germany. They've been in Germany in the 1780s, they've picked up these ideas, they've heard about the Illuminati.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  Read the same books.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  And so by the middle of the 1790s, getting to 1797, there are two people in particular who decide that in order to explain the chaos, they are going to ascribe the events of the last 10 years to the actions of the French philosophers and Frederick the Great and the Illuminati. These men all working together in a conspiracy to overturn the social order and the church and the monarchy. Those two people have their own very good reasons for making these allegations. One of them is Augustin Barrowell, and he is an ex-Jesuit priest, a conservative religious journalist, and he was a refractory priest, so he refused to sign up to the civil constitution of the clergy. In the summer of 1792, he became

• 31:56Speaker 03

  very, he came very close to getting arrested. Lucky he didn't, because in September 1792, the massacres take place, and he sees hundreds of his friends and colleagues butchered in Paris. He escapes by the skin of his teeth and seeks refuge in England. So a few years later, whenever he attempts to explain the cause of all his misfortune, he is not going to look fondly upon a secret society which had apparently been promising the kind of revolutionary change that he has now seen. At precisely the same time that Barrowell is writing his book, there is a stern Scots physicist by the name of John Robison, who is a Freemason. He's also been quite badly ill, he's been in a lot of pain, he's been

• 32:39Speaker 03

  isolated, and in his isolation, he has come upon some of the same documents and some of the same stories.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  He went for a journey online and self-radicalised.

• 32:47Speaker 03

  He did. And precisely the same time, the two of them, writing in ignorance of each other, allege exactly the same thing.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  That's funny.

• 32:55Speaker 03

  And, well, there can't be any coincidences, it must be true. And in the conservative press in Britain in 1797, 98, 99, people take up these warnings. They really begin to fear that there is a proper international conspiracy, not just of the Jacobins, because there is.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  And the Jacobins, just so people know, they're the revolutionary French government that are in charge at the moment and overseeing the terror.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  And, you know, there are spies and networks of intelligence and counterintelligence all over the place, that's not doubted. But they begin to ascribe an Illuminati character to a lot of this espionage. And it's not just in Britain, it's not just in France, it crosses the Atlantic too. So Robison and then Barrowell arrive in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and that is taken up, their warnings are taken up by the Federalists, who are one of the two main political parties at the time, who are pro-British, anti-French, they are slightly more conservative than Jefferson's Republicans, and they see Jefferson's Republicans as the allies of the Jacobins. And they see perhaps this republicanism

• 34:03Speaker 03

  as a Trojan horse for the terrible ideology that the Jacobins and the Illuminati have foisted upon Europe. And it's not just Cranks and really conservative preachers reading this stuff, Washington, Adams, John Jay, lots of the founding fathers are reading it and believing it.

• 34:20Speaker 00

  There are some, I don't want to go too far down the modern parallels, but there's some interesting ones, like, you know, critical race theory, which is sort of, some academic is writing off by himself in some ivory tower about critical race theory, the next thing you know, it is plastered on every single broadcast. Low-information voters can tell you, they can name it anyway, they might not know what it is. It's sometimes, perhaps particularly these conservative reactions, it's quite nice to think there's an identifiable, obvious, malignant force.

• 34:45Speaker 03

  With all conspiracy theories, I think that's one of the really important factors, is that it's much more comprehensible and emotionally satisfactory to think that there is a single motive intentional force behind the events that you deplore or that you don't understand. Not just critical race theory, but say, cultural Marxism as well. I mean, are people really concerned about Jürgen Habermas, or are they just using this as a catch-all phrase to describe the ideas they don't like?

• 35:13Speaker 00

  And also to embody the person, it's a bit scary to think that all these massive revolutionary changes can happen, actually, and no one's in charge. It's just...

• 35:21Speaker 03

  It doesn't make any sense. And for a historian, it seems like a, you know, sort of abnegation of duty or the abdication of responsibility to say that sometimes stuff happens.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  And to be fair to lots of people in the 1790s, we've been looking at the French Revolution as historians for more than 200 years now. We've got access to all of the archives, all of the documents, we've got sophisticated historiography, we've got sophisticated theories that can help us to attempt to understand what is going on. And there might be lots of really prosaic explanations, you know, the French monarchy was bankrupt, the harvests...

• 35:56Speaker 00

  Monday morning, everyone had a hangover and then we're going to work.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, you know, lots of the revolutionaries were young naive men who were stressed and drunk all the time, and they made terrible decisions. And in 1789, if you're the French king and pretty much everybody in the country has a bone to pick with you, the worst thing you could do was to convoke them all in the Estates General and give them a chance to talk to one another. There are accidents and there are contingencies, and there are really boring, basic factors that explain something which ends up being extraordinary. But without those, without that access to those documents and to those means of understanding, you've witnessed something extraordinary. So it makes a certain degree of sense that there should be an extraordinary cause.

• 36:37Speaker 00

  A secret society, mate. Wow.

• 36:39Speaker 03

  If you can't explain it, it must be going on somewhere behind the curtain.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  More on the Illuminati coming up after this.

• 36:56Speaker 06

  Hey, what's up? This is Kelvin Washington from The I Couple with Rob Parker and Kelvin Washington. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability, and it starts with a great deal on off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra. Two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shoptoyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 37:33Speaker 05

  As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Betwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors, and even more importantly, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history. Kings, queens, mistresses, servants, and everyone in between. We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodisiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines, and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits. In other words, it's the best bits of history, with me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal, and Society, twice a week, every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Brought to you

• 38:17Speaker 05

  by the award-winning network, History Hit.

• 38:31Speaker 00

  And so what happens through the 1790s? Did it continue to grow? Did more and more people believe in this?

• 38:35Speaker 03

  Well, people begin to see evidence in events which otherwise would not have been tainted by association with the Illuminati. So Barrowell, in the second volume of his four books, had suggested that the French and the Illuminati might be at work in Ireland. And in the spring of 1798, a secret society with the same cellular structure and some of the same ideas as the Jacobins and the Illuminati rises up in rebellion against the British. And this, for a lot of people, appears to be proof that there really is an international conspiracy that will seek to overthrow all righteous government.

• 39:14Speaker 00

  The United, so the United Irishmen, is there any evidence, are they, in some ways, are they inspired by the conspiracy? Does things start to become true at some point in a way?

• 39:25Speaker 03

  I don't think there's any evidence that they were connected or even aware of the Illuminati conspiracy or the conspiracy theory.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  They didn't go, look what they've achieved, maybe we can do something.

• 39:35Speaker 03

  Well, they were definitely involved with the French and the Jacobins. And the French government sends naval and armed forces to assist the Irish rebellion. It doesn't work, they're beaten back by the weather, and then eventually they land 6,000 militiamen in Connaught, and that goes terribly. But that, the very existence of that connection, is for people looking on from England, proof that there is this.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  An even bigger conspiracy.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  We're now, moving into the 19th century, the conspiracy theory by now, it's just taken such a deep hold, and it proves quite fit for purpose. Can it change? Can it move beyond that context of the 1790s European upheavals?

• 40:14Speaker 03

  It does. So there had been a really intense panic about the Illuminati in the late 1790s. But if context raised it up, context threw it back down again. So by 1804, let's say, Napoleon has restored the church to some of its privileges in France, he's crowned himself an emperor.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  Theory, yeah.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's...

• 40:33Speaker 00

  The Pope's just crowned him.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. So you can no longer look for the authorship of the Illuminati in Napoleonic France.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  After that, however, as you say, the idea has been planted. The idea that there could be a secret society which is a motive force in world history is there and it doesn't really go away. Like, it might now be shorn of some of its association with pathetic Bavarian intellectuals squabbling amongst themselves and, you know, fighting for privileges at university. But it's become something much greater. The Barrowell and Robison notion that these are the guys behind the curtain who are directing almost every decision of every government that you don't like. That is, as you say, really malleable. And so wherever you see something subversive occurring and you don't necessarily understand

• 41:25Speaker 03

  it, or parts of it are inexplicable, then they have provided a template, they've provided a conspiratorial schema of understanding the world that proves remarkably durable.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  So fascinating, because you say it, whether it's the Davos class, or it's, is it also a product, do you think of the beginning as a sort of, is the world shrinking in the late 18th century with literacy, publication, speed of transport? And people are more open to the idea of these kind of transnational conspiracies. I mean, obviously, we see the Templars in the medieval period and other things, but is there something about the nature of the world, the technology and the communication that makes that such a resilient conspiracy theory?

• 42:06Speaker 03

  I think so. If we've now got to the stage at the turn of the 19th century, let's say, where you can move goods and people and armies all across the world with much greater facility than was ever the case. Why would the same not be true of ideas? And obviously, there's a rich scholarship looking at how the American and the French revolutions shared much of the same ideology. So if that's happening in the open, people might well ask, well, there could be a secret correspondence taking place as well.

• 42:38Speaker 00

  And so therefore, does the Illuminati just become a catchphrase for all of that conspiratorially-minded thinking?

• 42:45Speaker 03

  They become all things to all men.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  So they appear through the 19th century, what, like 1848?

• 42:51Speaker 03

  So remarkably, not too much around 1848. I think mostly because they failed, those revolutions, almost all of them. In some parts of the world, they've become a cultural trope. So they appear in Duma, they appear in Tolstoy. In the early 20th century, they appear in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. The Romantic poets in Britain think they're fantastic and want to know all they possibly can about them. And in some ways, they could have remained that kind of literary device, a curio for people. But the idea is resistant, the template is resistant. And in the early 20th century, something really unfortunate happens, which is that

• 43:34Speaker 03

  elements within the Russian state decide that they would like to concoct their own conspiracy theory, their own secret society to justify pogroms in the Ukraine. And that is where we get the forgery that's known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which alleges that there is a conspiracy of Jewish elders to control the world by economic means, that all of this has been happening in the background. We have this in about 1905, it's published, translated into English 1919, 1920. By this stage, an English historian by the name of Nestor Webster has convinced herself that she is in fact the reincarnation of an 18th century French aristocrat.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  And she knows what happened, really happened in the French Revolution, it seems. And she can see precisely the same events occurring in the Russian Revolution. So they're not storming Notre Dame and the Bastille, they're storming the Kremlin and some battles, they're still executing royal families, and they're still murdering tens of thousands of dissidents. And she picks up not only on Barrowell and Robison and the Illuminati conspiracy theory as a means of explaining both the French and the Russian revolutions, at the same time, she melds it with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to create this hideous antisemitic conspiracy theory of the 1920s, which will explain the coming crash in the world's economy,

• 45:04Speaker 03

  the demise of the British Empire, the crumbling of the old European empires. So gone are the Hoenselerns and the Habsburgs and the Romanovs, and who could possibly have been plotting for such a thing? Well, they've been doing it all along.

• 45:16Speaker 00

  So it's now nasty progressive intellectuals and Jews have found common cause?

• 45:22Speaker 03

  Yes. And it's no longer just a conspiracy theory of the French Revolution or of the Russian Revolution, it's of all history.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  And people believe it. People publish articles in support of the conspiracy theory in London newspapers. Winston Churchill writes a really notorious article suggesting that there is merit to some of these wild allegations.

• 45:43Speaker 00

  For money, some of those lean years.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, well, he was actually, he was in Lloyd George's cabinet at the time. The Spectator calls for a parliamentary inquiry into just what's going on, you know, they're just asking questions, but these are important questions. And so we have through the 1920s, even though a Times journalist, their Constantinople correspondent has proved pretty categorically that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a forgery and a fraud, people believe what they want to believe. They see a change in the world they don't understand and they don't like.

• 46:18Speaker 00

  Well, from the outside, the Russian state and its czar look sort of immovable and eternal, and they're not to know that actually it was just balls up after balls up, and a very cold winter followed by an early spring and a women's march going on. I mean, that's, that's less attractive when discussing the fall of a mighty Euro-Asian empire, isn't it?

• 46:37Speaker 03

  And the czar in Nicholas, who was just politically incompetent and militarily incompetent. So the idea that the people in charge of things simply didn't know what to do and screwed things up is never terribly satisfactory. But I think that is also something that runs through all of these conspiracy theories. And one of the great arguments against the existence of a legitimate conspiracy is human incompetence. I mean, look back at the Illuminati themselves. They fell out with each other, they achieved absolutely nothing. And in the same letters where they're asking really arch questions about the nature of civil society, they're also asking, well, do you want dinner for an extra florin? You know, these are not masterminds, there are no adults in a hidden room.

• 47:16Speaker 00

  Is there something, I'm showing my perspective and my context, but is there something, do you think, about the fact these baddies are also sort of, they're scholars, they're insufficiently rooted to their homeland?

• 47:29Speaker 03

  They are cosmopolitan.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  They're cosmopolitan.

• 47:32Speaker 03

  That is a word that the Illuminati used about themselves because they wished to take inspiration from people writing everywhere in Europe. And that is a word that was used to insult the Illuminati by the conservatives who believed in the conspiracy theory in the 1790s. So there is this idea of, we might call it globalism or statelessness. They are citizens of nowhere, and they are attacked because of that. They are perceived to be a threat to the nation-state and to national cultures because of that.

• 48:03Speaker 00

  And now, bring it to the present day. I've heard, why have I heard the Illuminati? It's in popular fiction and stuff? What's the current thinking about the Illuminati? You've probably been in some pretty interesting internet corners.

• 48:14Speaker 03

  There are some pretty dark places and really quite wild ideas about who the Illuminati are now. You mentioned them earlier, so the World Economic Forum in Davos, so they're the people who are dictating economic policy to the national governments of the world. We've talked about globalism versus nationalism. Well, in the 1950s, lots of American conservatives picked up on the Illuminati conspiracy theory because they wanted to understand how the United States had apparently sacrificed military supremacy and subordinated their national interest to global institutions such as the UN and the World Bank and the IMF. And there's been that strain of anti-globalism persistent from the 1950s through to the present day.

• 48:58Speaker 03

  There are more, slightly more ridiculous elements to it in the sense that whenever Beyonce makes a triangular sign with her hands during the Super Bowl, that's apparently a sign of the Illuminati.

• 49:10Speaker 00

  She's the Illuminati.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  We have the eye in the pyramid, which is the Great Seal, is on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States. I mean, the eye above the pyramid is meant to be the eye of Providence, which is a really old Christian symbol indicating God's supervision of the world. But in the 1950s, that is perceived to be a sign of the Illuminati, and that's the kind of imagery I think we see repeatedly in magazines or in book covers or YouTube videos and thumbnails. And so we have this weird tension between people who think that the Illuminati are sponsoring Jay-Z and Taylor Swift, and that simultaneously, they are George Soros and Hillary Clinton, and that they are all-powerful.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  Although I think if Hillary Clinton was all-powerful, she probably would have won some more votes in 2016.

• 49:58Speaker 00

  Yes, but often the Illuminati, these all-powerful, shadowy groups have utterly failed to deliver the outcomes they're supposed to be credited with, yeah.

• 50:07Speaker 03

  But that, I guess their occasional failure is part of the secret, is part of the excitement. Because if you can discover them, if you can expose them, as say, Donald Trump might have done.

• 50:19Speaker 00

  And Trump and Napoleon pushed back, didn't they?

• 50:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, then you're on the right side, you're part of a community that is fighting for the righteous cause against these hidden unseen forces, and that's a pretty good feeling, I imagine.

• 50:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, if this film on YouTube doesn't get millions and millions of views, it's because of the Illuminati.

• 50:36Speaker 03

  I expect so, yeah.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  Because there's nothing.

• 50:38Speaker 03

  No other explanation.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  Because there's nothing wrong with your content, buddy. Thank you very much for coming on the show. Tell everyone what the book's called, it's out right now.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  It's called Illuminati: The History of a Conspiracy Theory.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  Excellent, thanks for coming on.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  It's September 1939. Hitler has plunged Europe into war. Canada is scrambling to support Britain, while the US insists they will remain neutral until the conflict expands and they're forced to act. What happens next creates an extraordinary partnership between two great nations that now, nearly a century later, seems increasingly in peril. I'm David Boris. I'm a military historian and the host of Hostile History. Join me for our special episodes on World War II. Search for and follow Hostile History now wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.