In the eleventh dialogue of Les soirees de Saint-Petersbourg, Joseph de Maistre (for La Rouche’s ‘De Maistre's Evil Influence’ see further down), France's most prominent counterrevolutionary theorist, defended the authority of prophecy in political affairs, declaring, "Never in the world have there occurred great events which had not been predicted in some manner .... A recent example is the French Revolution, predicted from all sides in the most incontestable manner." Yet as we have seen, the invention of its own historiography is an integral part of Martinism and  its offshoots in the French occult tradition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Beginning with the quest of esoteric Freemasonry to claim a genealogy stretching back to the Knights Templar and the builders of the Temple of Solomon, passing through the construction of an ancient pedigree for the humble Tarot deck, and culminating in an all-encompassing theory of an unbroken chain of great initiates in the work of Edouard Schure, the invention of tradition was above all about establishing authority and legitimacy for the theories and proposals that individual occultists put forth. Through the invention of tradition, occult theorists appeared not as relatively marginal proponents of questionable historical and metaphysical theories but as the heirs of an ancient and honorable tradition, a secret wisdom that lay beneath the surface of all world religions and extended back to the dawn of time. The invention of tradition was not, however, the only way in which Martinists and  neoMartinists sought to establish their authority. In their writings and their public activity, they also sought to create boundaries for the occult community, to construct an occult public sphere that would define Martinism as elite, disinterested, rational, masculine, Christian, and authentically French, in opposition to rival esoteric movements and practitioners who could be stigmatized and excluded as vulgar, self-serving, irrational, feminine, pagan or satanic, and foreign. Plus Martinist thinkers therefore also recorded and commented political prophecies in their writings, consulted and conversed with prophets and visionaries, and some of them, notably Saint-Martin and Papus, themselves tried their hand at prophecy or apocalyptic writing. For the La Rouche "The cultish formation known as Martinists or Synarchists" see, or for "the leader of Martinist freemasonary, Count Joseph de Maistre" see also.

To speak of "the politics of the occult" however is to enter into a terrain that most Martinists would have regarded as suspect. Occultism, as we have seen, was primarily a moral and philosophical phenomenon and only secondarily a political one. Occultists themselves professed a sort of detached, Olympian disdain for the petty squabbles of politicians, when they deigned even to notice them. A statement of principles issued by the supreme council of the Martinist Order on March 9, 1897, concluded with the assertion that "the Martinist Order never concerns itself with politics, nor with questions of religious denominations. It enables study and does not seek to step beyond the most absolute tolerance."l We have seen that, although occult thinkers of the Martinist tradition expressed an elite disdain for parliamentary democracy and favored a corporatist reorganization of French society, they were far from being straightforward reactionaries, and they abhorred the violence that a fascist solution to France's dilemmas would have entailed. We should not, of course, accept at face value the proclamations of political neutrality and disengagement of the occultists of post-Enlightenment France. One of the principal goals of this study, in fact, has been to demonstrate that occult discourse was in fact deeply engaged with the political and social debates of the times in which it was composed. This chapter will argue that there was a distinctly Martinist program for the social and spiritual renewal of postrevolutionary France and, through it, the wider world. True to the Martinist cosmology and conception of human nature, the Martinist utopia was imagined as the realization of a providential plan for human society, the discovery and enactment of timeless, universal laws reflecting man's divine nature. This Martinist program, which became known as the synarchy, was elaborated by Joseph Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre in the 1880s, inspired by the rather vague political assertions of SaintMartin himself during the revolutionary decade and drawing on the metahistorical work of Antoine Fabre d'Olivet. Saint-Yves d' Alveydre's model of the synarchy would be accepted by the neo-Martinists of the fin de siecle and, as we shall see, would survive into the twentieth century. Occultism provided a definite conceptual vocabulary for discussing political and social ills and offered its own particular moral vision of the ideal society, but its abstract and antimaterialist character did not permit the development of a uniquely occultist form of political praxis. It was as if the destination of the French state-and, indeed, of all humanity-was determined in advance, but there was no commonly accepted road map by which the destination could be reached.

As we have seen, the Martinism of the Old Regime was, at its outset, a philosophical doctrine that aimed at personal salvation and spiritual renewal and gave little importance to the political affairs of this world. Politics became a central concern for French esoteric thinkers, as for Frenchmen generally, with the outbreak of the French Revolution. The esoteric view of history was primarily one of seeking signs of a providential design in human affairs and of the operation of timeless principles of social order and disorder. The Revolution provided new grist for the mill, as well as representing, for those who lived through it, an experience that was both personally and intellectually traumatic and with which they struggled to come to terms. In his Lettre a un ami sur la Revolution francaise, written in 1795, SaintMartin declared that the hand of Providence was visible in the events of the Revolution and that it had been divinely ordained to destroy the corruption and vices of the Old Regime so that France might better fulfill its providential mission. "I believe that its equitable hand had the purpose of destroying the abuses that had infected all parts of the former government of France, abuses of which the ambition of the clergy and their sacrilegious actions have held the first rank," he wrote. Nevertheless, Saint-Martin argued, "after haVing eliminated these great abuses, Providence will grant the French people, and after them many other peoples, days of enlightenment and peace of which our minds cannot yet conceive."2 Later in the same work, Saint-Martin returned to the same theme, writing that "the imposing march of our majestic revolution, and the dramatic events which mark it at each instant, does not allow anyone other than madmen or those of bad faith to fail to see written in fire the execution of a formal decree of Providence. . . . Its hand, like that of a skillful surgeon, has removed the foreign body, and we feel the inevitable consequences of a painful operation, and the evils connected to the treatment of the disease, but we must endure these pains with patience and courage, for there is not one of them which does not advance us toward good health."3 He concluded that the Revolution would "help us, and many other peoples to recover the true usage of our faculties, and to reveal to the nations the sublime goal which concerns all of human society, and encompasses man in all of his relations."4

Statements such as these led the counterrevolutionary polemicist abbe Barruel to denounce Saint-Martin and his followers as the notorious members of a vast revolutionary conspiracy. Barruel declared that "this sect made many dupes in France, in Germany, and even in England, and I have seen that everywhere its highest secret consisted of demonstrating that the French Revolution was the fire that was to purify the universe."s To at least some observers, therefore, Martinism appeared as a dangerously revolutionary and subversive doctrine that aimed at the leveling of social distinctions and the incitation to vice. Barruel was, however, hardly an objective or reliable witness, and SaintMartin's doctrines pointed in a quite different direction. Saint-Martin's thought and principal objectives were primarily religious and philosophical rather than political or social, and he argued that the question of the proper form of government, which had been such a central theme of Enlightenment discourse, was less important than the spiritual progress of mankind. The form of the state, whether democratic, aristocratic, or monarchic, was but an "envelope," to which "Providence ... gives little importance." Rather, Saint-Martin declared, "the form of government is but a secondary object, for whatever the forms of governments, Providence cannot make them prosper unless they are inspired by its wisdom and its invariable reason. In a word (do not be frightened by what you will read), unless they truly have the theocratic spirit-not human theocracy, not to say infernal theocracy, as has always been the case on earth, but divine, spiritual, and natural theocracy, that is to say, resting upon the laws of unchanging truth and the rights of that sacred fatalism that unites God and Man by an indissolvable alliance, whatever situation may arise. God is the only monarch, the sovereign of all beings," Saint-Martin concluded, "He wants to be the only one to rule over peoples, in all of their associations and governments. The men who find themselves at the head of nations or administrations, should be nothing but his representatives, or if one prefers, his commissaries."6 Saint-Martin thus defined the ideal government as theocratic in spirit but did not go into detail as to the external structure or forms that it should take. Any form of government, it appears, could be acceptable with the proper spirit, whereas no form of government could endure without it.

A generation after Saint-Martin, Fabre d'Olivet similarly presented an idealized theocracy as the proper governing system for the ideal, harmonious society of his dreams. Unlike Saint-Martin, however, he addressed the structure as well as the spirit of governing institutions. Fabre d'Olivet's theory of government was inseparable from his theory of history, which we have already examined, because both are predicated on the interaction of the three principles-Fate, human will, and Providence-which Fabre d'Olivet saw as the motor forces of historical development. Fabre d'Olivet's account of the prehistorical empire of the Aryan conqueror Ram functions as not only a speculative prehistory, but also a prescriptive political declaration, a blueprint for establishing a peaceful and harmonious social order in Fabre d'Olivet's own time. Fabre d'Olivet interrupts his narrative of Ram's conquest of India to make the following declaration of political principles: Modern political theorists, accustomed to reading histories written in miniature, see everything in small terms. They imagine that a law written on paper is a law, and that an empire has been established because a constitution has been written. They do not wonder whether Providence, Fate, or the will of men enters into these things.

Listen, legislators and conquerors, and understand this. Whatever your designs may be, unless one of the three great powers I have described support them, they will vanish in the air like smoke .... With Fate alone one can achieve more or less rapid and disastrous conquests, and one can stun the world like Attila, Genghis, or Tamerlane. With Will alone, one can establish more or less stormy and transitory republics, like Lycurgus or Brutus. It is only with the intervention of Providence that one can found regular states, Theocracies, or Monarchies whose splendor will cover the earth, and whose duration will triumph over time, like those of Thoth, Bharat, Ram, Fo-Hi, Zarathustra, Krishna, or Moses.7 Fabre d'Olivet praised Ram for following the guidance of Providence in establishing his empire, by abandoning the scepter for the pontifical staff, and establishing an order in which religion sanctioned and gUided the exercise of power. Although the greater part of his study concerned the distant, indeed prehistoric past, Fabre d'Olivet argued that the principles of Ram's empire could be introduced in the nineteenth century, declaring, "The moment is extremely favorable to constitute in Europe a unitary government." If this were done, Fabre d'Olivet assured his readers, all the peoples of the world "would speak the same language, would treat one another as brothers, and would enjoy a happiness as great as their moral nature would allow, during a long succession of centuries, until the final moment determined by the eternal Wisdom."s The universal language, it need hardly be added, was of course French, as Fabre d'Olivet had written in his treatise on poetry, Les vers dores de Pythagore, that "what India was for Asia, France should be for Europe. The French language, like Sanskrit, tends toward universality .... Destined to float above the debris of a hundred dialects, it should save from the shipwreck of time all their beauties and notable works."9 Fabre d'Olivet hoped that modern France, like the ancient India of his imagination, should be the heart and spirit of a new universal empire.

Fabre d'Olivet's ideals, as presented in his Histoire philosophique du genre humain, are generous and expansive. What, more specifically, did he have in mind for the society of his own time? The closest Fabre d'Olivet ever comes to proposing a concrete governing structure for nineteenth-century France is in the penultimate chapter of Histoire philosophique, in which he offers the follOWing proposals: Eliminate the schism of religion; erase all differences between sects; have a sovereign European Pontiff, who will be recognized and respected by all peoples .... Rather than accepting only two principles, and consequently being eternally in the arena of combat, recognize three, represented as: Providence, by the sovereign Pontiff and the priesthood; Fate, by the monarch, the peers of the realm, the ministry and the nobility; Will, by the electoral colleges and the deputies of the departments; and you will see the much sought unity born of itself, for three powers or three principles united always produce, in their combination, a fourth power or a fourth principle, from which results the only unity possible on earth.10 The governing structure Fabre d'Olivet proposes sounds remarkably similar to the Napoleonic state and the post-Napoleonic constitutional mOnarchy that succeeded it. The difference, as with Saint-Martin, is not primarily one of structure, therefore, but rather of principle, of the different parts of the governing structure recognizing their respective roles, and contributing to the building of a harmonious whole, rather than struggling for total control of the state.

The one element in Fabre d'Olivet's proposal that is strikingly different from the early nineteenth-century status quo is the recognition of the authority of a universal pontiff, for the Napoleonic Concordat had clearly subordinated the church to the expanding state, and the Restoration, to the dismay of some of its supporters, drew inspiration more from the Gallican liberties of the Old Regime than the Vatican's claims to transnational authority. It would be easy to hear in these declarations echoes of the Legitimism and ultramontanism of a Joseph de Maistre. Fabre d'Olivet certainly shares with his more famous contemporary a hatred of the Revolution and all that it signified, his depiction of the revolutionary terror, both allegorically in Lettres a Sophie sur l'histoire, and directly in his Souvenirs. In the Histoire philosophique, Fabre d'Olivet declares that, although all forms of despotism are condemnable, "it is nonetheless true that violence and the danger of despotism augment as one descends from the first classes of society to the lowest as it is spread among a greater number of arms."11 As we have observedJ howeverJ neither absolute monarchy nor the feudal order that had preceded it appeared to him as the ideal form of government. Despite the differences that separated Fabre d'Olivet from his liberal contemporaries, such as Benjamin Constant and Augustin Thierry, he shared their opinion that the repression of the Restoration era would likely backfire and that political reaction was therefore as dangerous to the social order as revolution.12 In Histoire philosophique, Fabre d'Olivet lamented the polarization of European opinion following the Congress of Vienna, declaring that "this state is unfortunate, and if it lasts long, it threatens the social order of Europe with complete collapse."13

Fabre d'Olivet also differed sharply from ultramontanes such as de Maistre in his rejection of the Catholic orthodoxy, and to a lesser degreeJ of the Judeo-Christian tradition as a whole. Over the course of his life, Fabre dJOlivet moved away from the Calvinism of his heritage and toward a sort of religious syncretism that led some of his latter-day admirers, such as Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, to refer to him, somewhat misleadingly, as a neopagan.14 In Les vers dores de Pythagore, Fabre d'Olivet favorably contrasts the tolerance of ancient polytheism with "the Christian religion, exclusive and severe," arguing that ancient peoples adored the divine in many different manifestations and that "the gods of the peoples were in their eyes the same Gods, and their cosmopolitan dogmas condemned no one to eternal damnation."15 His 1810 work La langue hebrai'que restituee, ostensibly a treatise on the Hebrew language, was in fact an esoteric rewriting of the Genesis creation story, which he declared had been misrepresented by the mainstream churches because of a faulty knowledge of Hebrew, and asserted in passing that Moses was an initiate of the Egyptian mysteries and Hebrew the language of ancient Egypt. At the end of the Histoire philosophique, Fabre d'Olivet advocates the unification of Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Jews into a single faith, declaring that "obstacles which were once insurmountable are no longer so," though he made no attempt to address the obvious doctrinal differences that would make such a fusion improbable.l6 Fabre d'Olivet's final work, unpublished during his lifetime, was Theodoxie universelle, which sought to reconcile Judeo-Christian and Asian religious traditions to reveal an original, natural religion of man. Leon Cellier writes that "unity is for Fabre d'Olivet the guarantee of the truth which he has perceived. Tradition is one, and this luminous accord of cosmogonies is the proof of a primitive revelation granted to man by Providence."17 Fabre d'Olivet was certainly a theocrat, but he was just as certainly not an ultramontane.

A hint of what Fabre d'Olivet may have had in mind comes from examining the changing course of his work during the twenty years that separated the Lettres a Sophie from the Histoire philosophique. Cellier has argued that, despite the apparent consistency of goals and ideals that Fabre d'Olivet presents in his memoirs, the esoteric thinker was in fact something of a political weathervane, who changed his positions according to the dominant political wind of the times. IS The generally hostile references to Napoleon Bonaparte in the Histoire philosophique are in sharp contrast to declarations Fabre d'Olivet had made a decade earlier in the preface to his Vers dores de Pythagore, which can only be described as sycophantic in their adulation of the emperor: A bit earlier in the same work, Fabre d'Olivet places Bonaparte in a lofty pantheon of heroes who had transformed the world, writing, The men destined by Providence to regenerate the world, in whatever way and by whatever means, are extremely rare. Nature, following the dictates she has received to bring everything to perfection in due time, slowly elaborates the elements of their genius .... They are like the beacons of humanity; it is to them that I attribute primary inspiration. Their inspiration is immediate; it emanates from the first principle of all intelligence ... like the force of the magnet emanates from its cause. This cause is profoundly hidden from our eyes, but it is what enflames the genius of a theosopher, like Thoth, Orpheus, or Zoroaster; of a theocrat like Krishna, Moses; or Mohammed; of a philosopher like Confucius, Pythagoras, or Socrates; of a poet, like Homer or Valmik, of a triumphant hero, like Cyrus, Alexander, or Napoleon.20 Cellier, discussing the theocratic order that Fabre d'Olivet proposes in the conclusion of the Histoire philosophique, describes it as "a holy alliance in which the people, and not only the kings, would have a voice." Cellier further speculates that "these utopian projects, I am convinced, do not date from the Restoration; they were already formed at the time of the empire, and probably Fabre d'Olivet hoped that Napoleon would realize them, and undoubtedly communicated them to him."21 During the empire, Fabre d'Olivet struggled in vain to win the emperor's favor, seeking to win imperial sponsorship of his 1810 work, La langue hebrai'que restituee, but such support was not forthcoming. Following Napoleon's defeat and the Restoration, Cellier writes, "this frustrated love turns to hatred."22

It seems, therefore, probable that Fabre d'Olivet had hoped that Bonaparte would be the great emperor to unite all of Europe, and possibly the world, into a great empire, which could then adopt the theocratic structure that Fabre d'Olivet presented as the dictate of Providence. It is also tempting to conclude, though direct evidence on this point is lacking, that Fabre d'Olivet fancied himself as the potential Pontiff of a new universal religion, which would reconcile not only Catholics and Protestants, but adherents of all of the faiths of the world. These grandiose schemes, however, would come to nothing when Napoleon failed to respond to any of Fabre d'Olivet's approaches, and the Restoration monarchs were similarly disinclined to adopt his proposals, if, in fact, they were even aware of them. The idea of a universal theocratic order would later be taken up by Saint-Yves d'Alveydre and by the neoMartinists of the fin de siecle. In the intervening years, however, political discourse, in both its esoteric and more mainstream forms, would evolve in quite different directions. Im fact the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte towers over much of the French nineteenth century, and it is therefore no surprise that Bonapartism would also have a significant and much disputed role in an esoteric movement seeking political and social renewal. Some of Bonaparte's contemporaries, such as Fabre d'Olivet, saw him, at least briefly, as a proVidential figure, whose coming was to usher in a new age, whereas others, such as Madame de Kriidener, a prophetess whose visions influenced the thought and actions of Tsar Alexander I, saw Napoleon as the Antichrist, who must be defeated at all costs to allow the restoration of a divinely inspired social order. The Napoleonic myth, powerful in life, would grow even more compelling follOWing the emperor's death in exile, particularly as memories of Napoleonic glory outshone the accomplishments of the feeble Restoration monarchs.

Frank Paul Bowman has observed that the legend of Napoleon as a messianic liberator owes much to the work of Polish exiles in the France of the July Monarchy, who idolized the emperor who had, if only briefly, restored the Polish state that had disappeared through partition at the close of the eighteenth century. The best known of these exiles, Adam Mickiewicz, professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the College de France, gave a series of lectures in 1842 and 1843 that presented Napoleon as one of a series of divine messengers sent to further the mission of Providence.23 Mickiewicz's countryman, Hoene Wronski, would develop this idea even further in his writings, which offered both a metahistorical narrative of a Martinist variety, centered on the fall and redemption of man, and a political program, which presented the Bonapartist synthesis as the solution to Europe's historical and spiritual crises. Wronski presented the history of humanity as a struggle between two opposing principles, which he called divine right and human right, that had to be harmonized for human society to achieve stability and happiness. This formulation is strongly evocative of Wronski's much betterknown contemporary, Auguste Comte, who presented history as a dialectic between the forces of order and progress, and whose philosophy of Positivism, as many historians have observed, would playa fundamental role in the emergence of the moderate republican synthesis of the Third Republic. Wronski asserted that the partisans of divine right sought absolute good through faith, whereas the partisans of human right sought absolute truth through reason and declared that "it is this double conquest, that of absolute truth and absolute good, that is the final goal of the creation and existence of humanity." Wronski declared that, follOWing their principles to their ends, reason and faith would converge but that, when they degenerated into extremists of Right and Left, they became "enemies of the social order, as they undermine the foundations of the state."24 Wronski rejected the policy of compromise of the juste-milieu liberals of the July Monarchy, arguing that they were merely diluting two opposing principles without reconciling them or creating a durable synthesis,create a Europe of free and independent nation-states, believing that "the freedom of peoples was the base and should be the goal of political existence."29 Under Napoleon's enlightened rule, he wrote, "the French empire already formed a true antinomian government, such as will be those which ... shall be formed during the new age of humanity," characterized by the reconciliation of "divine or moral sovereignty, and human or national sovereignty."3o Wronski lamented that "in the present state of universal demoralization, or rather the present universal ignorance of political authority, the sublime governmental reform that Napoleon instituted is not and cannot be understood in France."31 Nevertheless, Wronski asserted that "today it is the unique and immense glory of France ... that this Napoleonic system is no less than a providential anticipation of the new age of peoples, in which no human, or even infernal, force can prevent humanity from entering in victory," and he acclaimed Napoleon as "the new savior and final reformer of humanity," declaring that "the name of Napoleon should be placed alongside the immortal names written on the providential banners of the ages" and that his remains should be buried in the Vatican, "which alone can offer a resting place worthy of this powerful restorer of moral laws and divine authority on earth."32

Wronski's occult Bonapartism did not go unchallenged; Alexandre Erdan condemned his "messianic" doctrines in La France mystique, writing, Wronski is not only a very mediocre, but also an extremely retrograde thinker. Under the pretext of constructing I know not what society of absolute perfection, he attacks the very foundations of contemporary civilization and liberty. Nothing equals his resentment of the philosophy of the eighteenth century, unless it is his hatred of the great revolution of 1789. Under the double rapport of an intellectual and a sociopolitical movement, he is completely within the tradition of the majority of his mystic counterparts; whether by temperament or design, he is, on behalf of a chimeric future, a determined adversary of all those who have combated and destroyed the abuses of the past.33 Not surprisingly for a Bonapartist, Wronski placed great hopes in the emperor's nephew, the future Napoleon III, though he was alarmed enough by the young prince's profession of quasi-socialist principles to issue a warning to him, tellingly titled Le faux napoleonisme. The Revolution of 1848 seemed to Wronski to threaten the return to primitive anarchy that he had warned against in his Metapolitique messianique, and he announced in an 1849 pamphlet that "the civilized world is currently near a great abyss" and called upon "superior men ... to prevent this imminent moral collapse of humanity," declaring that "the only momentary hope of salvation that remains is that armed force, which combats for the principle of divine right, shall triumph."34 Two years later, the increasingly alarmed Wronski declared, in another pamphlet, that "governments currently have the right, in all cases, to take whatever action they deem convenient or necessary for the full conservation of their authority," while "the peoples have the obligation, in all cases, not only to obey all governmental measures, but to consider these measures as useful."35 In his final published work, Le secret politique de Napoleon, Wronski retrospectively defended the presidential coup d'etat by which Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte crushed the Second Republic and established the Second Empire, declaring "for the salvation of France, the indispensable moral necessity of the coup d'etat of December 2, and this as a supreme duty, which by its high and urgent spontaneity, placed those persons invested with power above any constitutional legality, now problematic, and released them from any prior oaths."36 This final work, fittingly, was dedicated jointly to Emperor Napoleon III and Tsar Nicholas I, "as respective representatives of the exclusive sovereignty of human right and divine right," although, rather incongruously, the same work condemned Russia's oppression of Poland and called for reform within the former to create a pan-Slavic empire that would allow Poland to play a mediating role between East and West.37 Wronski died in 1854, living just long enough to see the two sovereigns to whom he dedicated his final work thwart his providential designs for humanity by fighting one another in the Crime an War. A generation later, however, the Russia of the tsars would again, if only briefly, appear to several prominent neo-Martinists as the agent of Providence and the hope for the regeneration of Europe. We now turn to examine the attraction that the last Romanovs held for Gerard Encausse (Papus) and Saint-Yves d'Alveydre in the final decade of the nineteenth century.

The Franco-Russian Entente, finalized with the visit of Alexander III to Paris in 1891, was of vital symbolic and strategic importance, because it ended twenty years of diplomatic isolation, offered the possibility of revenge against Germany and the recovery of lost territories, and linked France to a model of autocracy that French monarchists envied. As we saw in chapter 5, in the final years of the nineteenth century Papus wrote a political prophecy according to which Tsar Nicholas II would rescue France from the chaos of a new and bloody cycle of revolution and would restore a divinely ordained social order. Papus would become increasingly fascinated with Russia toward the final years of his life, traveling on two occasions to St. Petersburg in the company of a folk healer, Philippe Vachod, in the first decade of the twentieth century.38 The degree of Papus's involvement with the imperial couple is, however, unclear. His biographers, Marie-Sophie Andre and Christophe Beaufils, note that Papus was only given one audience with Nicholas and Alexandra during his first visit to St. Petersburg, though he gave a series of public lectures and mingled with Russian high society. In a letter to Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, Papus wrote, "His Majesty the Tsar is greatly interested in Christian esotericism and I believe that the Archeometer [a table of astrological, numerical, and symbolic correspondences that Saint-Yves d'Alveydre had created as a key to prophecy and esoteric philosophy] could enlighten him."39 Already in 1889, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre had authored a panegyric to Alexander III, presenting him as the Great Emperor announced by the prophetic tradition.Translated from the French it reads;Because Satan unleashes The Hydra, War, thundering Hell! Because in his claws madness Overcomes half of the continent, Wisdom must have the other, The East must have a Tsar-Apostle, A priest with an iron glove A St. George, Emperor of the World, Who marching against the unworldly Beast, Finally shows him the enforcer of justice.40

Soon after Nicholas II inherited the imperial crown from Alexander III, Papus wrote him an open letter, advising him to reject absolutism and recommending that he read the works of Fabre d'Olivet and Saint-Yves d'Alveydre. Papus praised Russia as "the most truly religious" of European states and "the closest to the paths of Providence," but he also warned Nicholas that "the empire which takes as its gUide the maxim that 'force trumps law' by this fact repulses all Providential influence, gives itself over to Fate, and demands of terror, trickery, and diplomatic chicanery a respect which only God could grant, and soon collapses, devoured by its own flaws."41

Papus's enthusiasm for the Russian monarch was somewhat tempered by his experiences on his first voyage to St. Petersburg, if the following declaration, published posthumously by his admirers in 1943, is to be believed. Papus had allegedly remarked that he "had not imagined, prior to witnessing it firsthand, how the court of an absolute monarch, bearing in its hands the fate of one hundred fifty million people, could turn to the 'spirit' of a folk-healer to consider the greatest questions of politics and administration . . . . These people are mad. They are at the mercy of the first scoundrel who will know how to flatter their mania; they are sliding toward the abyss."42

The Martinist presence in St. Petersburg, which in fact appears to have been relatively modest, was greatly exaggerated by contemporaries both on the revolutionary Left and the integralist far Right in Russia. In 1906, a newspaper article hostile to the tsar denounced Papus as the "private spiritual guide" of the tsar, who was said to "consult the spirits of his ancestors prior to taking a political decision." During the Revolution of 1905, by another account reported by French ambassador Maurice Paleologue, Papus evoked the spirit of Alexander Ill, who supposedly warned his successor, "Whatever the cost, you must crush the Revolution which is beginning, but it will be reborn one day, and it will be as much more violent as today's repression should have been more rigorous."43 Papus dismissed the charges, declaring, "I have not gone to Russia in years."44 In 1922, after Papus's death, when the success of the Russian Revolution revived this legend, Papus's admirer Marc Haven (Emmanuel Lalande) dismissed the charges in the October 1922 issue of La Voile d'Isis, claiming that "Papus never pronounced such words" and ridiculing the claim that Papus had used occult powers to protect the Russian imperial family from harm, asserting that "no known man has ever held such power, neither Buddha, nor Moses, nor Bacchus, nor even Christ."45

The reactionary mystics and political organizers Sergei Nilus and G. V. Boutmi, who played key roles in launching and publiciZing the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the first years of the twentieth century, de"1.ounced Martinism as an alien doctrine, tinged with Satanism and associated with a Jewish world conspiracy.46 Boutmi called the Martinist claims to Christian esotericism to be "the sum of hypocrisy for an order founded by a Jew and professing the Jewish doctrine of the Kabbala." Calling Papus and Philippe "sorcerers" and "dangerous agitators," Boutmi called Martinism "the most Jewish of Masonic organizations," which led the tsarist regime "to take stupid actions directly contrary to the interests of the state and the people."47 In a new edition of the Protocols, Nilus included the Martinist insignia, along with Levi's rendering of the tetragramaton and the Chariot card of the Tarot deck, as symbols of the Antichrist. These increasingly absurd charges led Papus to declare in a letter dated November 24, 1910, that "there is no Jew on our Supreme Council" and that he himself was a Catholic,. but also added that "in France there are Jews of very high moral and intellectual worth whose friendship would do honor to whomever would receive it."48

Papus's admiration for Russia led him to sympathize strongly with the Romanov Empire in the Russo-Japanese War. Predicting a Russian victory, Papus denounced the tsar's antagonists with some of the harshest and most racially charged language that is to be found in his voluminous writings. The Russo-Japanese War, Papus declared, was "the prelude to the final struggle between the two races," in which "the human debris of ancient Lemuria" would be "crushed by the white armies bound together by the common enemy."49 Alarmed at the Japanese victory, Papus adopted an increasingly racist stance, advocating pronatalist policies in 1909, warning that without more babies, "our race ... will be devoured automatically by the more prolific races."50 Despite these concerns over the rise of Japan in East Asia, Papus was more favorably disposed toward the declining Ottoman Empire, which undoubtedly appeared as less of a threat to the West and its ideals. Papus corresponded with the Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who responded to his favorable depictions of Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Lumieres d'Orient by granting him the honor of the "Ordre Imperial du Medjidie," which Papus proudly included among his growing list of titles and distinctions. 51

How are we to reconcile the growing admiration that both Papus and Saint-Yves d'Alveydre expressed for ruthless Eastern autocrats with their profession of ideals of peace and coexistence? Neither Papus nor any of the other principal fin de siecle Martinists visited the Ottoman Empire, and they may have been unaware of the brutal character of the reign of Abdul Hamid II, whose intensified persecution of the empire's Christian minorities would later culminate in the Armenian genocide of the First World War and the subsequent violent expulsion of the Greeks of Anatolia.52 The empire of the Romanovs, on the other hand, was far more familiar to fin de -sjecle Frenchmen, and Papus traveled several times to Russia and socialized with Russian exiles in the cafes of Montmartre, while Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's marriage to the Polish countess Marie de Ritznitch brought him into contact with the same milieu. Both men were clearly aware of the persecution of minorities, particularly Jews, in the tsar's empire, as well as that empire's ruthless repression of political dissidents. Nevertheless, the Martinist appeal to Eastern autocrats had a certain logic to it. Martinists scorned parliamentary democracy and electoral politics and held out no hopes for the transformation of the French Third Republic. They were even more vehement, however, in their rejection of violence and militarism, and so were fundamentally opposed to the violent seizure of power through a coup d'etat or revolutionary conspiracy, for both of which they were, furthermore, temperamentally unsuited. Their relationship to the French monarchical tradition was ambiguous at best, and in any case, the Legitimist branch of the Bourbon dynasty died out with the Count of Chambord in 1883, and neither the Orleanist.nor the Bonapartist pretenders generated much enthusiasm, although Henriette Couedon's prophecies regarding the coming of a Great Monarch did raise the hopes of the royalist faithful, at least for a brief while. The only alternative that appeared to offer any hope of success, however farfetched, was that a powerful absolute monarch would become converted to the Martinist program and would then use his authority to enact it within his realm and, ultimately, throughout Europe and the wider world. The extreme improbability that either the Russian tsar or the Ottoman sultan would have embraced a political model that would, effectively, have put an end to their personal authority made this solution entirely unworkable.

Although these overtures to the East form a significant part of the history of Martinist political and social thought in the fin de siecle, their importance should not be overstated. Even as they flattered the tsars and, like many of their compatriots, recognized the utility of the Franco-Russian Entente for their own nation, neither Papus nor Saint-Yves d'Alveydre ever suggested that tsarist Russia should serve as a model for the renewal of France. Though they differed on many other matters, the neo-Martinists of the fin de siecle concurred in endorsing the synarchy, a model whose principles and structure were elaborated and celebrated in the voluminous works of Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, as the ideal solution to the social and political instability of their times. Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, for his part, was influenced by Fabre d'Olivet, whom we have already examined, and by Alphonse-Louis Constant, alias Eliphas Levi, to whom we now turn.

Born in 1810, the son of a shoemaker, and dedicated from an early age to a religious vocation for which he was dramatically unsuited, AlphonseLouis Constant published a series of radical texts in the 1840s that combined social radicalism with a militant, apocalyptic Christianity and was twice imprisoned for subversive writings under the July Monarchy. Constant also befriended the feminist writer and speaker Flora Tristan, whose memoirs he edited and published, and was for a time married to a remarkable young feminist writer and sculptress, Noemi Cadiot, who wrote under the penname Claude Vignon.53 During the Revolution of 1848, the abbe Constant edited an ephemeral newspaper, Le Tribun du Peuple, and ran unsuccessfully for election to the Constituent Assembly in the spring of 1848. In the 1850s, both Constants became regular contributors to the Revue progressive, a journal edited by the Marquis de Montferrier, brother-inlaw to Hoene Wronski, who, if only briefly, became an intellectual mentor of sorts to the abbe Constant. The relationship between the avowedly counterrevolutionary old Bonapartist and the young Christian socialist was certainly a surprising one, but Constant was then undergoing a personal crisis, brought on by his disillusionment with the failure of the Second Republic as well as the failure of his marriage (Alphonse-Louis and Noemi Constant were separated in 1853, and their marriage was subsequently annuled). The revolutionary violence of 1848 and the breakdown of republican institutions in the following years destroyed Constant's faith in both socialism and democracy, though he continued to seek a solution that would provide order, harmony, and justice to his troubled nation. This quest would take him in a mystical direction, and he would adopt the persona of the magus Eliphas Levi (a Hebraization of his given names, Alphonse-Louis) and turn to subjects such as the Tarot, ritual magic, and alchemy. Ultimately, Levi would provide his own unique and novel solution to France's political and social dilemmas. For a time, however, he would be, following Wronski, an admirer of Napoleon and an advocate of the unique synthesis of autocracy, egalitarianism, and national glory that the emperor had embodied.

Wronski's adoration of the emperor, for example, is reflected in some of Levi's later work. "Napoleon is no longer a man," wrote Levi in La clef des grands mysteres in 1861, "he is the second savior of the world .... To think that the sword of a Tartar would destroy one day the pact of our glories, the testament of our liberties! Say rather that we should become children again and that we will return to our mothers' breasts." This admiration of Napoleon clashes sharply with Constant's pre-1848 assessment; in Testament de la Liberte, he called the emperor" a crowned soldier," who tied Liberty to his saddle "and dragged her in captivity." The Franco-Prussian War likely dampened his momentary enthusiasm for Bonapartism; in one of his last works, Levi listed the first emperor as one of a series of failed sovereigns in recent French history, who "chose to rule by war and was taken away by war."54 The demagogy and militarism of Bonapartism would ultimately make it anathema to Levi, and, unlike Wronski, he never looked favorably on Napoleon III; in fact, his third and final prison term came as the result of a satirical poem called "Caligula," which mocked the new emperor. Ultimately, Levi, or the mature Constant, would reject not only Bonaparte, but Wronski as well, declaring that the latter sought "to profit from a science which he was perhaps unworthy to comprehend or to possess."55

Levi's Bonapartism was never more than half-hearted, for while he praised Napoleon in La clef des grands mysteres for extending the gains of the Revolution and defending France against its enemies, he also included him in a long line of despots and conquerors who had vainly pursued the chimera of universal empire, writing in the same work that "Nimrod and Babel are the two primitive allegories of the unitary despot and the universal empire always imagined, attempted successively by the Assyrians, Medes, and Persians, by Alexander, Rome, Napoleon, and the successors of Peter the Great, and always unachieved as a result of the diversity of interests, expressed by the confusion of languages." Levi argued that such projects were destined to fail, for "the universal empire is not to be achieved by force, but by intelligence and love."56 Levi went on to state that the true Antichrist was neither the pope nor Luther, but "the spirit opposed to that of Christ ... the pride of domination and despotism over thought."57 Levi's rejection of despotism was, however, accompanied by a parallel rejection of mass democracy. "To substitute arbitrary human will for the legitimate despotisim of the law, to put tyranny in place of authority," he wrote, "is the work of all protestantisms and all democracies. What men call liberty is the sanction of illegitimate authority, or rather the fiction of power not sanctioned by authority." Levi argued that revolutions came full circle, and created the mirror image of the system they sought to overthrow. "Jean Calvin protested against the pyres of Rome to give himself the right to burn Michel Servet," Levi continued. "Any people that frees itself from a Charles I or a Louis XVI falls under a Cromwell or a Robespierre, and there is a more or less absurd anti-pope behind all the protests against the legitimate papacy."58 Further, Levi wrote, the error of those who call themselves republicans is protesting against the constraints of duty and the restrictions of law that oppose the free expression of their caprices and their pride. What they do not understand is that one cannot reform abuses through violence, one can build nothing durable outside of the legal order and recognized justice. Why have all revolutions to this day failed? It is that they were made through the right of force and not the force of right, it is that protest becomes illegitimate when it becomes insurrection against legally established power. Insurrection, far from being the most sacred of duties, is at once the parricide and the suicide of nations!59

Fundamental to the political thought of Levi during his final years was a deepening pessimism regarding the possibility of mass democracy. "The multitudes, slaves of fate, can only enjoy liberty through absolute obedience to the will of free men .... But when the beast governs the beast, when the blind leads the blind, when men of fate govern fatalistic masses, what is to be expected? Terrible catastrophes, and they will never fail to appear."60 Chastened by the failures of 1848, Levi had come far from the idealism of his youth. "He who pretends that man is perfect at birth, and that society perverts and degrades him, would be the most savage of anarchists, were he not the most poetic of madmen," Levi wrote in Histoire de la magie, in an obvious allusion to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom he also implicated in posthumously inspiring the Reign of Terror by declaring that "the conscientious realizers of the utopias of the gentle Genevan philosopher were Robespierre and Marat."61

True democracy, Levi now maintained, was impossible and undesirable, in view of the inequality of human abilities. "To give absolute freedom to men who are naturally unequal/' he wrote, "is to organize social warfare, and once those who should constrain the ferocious instincts of the multitudes have the madness to release them, one does not have to be a profound magician to realize that they will be the first to be devoured."62 The passage was written in reference to an eighteenth-century amateur of the occult, Jacques Cazotte, who was supposed to have predicted the Revolution of 1789, but its tone of disillusionment with the masses is reflective of Levi's own experience of the Revolution of 1848. Writing in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, at a time when monarchists held a majority in the National Assembly and the possibility of a restoration of the Bourbons appeared likely, Levi wrote, "A plebiscite which reestablishes heredity is an abdication of the people, and this abdication, France has already repeated it three times, it will repeat it a fourth if necessary, but what will remain, other than a return to the errors of the old monarchy?" Although he no longer believed that government could be by the people, Levi still maintained that it should exist for the people, and he further believed that neither king nor emperor could offer the stable and responsible government that the nation required. "The people," he wrote, "must demand a strong and durable constitution; there lies the difficulty, for the people can do nothing by itself but riot, and its representatives can always compromise or exploit it. Is it even capable of choosing its representatives wisely? Can it appreciate the science of the economists? Does it know enough of politics and administration to distinguish capable men from fast-talkers always ready to put themselves ahead? The people is the plaything of the parties, and it always leans toward the most empassioned, and therefore the least reasonable men. "63

Skeptical of the benefits of universal suffrage, which had already saddled the France of 1848 with Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, Levi suggested bitterly that "the results of elections would be less disastrous if the names were drawn at random." But rather than rely on blind chance, Levi offered instead a vision of a limited, enlightened democracy. "The right to vote should be subject to examination," he wrote, "one would become an elector as one becomes a bachelor of arts after a serious test, but the diploma would be delivered free of charge. The examination would not be based on Greek or Latin, or even on mathematics, but one would have to demonstrate judgment, common sense, and at least primary education, and then offer guarantees of morality and honesty." Knowledge alone, and not mere birthright or advancing age, would make the man and citizen. "One should not imagine," Levi continued, "that one is a man when one has a beard on his chin, and has behaved foolishly for thirty, forty, or fifty years; one is a man when he has reason, adequate education, a just spirit, and when one has the right to resist all oppression in exchange for the self imposed duty never to oppress others."64

Levi's ideal governing order, then, was neither despotism nor mass democracy, but rather what he described as "the reign of wisdom," which, as he explained, could only be the government of a select few. "Since sages are always in small number amid mankind, the reign of wisdom could not therefore be the reign of the multitude." The motto of such a society, he suggested, might be "everything for the people by the elite of the people." Levi elaborated this position in Des partes de ['avenir, a post-18l0 manuscript, not published during his lifetime. "Providence only reveals itself to sages," he wrote, "the vulgar masses are blind flocks pushed by fate. Let sages finally come to power, let the adepts be the guides of the inept, let the true aristocracy, that of knowledge and talent, begin its reign, and the world shall be saved."65 Levi was thus the first writer of the French occult tradition to articulate the ideal of government by an elite brotherhood of initiates, an idea that, as we shall see, would later be almost universally embraced by the neo-Martinists of the fin de siecle.
What would the reign of the sages look like? Des partes de ['avenir goes on to list a rather disjointed series of proposals for the utopia of the future:

That primary education for all be free and obligatory.

That public scandals no longer be tolerated, neither among the humble nor among the great.

That women without estate who live in idleness and luxury be taught to work in houses of correction.

That honest women be especially protected by the law, that they be admitted to all professions that they can exercise as well as men, so that they will never be driven to prostitution by poverty.

That the death penalty which does not intimidate murderers be replaced by a longer and more terrible penalty, such as imprisonment in a hole without light, where they will never hear a human voice and where they will live on bread and water.

That there be a great federation of all peoples, and that the differences between nations be resolved not by war, but by arbitration. That a man who falls into misery and is reduced to begging be called for judgment. If he is miserable due to his own fault, he should be punished and imprisoned, but if he is so through the fault of others, society owes him compensation.66

Some of the proposals echo innovations of the French Revolution, such as the popular election of bishops, as had been the practice under the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790, and the introduction (proposed but not actually achieved in the 1790s) of free, universal primary education. Other proposals looked still farther ahead, such as his call for the admission of women to all professions. Other proposals, however, seem to suggest a somewhat authoritarian welfare state, such as his call for the surveillance of work by the state and the punishments he proposes for prostitutes, beggars, and other criminals. This tension between idealistic objectives and the acceptance of coercive means results from the fact that Levi's utopia, like that of Rousseau, depends heavily on the moralization of individuals and the cultivation of a particular kind of virtue. Significantly, Levi's proposed utopia envisions not only the reform of French institutions but also the creation of a transformed international order, in which nations would coexist in peace and harmony, with all disputes between them being resolved by arbitration. It is surely significant that this proposal was made by a Frenchman in the immediate aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, but its implications go well beyond the FrancoGerman antagonism or the disputed territories of Alsace and Lorraine. By propOSing a universal system of arbitration of national disputes, Levi advocated a system to preserve peace without running the risk of despotism that the universal empire advocated by Fabre d'Olivet might imply. The sages and experts of different nations would work to resolve disputes amicably without the need for one nation to subjugate another. Levi had many students and admirers during his lifetime but produced no direct disciples or intellectual heirs. Nonetheless, his vision of a Saint-Yves d'Alveydre advocated "synarchy" as the solution to the crises of fin de siecle Europe in a series of lengthy works, which he called his Missions, published in the 1880s. In the first of these, the Mission des souvera ins, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre blamed "pagan" or "Caesarist" political and social organization for the militarism and social conflicts that seemed to endanger the future of the Continent. Saint-Yves d'Alveydre did not seek a revolutionary transformation of society, however, for as he stated in the preface to his longest and most ambitious work, Mission des Tuifs, he hoped to show that "sovereign and priestly functions ... can and should complete, swifter and surer than the Revolution, the progress that will lead Christian civilization toward its harmonic Unity, toward its definitive Constitution." In fact, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's political thought was, in the literal sense, counterrevolutionary, because he hoped that the recovery of the timeless principles of synarchy would bring an end to the revolutionary disorders that had plagued France, not merely since 1789 but, in his eyes, for a much longer period. Saint-Yves d'Alveydre later claimed that "the first time I expressed my ideas was in 1871, at Versailles, before several comrades in arms, while Paris burned in the distance. 'Look,' I told them, pointing toward the red clouds, 'that fire has been burning since the time of Etienne Marcel. Our national genius has been able to contain it for over five hundred years, but it is not Thiers who will extinguish it by cannon fire, it is I, with a true and just law that is good for all."67 Though this declaration, published in 1887, at the height of Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's career, may be apocryphal, it offers an accurate and candid expression of the motives of his political and spiritual quest. The Revolution, to Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's eyes, had brought only "a new sectarianism, much more vulgar, despotic, and depressing," and the Third Republic, to him, was a mere "nominal republic," unlikely to provide France with peace or stability.68 Unlike most of his contemporaries, but like Alexis de Tocqueville a generation before, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre denied that the Revolution had brought a fundamental change to French society. "The monarchy has been supplanted," he wrote, "but the State remains, just as Louis XI envisioned it, just as Richelieu wished it, just as Colbert created it. No one thinks of destroying it; everyone hopes to occupy it." The bourgeois Third Republic was no different from earlier regimes, for "an armchair replaced the throne, the crown gave way to a top hat, the scepter is followed by a cane," but the centralized, "Caesarist" state remained.69 Like Tocqueville and Montesquieu before him, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre praised the medieval organization of French society, paying tribute to the convocation of the Estates General by Philip IV in 1302. Blaming the abandonment of this ancient arrangement on foreign, especially Habsburg models, he argued that France had been on the wrong course not since 1789, but since the 1648 Peace of Westphalia had formally abandoned the medieval ideal of the unity of Christendom under one pope and one emperor, replacing it with what he described as the "international anarchy" of the tenuous balance of power between ambitious nation-states. Not surprisingly, the Enlightenment also came in for substantial criticism from Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, who declared that "Voltaire was the very humble courtesan of the powers of anarchy from above," referring to the philosopher's support of enlightened despotism, and remarking that "after a hardly serious struggle against the simple, childish interpretations of the Holy Word ... they believed they had finished with the architectural plan of the reign of God, and they demolished everything, hoping the better to be able to build from a clean slate, based on sensorial experimentalism and instinctive naturalism."70

While Saint-Yves d'Alveydre maintained, along with many of his fin de siecle counterparts, that French and European society stood on the brink of ootastrophe, he argued that a "synarchic" government based on Judeo.Christian principles would offer a way out of the crisis. In Mission des fuifs;. Saint-Yves d'Alveydre proclaimed that such a government had in fact existed over the entire world during a distant golden age of mankind, established by the philosopher-king Ram in ancient India. "This," Saint-Yves d' Alveydre wrote, "was the primordial Synarchy .... It was by this wise and just organization that the peoples of the universal theocracy of the Lamb, the universal empire of the ram, knew for three thousand five hundred years the realization of divine unity, the peace of the living, social God through the members of the spiritual body which here below constitutes humanity." "Under this government of Principles, under this Synarchy, says the Tradition, there were neither sectarians, nor despots, nor beggars, nor intolerance, nor arbitrary power, nor revolt." Rather than an oppressive, bureaucratic centralized state, Ram's empire was a free federation of harmonious local communities. "No one governed the Aldee," he wrote, "Everyone there consented to the reign of the best possible social principles, that is to say, to an organic, impersonal, intellectual government." This novel interpretation, which, as we saw in chapter 2, was based so heavily on Fabre d'Olivet's Histoire philosophique du genre humain that SaintYves d' Alveydre's critics accused him of plagiarism, further maintained that the ancient Hebrews, alone among peoples, had preserved the principles of synarchic government following the collapse of the universal empire of Ram.!! This ideal empire, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre maintained, lasted for over three millennia, but after it collapsed through internal schism, its spirit and laws were preserved by the tribes of Israel, whom Moses, an initiate to the Egyptian mysteries, reorganized as "a royal university of God, to save from the shipwreck of the ancient institution, the Science of the physiology of the Universe, or Cosmogony, and its consequence, the Science of the Social State."72 Thanks to the supposedly unchanging cultural continuity provided by the Jews, the principles of synarchy had never disappeared, and, Saint-Yves d' Alveydre felt, they held the key to the regeneration of the French state and of the wider world.

This social organization proved so enduring, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre declared, "because it corresponded to the triple nature of man ... intellectual, moral, physical; and this triple life has for its necessary organs Religion, or the body of teaching orders, Justice, and Economics."73 Saint Yves d'Alveydre argued that there were "three ontological races of man," the intellectual, the empassioned, and the instinctive, which corresponded to these three orders, and contrasted Ram's empire, in which each person was directed toward the field of activity most suited to his nature, with "a formless social state like our own, in which these three ontological races are everywhere mixed up ... to the detriment of each and of all."74 Saint-Yves d' Alveydre thus envisioned a society of orders or castes based upon the differing abilities and characteristics of differeri'i: groups, though he argued that these should be based on individual aptitudes rather than on heredity. The key to synarchic government, as Saint-Yves d'Alveydre presents it,") appears to be the separation of the realm of thought from the exercise of power, so that "Authority never belonged to Force," allowing freedom of thought to coexist with stable, unitary political administration of Saint-Yves d'Alveydre proposes a government under three councils, representing the teaching orders (clergy as well as secular scholars), politics and administration, and economics and finance. This form of government, with its three councils, best represented "the triple nature of man ... intellectual, moral, physical."75 He comes close to Constant's ideal of government by a brotherhood of sages but introduces a sort of separation of powers, in which the function of the sages gathered in the council of education is to advise, rather than to wield power themselves. Saint Yves d' Alveydre appears to oppose coercive power in any form and assumes somewhat optimistically that the holders of political authority would follow the moral leadership of the council of sages.Although the structure of the synarchic government is consistent throughout Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's voluminous body of work, its spatial and temporal location is extraordinarily fluid, perhaps reflecting the ongoing evolution of the author's own thought on the matter. Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's first treatise on the topic, the 1882 Mission des souverains, presented the structure for what he described as a "Christian social state" but maintained that such a regime had never existed and that all of the misfortunes of Western civilization derived from the absence of a synarchic state, which, in his view, the early Christians should have created, rather than adopting the authoritarian structures of the Roman Empire. In Mission des fuifs, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre adopted the imagined prehistorical empire of Ram from Fabre d'Olivet's work and called for the restoration of a universal empire based on synarchic principles in the present. In his final published work on the topic, however, the 1887 La France vraie, Saint-Yves d' Alveydre located the synarchy within France's own political tradition, tying it to the medieval Estates General and its corporative organization of French society. In La France vraie, Saint-Yves d' Alveydre defines the precise founding moment for the synarchy: the convocation of the Estates General by Philippe IV, assembled in Notre Dame cathedral on April 10, 1302, in which the three orders of society were represented by members of the church, the nobility, and the bourgeoisie of the towns. Saint-Yves d'Alveydre reflects: Certainly this representation is insufficient and even perniccious, that of the first two orders in particular, and what conserns the anarchic character which they bear from the feudal revolution. But in themselves, as social corps, they signify more than their relJresentatives: Education, Justice, Economy, these three powers, even if not completed, are the stunning prophecy not of a single man, but of an entire nation. They are completely distinct from all of the political constitutions which come from abroad, by which I mean the pagan world, whether it be Roman or Greek, Macedonian or Persian, Babylonian or Ninevite. They signify or call to constitute something different from the Caesarism of Jules, of Xerxes, of Sargon and Ninus, different from the republic of Cato or Plato, of Brutus and Harmodius, different also from the parliamentarism of Cromwell or Monk, of William of Orange or of Washington.76

Such widely divergent metahistorical accounts necessarily made for tensions and inconsistencies between different texts. One of the greatest inconsistencies in his work comes with his treatment of the Templars, a subject that fascinated occultists throughout late nineteenth-century Europe. Although in some of his works, he praises the Templars as a secret brotherhood of sages who sought to establish an ideal, synarchic society, this clashes with his panegyrics to the medieval France of Philip IV, who bro'tally suppressed the Templars. Where the focus is on the synarchic character of medieval France, as in La France vraie, therefore, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre ", paints a darker portrait of the Templars, whose efforts at establishing a synarchy before its time had arrived would have meant domination "by nobility of the sword, generally ignorant and always exclusive."77

Whereas Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's synarchy had begun in Mission actuelle des souverains, as an abstract utopia that had never existed, and was portrayed in Mission des fuifs as belonging to a lost, prehistorical golden age, by the time of the writing of La France vraie, the fifth and last of SaintYves--d'Alveydre's "missions," it had become firmly associated with France's own medieval heritage. For this reason, Saint -Yves d' Alveydre concluded, France should look not to the abstract theories of the Enlightenment or to a return to royal absolutism, but should rather turn to the synarchic model inherent in its own medieval traditions, a sort of revived and transformed Estates General, to recover its former greatness. In the conclusion to his final study, La France vraie, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre writes, Suppose that, rather than having no foundation but a floating governing structure, pushed by the winds of universal suffrage, unprofessional and unqualified, the French government was founded upon a triple social rock. Suppose that, rather than in absorbing in the form of bureaucracy all of the organic forces of the nation, it allowed their enormous intellectual, moral and experimental power to be placed in the direct service of the governed, to regulate the constant study of their needs, the drafting of their proposals, the synthetic and progressive balancing of their wishes. Suppose that the Estates General were in place, no longer feudal, but democratic, and examine the role of the clergy. All of the teaching corps, religious, civil, and military, are present in the first estate. What spirit of European reaction could reverse such an assembly? What spirit of international revolution could overturn this totality, this universality, this Catholicism of religion and science forever united? No sectarian force of the world could disrupt this union of teaching faculties, of professional luminaries in which the security of the state and the nation would demand that all sects were represented, even the Islam of our African colonies, even the Hinduism and Buddhism of our Asian colonies. The French state thus represented would become the greatest column of light, the most imposing that civilization and humanity of all the centuries have ever had to guide them.78

During the 1880's, Saint Yves d' Alveydre had just published the first of his missions, the Mission actuelle des souverains, anonymously, and he restated many of its theses in his address to the congress, rather optimistically describing it as "a book which you know and which all the governing elite of Europe has in its hands."79 Saint-Yves d'Alveydre condemned the violence and international tension of the late nineteenth century and highlighted the instability and danger inherent in this situation, asking, "what is the monarchy, what is the republic among the great military powers of the continent, that can say with certainty, 'I have ten years of duration ahead of me?'" To escape this danger, Saint-Yves d' Alveydre called for the remaking of Europe along synarchic lines, with synarchically ordered nation-states coexisting under the auspices of a general European federation. "It is no longer diViding," he asserted, "but rather uniting that is needed to reign." Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's new European order, he assured his audience, would be "the opposite of a despotic conspiracy like the Holy Alliance; it is the salvation of all through all, carried out in complete freedom by this precise organ of our social redemption: the Arbitral Synarchy."80 Whereas in many ways, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's European federalism participates the European Union of the following century, as well as international organizations such as the League of Nations or United Nations, its religious and philosophical foundations should not be neglected. Saint-Yves d' Alveydre began and concluded his address to the Congres with the biblical injunction "Glory to God in the Heavens! Peace on Earth and goodwill to men!"81 He went on to tell his audience, "Gentlemen, between the anarchy from above and the anarchy from below; between the wars among states and the civil war of the rulers and the governed, more than courage is needed; faith is needed to plant the flag of peace."82 Synarchy was more than a humanitarian proposal to preserve peace and encourage international cooperation, though it was certainly that as well. For Saint-Yves d' Alveydre, it was the realization of the plans of divine providence for human society; it was, as his opening remarks strongly suggest, the coming of the kingdom of heaven on earth. The creation of the synarchy, the divine plan for social order and harmony, could only be enacted by the common consent of both rulers and citizens. Saint-Yves d'Alveydre went on to tell the Congres, "Surely, gentlemen, we will not go to raise up an unarmed public opinion against the Caesarist powers, armed to the teeth, for they would likely receive no answer but rifle shots. Our action should rather focus on other subjects than poor cannon-fodder, on organisms that are non-political, neutral, and therefore capable of becoming mediators."83 These potential mediators were the future members of the three synarchic councils, representing the teaching orders (both civil and religious), judicial and administrative officials, and the delegates of economic interest groups. Saint-Yves d'Alveydre appealed to these enlightened experts to persuade the rulers of Europe to adopt the synarchic model, which alone could preserve peace and stability throughout Europe.

To put these ideas into practice, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre in 1886 established a sort of lobbying group called the Syndicat de Presse economique et professionnelle de la France, which presented synarchist proposals to deputies, ministers, and even, in 1888, to the president of the Third Republic, Sadi Carnot. These efforts met with little success, for, as Jean Saunier notes, "political circles were then too agitated by the Boulangist crisis to be able to examine his projects calmly." Despite these failures, SaintYves d' Alveydre was not a marginal figure; he managed to win several deputies, including Franc;ois de Mahy and Paul Deschanel, and one senator, Jean Milhet-Fontarabie, to his cause, and in 1893, he was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor. 84
Most of Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's contemporaries in the fin de siecle occult revival did not deign to address mundane economic matters, but they universally praised his works and his contribution to the discourse of occultism. Oswald Wirth, secretary to Stanislas de Guaita, declared that, although his friend and mentor had participated in the electoral campaigns .Qf the integral nationalist and anti-Dreyfusard Maurice Barres in the 1890s, t'his engagement was motivated "by friendship, and for his amusement" and did not imply a political affinity for the far Right. Rather, Wirth as-, serted, "he saw the ideal regime as synarchy."85 One of Guaita's disciples, Gary de Lacroze, wrote in l'lnitiation in October 1890, "The triumph of right over force, of Providence over Fate, is the logical conclusion of the evolution of the West."86 Papus, in his obituary of Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, which ran in the February 1909 issue of L'Initiation, declared of the latter's doctrines that "the social implications will be considerable once they are understood."87 It seems entirely reasonable, therefore, to present the synarchy as a political and social model embraced by nearly all of the key figures of the fin de siecle Martinist revival.

Papus, who throughout his life acknowledged Saint-Yves d'Alveydre as his "intellectual master," repeatedly advocated the synarchy as the only lasting solution to the tensions and conflicts of the turn-of-the-century world. Defending Saint-Yves d'Alveydre against charges that he had plagiarized Fabre d'Olivet's work, Papus wrote in 1888 that "each of his books is a satellite, of which the social law which he calls the synarchy is the sun, and all his books gravitate around one of them, the Mission des fuifs, which marks the point of departure and the point of arrival of all of his works. "88 In a January 1893 letter to the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, Papus warned of the twin dangers of "the triumph of social revolution directed by secret societies among the Christian peoples" and "the triumph of Tartar [Le., Russian] Caesarism at the instigation of the kings and princes of the west" and presented the unification of Europe under synarchic principles as the only guarantee offering "absolute assurance for the future of Turkey."89 Just before the outbreak of the First World War, Papus gave a public lecture on the principles of the synarchy, in which he proposed regrouping the electorate "along corporative interests rather than by politics" and putting in place of compulsory military service, a "service civil obligatoire" that would put the particular talents of each citizen in the service of the community at large.9o

Perhaps ironically, the work that was to have the greatest influence on the subsequent development of the synarchy legend was not published during Saint-Yves d' Alveydre's lifetime, and, had Saint-Yves d' Alveydre's wishes been respected, would not have been published at all. During the 1880s, which as we have seen was the most fertile period in Saint-Yves d' Alveydre's career, he wrote a relatively short manuscript entitled Mission de [Jlnde en Europe, Mission de ['Europe en Inde, which offered the surprising revelation that a center of synarchist initiation and organization, called Agarttha, still existed, hidden deep in the Himalayan mountains of India, surrounded "by twenty-two temples, representing the twenty-two Arcana of Hermes" (that is, the twenty-two trumps of the Tarot). Saint-Yves d'Alveydre presented Agarttha as an ideal society, free from the corruptions and abuses of the modern world, and organized along timeless synarchist principles: The Agarttha does not know any of our frightful judicial or penitentiary systems; it has no prisons. The death penalty is not applied there. Policing of society is done by the heads of families. Crimes are referred to the initiates, to a service of pundits. Their arbitration of the peace, always spontaneously invoked by the parties themselves, almost always avoids an appeal to other courts of justice, for voluntary reparation follows all damages. Need I state that all the shames and social plagues of non-synarchist civilizations-the misery of the multitude, prostitution, drunkenness, the ferocious individualism from above, the subversive spirit from below-are unknown in this ancient Synarchy?91

Saint-Yves d'Alveydre declared that Agarttha governed a society of forty million inhabitants, which somehow had escaped detection by the British colonial authorities who ruled India. Like the ancient empire of Ram, from which its structure was derived, Agarttha followed the spiritual direction of a sovereign pontiff, here called the mahatma (no relation should be inferred to Mohandas Gandhi, who was a child at the time Mission de [Jlnde was written). The current mahatma, who rose to occupy his throne in 1848 (the choice of a revolutionary year is likely not coincidental), saw "the temporary occupation of the southern provinces of India by England as an ordeal sent from above," and, accordi ng to Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, the mahatma knew the precise hour of India's deliverance. 92 Saint-Yves d'Alveydre called for a true unification of Europe and Asia, in which the material advantages of the former would be joined to the superior spiritual wisdom of the latter, and called on the sages of Agarttha to "emerge from the invisible" and share with Europe "your titles of glory in the past, utility in the present, and gifts for the future."93 He concluded this work by expressing the hope that the European powers would respect the sovereignty of Agarttha and learn from its wisdom. "May the day come," Saint-Yves d' Alveydre wrote, "for a European ecumenical council, representing all religions, all universities, all lodges of the thirty-third degree, all the sovereign directions of our European nations, and may I be summoned to expound and defend the synarchist law of history and human society, assisted by two magi of Agarttha! "94 Saint-Yves d'Alveydre chose not to publish this work during his lifetime, and just prior to his death, he instructed his heirs to bum the manuscript. Jean Saunier has argued that this decision was because of Saint-Yves d' Alveydre's fears of reprisals from the initiates of Agarttha if he were to reveal their secrets. His stepson, Count Alexis Keller, however, preserved a copy, and the work was published posthumously at the initiative of Papus and the Martinist Order, which had awarded Saint-Yves d'Alveydre with several honorary degrees, which he had chosen not to accept.95 During the 1920s, when the rest of Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's work had been largely forgotten, the legend of the Agarttha continued to fascinate readers. A Russian exile, Ferdinand Ossendovski, claimed in a 1924 work, Betes, Hommes, et Dieux, to have visited the Agarttha in his travels across Asia, and Rene Guenon, the most prominent occultist of the interwar period in France, also asserted the existence of Agarttha in Le Roi du monde. Ossendovski and Guenon even contributed to a roundtable discussion, organized by the journal Nouvelles litteraires, to consider the Agarttha in July 1924, in which the conservative Catholic historian Jacques Maritain also participated.96 It was through the legend of Agarttha that the concept of the synarchy was primarily to be remembered in twentieth-century France.

More than any of the other esoteric thinkers , SaintYves d'Alveydre cast a long shadow over twentieth-century France, though in a way in which he could not have anticipated and of which he certainly would not have approved. Although most of the Martinist and neoMartinist thinkers have been all but forgotten in contemporary France and the organizations they founded reduced to extreme marginality, the word "synarchy," introduced and popularized through the voluminous writings of Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, still produces a certain frisson among French readers, having become an integral part of the strange world of conspiracy theories of secret plots and shadow governments. This strange odyssey of the work of Saint-Yves d'Alveydre stands beyond the period of this study, but it is nonetheless worthy of brief discussion, because it offers striking evidence of the unexpected persistence of occult elements in contemporary political discourse. Both the Martinists and their enemies shared a belief that the hidden actions of secret societies of initiates determined the outcomes of many of the most significant events in world history, a belief perhaps most clearly articulated in the Templar legend and the assertion that a feud between Martinists and Illuminists, of which the Wilhelsmbad conference of 1782 was taken as the visible sign, was the secret that explained the French Revolution. In a 1914 article on "unknown superiors," a favorite theme of anti-Masonic lore, Papus himself contributed, though unintentionally, to the association of Martinism and the synarchy with a sinister conspiracy to dominate the world: Alongside the national politics of each state, there exist organisms little known to international politics. Today the constitution of Alsace-Lorraine as two Swiss cantons, the liberation of Poland become the center of a Balkan [sic] Switzerland, the disappearance of Austria, and the construction of a United States of Europe after the definitive crushing of militaristic feudalism are problems which are posed in international councils, in which take part, not career politicians or decorated ambassadors, but a few modest, unknown men, some great financiers, superior, in their broad conception of social action, to the proud politicians who presume, as ephemeral ministers, to govern the world .... These men, assembled in small groups, create the tools that vary with the moment, the chosen nation, and the state of spirits at the time. They act in accordance with an old science of social organization issued from the ancient sanctuaries of Egypt and piously conserved in certain so-called Hermetic centers.97

The legend of a world synarchic conspiracy first surfaced in 1941, one of the darkest years of contemporary French history, a time in which France was reeling from an unprecedented defeat, divided territorially into occupied and semiautonomous zones, and at the mercy of an enemy that still appeared invincible. In December 1940, the Vichy regime of Marshall Philippe Petain had gone through a political shakeup, with the dismissal of Pierre Laval, the most prominent advocate of collaboration with Germany, and his replacement with the less pliable Admiral Franyois Darlan, who brought a new group of seemingly apolitical technocrats and business leaders to power. The collaborationist press of Paris cried foul, and throughout the spring and summer of 1941 a series of incendiary articles charged that Vichy had been taken over by a secret conspiracy, called the Mouvement Synarchiste d'Empire-which Pierre Costantini, writing in L'Appel, called "the most perfect expression of Jewish, Anglo-Saxon, and Gaullist gangsterism"-which sought to undermine the Franco-German entente and to bring France's industrial and colonial assets under the control of a Jewish and Anglo-American plutocracy.98 When the prominent businessman and corporatist thinker Jean Coutrot was found dead on May 19, 1941, a curious document called the Pacte Synarchiste was found among his belongings, and the legend began that Coutrot, who in fact committed suicide following a series of personal and professional crises, had been murdered by the Mouvement Synarchiste d'Empire to prevent him from making its evil deeds public. Where did "the legend of the Vichy synarchy," as Richard Kuisel has termed it, come from? The legend of the Masonic conspiracy against the established order had been a staple of the French Right since the days of the abbe Barruel, and conspiracy theories became ever more prevalent in French society during the interwar years. Olivier Dard has noted the similarity of the response to the Pacte Synarchiste and that which, a generation earlier, had been produced by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and further notes that many of those who were most active in propagating the legend of the synarchy, such as Henry Coston, the onetime editor of the anti-Semitic journal La Libre Parole, had long been offering theories of a Jewish world conspiracy.

Olivier Dard notes that, "Masonic plots, Jewish plots, plots of international finance formed a habitual reference for the French in the late 1930s."99 The suddenness and completeness of France's "strange defeat" of 1940 led many observers to conclude that treachery from within must have been to blame, and an association of Jews, Masons, and Anglo-Saxons fit the ideological proclivities of the collaborationist press. The synarchy myth was also very well suited to be used as a propaganda weapon by the supporters of Pierre Laval against the ambitious technocrats who surrounded Admiral Darlan, and most scholars who have studied this strange episode, notably Richard Kuisel, have concluded that the rivalry between the Laval and Darlan factions was the most likely cause for its appearance at this precise moment. Association with a much-feared, if entirely imaginary, global conspiracy proved fatal for one prominent Martinist, Constant Chevillon, the grand master of the Martinist Order, who was abducted from his Lyon home and murdered by the Milice on March 25, 1944.100

The Pacte Synarchiste is a very strange document, consisting of 13 theses and 598 supporting propositions. In general, it calls for the transcendence of the opposition between capitalism and socialism through a corporatist reorganization of society and for the creation of a world government on "synarchic" principles, to be organized around five regional synarchic governments: the British Commonwealth, a Pan-American society under the United States, a Eurasian society under the Soviet Union, a Pan-Asian society of uncertain leadership, and an entity called "Pan-Eurafrica," which was to consist of continental Europe plus the French African empire, under French leadership. Much of the document is devoted to the strengthening of the bonds between metropolitan France and its empire and the replacement of exploitative capitalist relations with mutually beneficial economic and cultural ties, a preoccupation that dates the document to the interwar period and the efforts of reformist imperialists such as Albert Sarraut for the mise en valeur of the French Empire.But what does the Mouvement Synarchiste d'Empire have to do with the synarchy of Saint-Yves d'Alveydre? The language and the generally utopian tone of the document are evocative of the fin de siecle inventor of the synarchy, but its aims are almost entirely economic and technocratic, with only the occasional nod to the spiritual and cultural issues that were central to Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's thought. Olivier Dard, who compares the Pacte Synarchiste to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, seems to imply that the document was a forgery created by the collaborationist far Right to discredit Darlan's technocrats, whereas Jean Saunier suspects that the pact was created by a real, though probably marginal, organization dedicated to Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's principles. Saunier writes, It is not unlikely that these ideas, mixed with those of other occult currents, theosophy, anthroposophy, Martinism, etc., constituted the doctrine of a small group that in fact existed, that did create the Pacte Synarchiste d'Empire .... Nevertheless, far from being at the root of the economic and political currents that appeared after the First World War, this group, on the contrary, was towed along behind them .... Its political importance was more or less nil, but the confusions of its adversaries gave it an almost mythic dimension.I01

Whatever the origin of the synarchy conspiracy theory, its legend far outlived the Vichy era. Ironically, this conspiracy theory, created by the far Right, was taken up after the Liberation by the leftist writers Charles Dumas and Raoul Husson, who saw the synarchy as a fifth column that had orchestrated France's defeat and placed its resources at the disposal of the Germans, rather than a Jewish/Anglo-American world conspiracy. It was Husson, under the pseudonym Geoffroy de Chamay (the name of a medieval Templar, no less!), who first published the pact in the liberation era. Henry Coston, whose career spans the period from Drumont's antiSemitism to Poujade's rural libertarianism, was perhaps the most prolific writer of the growing body of synarchist conspiracy literature and successfully tapped into the fears of many ordinary French readers regarding technocracy, European integration, and bureaucratization, all of which were presented in his writings as the fruits of a wicked synarchist cabal.102 The communist writer Pierre Herve saw the synarchy as the union of the most unlikely trinity of the Vatican, Wall Street, and Charles de Gaulle, while subsequent commentators attributed decolonization, the Trilateral Commission, and the Rio de Janeiro environmental accords to its machinations.103 The legend of the synarchy became, in effect, an almost infinitely elastic concept, which could be appropriated by authors of all political tendencies and used to advance the most fantastic theories. It need hardly be said that neither the Vichy technocrats, Jean Monnet, Charles de Gaulle, nor any of those identified as belonging to a Synarchic conspiracy have had anything to do with the Martinist Order.

About seven decades ago, the historian Carl Becker delivered a series of lectures entitled "The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers," dealing with the roots of Enlightenment political philosophy. In opposition to the dominant paradigms of secularization and rationalization, which contrasted a spiritual and metaphysical medieval mentality with a modern, rational one, Becker argued that the Enlightenment vision of progress, nature, and a future utopia was essentially a secularization of the ancient Christian drama of salvation and transcendence, in which "the Philosophes demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials."104 Few historians today would embrace Becker's vision of the Enlightenment, although, in the light of the post structuralist rethinking of key concepts such as "progress," "reason," and so forth, his thesis perhaps deserves a second look. Although I consider Becker's comparison between medieval scholastics and Enlightenment philosophers highly problematic, his argument regarding the search for natural laws to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth is strikingly appropriate for the Martinists of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Far more so than the philosophes and their heirs, the Martinists sought to rebuilt St. Augustine's heavenly city on earthly foundations, to discover the timeless principles of divine proVidence for the reorganization of human society, and to establish a genuinely "theocratic" order for a "Christian social state." The social and political vision of Martinism, from the writings of LouisClaude de Saint-Martin in the 1790s to the "missions" of Saint-Yves d' Alveydre in the 1880s, was shaped primarily by the quest for the principles of a true theocracy, for the blueprints by which the heavenly city could be reconstructed, and a for new age of peace and harmony established in France and throughout the world. This quest was the consistent, and even inevitable, consequence of the Martinist cosmology and metaphysics, for if man was, as Saint-Martin asserted, a spiritual being constantly seeking to return to his lost divine origins, the governing structure that alone could assure his happiness could only be divine in nature. The idea of the synarchy, which Saint-Yves d'Alveydre elaborated in the 1880s and was accepted by the neo-Martinists of the fin de siecle, was an effort to bridge the divide between human society and the divine and accommodate timeless principles to the needs of postrevolutionary French society.

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