a hatred of French absolutism, while in religion he privately described himself as a “pantheist.”24 The word had been invented by Toland to describe his personal creed.25 Rousset passionately loved his lodge in Amsterdam and wanted it to be a place where virtue and probity, tied to no religion, could be cultivated.
A mason of any lodge had to be “of the religion of that country or nation whatever it was,” but the 1723 Constitutions said that “tis now thought more expedient only to oblige [the freemason] to that religion in which all men agree.”26 In deference to the deep religious divisions in Britain, freemasonry endorsed a minimalist creed which could be anything from theism to pantheism and atheism. Not surprisingly, the lodges in England had a high representation of Whigs and scientists, while in Paris at mid-century the freemason Helvétius was a materialist and in Amsterdam, Rousset de Missy was a pantheist. The great political theorist, Montesquieu, also a freemason, was probably some kind of deist. In both London and Amsterdam Jewish names can be found in the lodge records. In France there were lodges for both Protestants and Catholics, indeed even actors, often scorned in polite society, were admitted. In one Paris lodge letters between brothers mention a “Negro trumpeter” in the King’s regimen.27 Rarely do lodge ceremonies, even in Catholic countries, contain overtly Christian language.
When the Catholic Church condemned lodge membership in 1738 it objected that freemasonry constituted a new form of religion. It also condemned frequent elections as being republican.28 For some men freemasonry expressed new beliefs that were tolerant and endorsed practices ultimately at odds with traditional religiosity and monarchical absolutism. The Church’s condemnation only made the lodges more attractive to the secular-minded and the progressive. It is hardly surprising that by 1750 membership in a masonic lodge had come to denote enthusiasm for the new, enlightened ideas, although not necessarily for the materialism and atheism associated with some of the philosophes.
Thanks to the records that came back from Moscow only in 2000, the evidence is now clear that in the 1740s in France women also belonged to lodges. A note on the bottom of one record mentions the local women’s lodge in Bordeaux. In The Hague in 1751 a lodge of men and women used French as its first language and left a list of its officers in both the masculine and the feminine, Le Maitre, La Maitresse, and so on. Local actors and actresses in the Comédie française housed in the town fraternized with nobleman and wealthy merchants.29 They were even attacked for doing so by a local abbé. Traditionally we see eighteenth-century women as less attracted to the heresies associated with the Enlightenment than men. But the masonic ceremonies we can trace to them suggest an ability to be just as secular as their brothers. We will learn more about these women in Chapter five.
But the lodges were about more than social and intellectual life. The self-governance of lay elites outside of confraternities or town councils, and operating in local groups joined on a national scale, was rare in continental Europe during the eighteenth century. Within the masonic lodges as they spread first to the Dutch Republic and France, then as far east as Prague and Moscow, and as far west as Philadelphia and Cap Français (Haiti), secular-minded, affluent men, and some women, began governing themselves: in colonial settings as part of their empires, at home as part of their localities and through the Grand Lodges, their nations. Lodge membership became a symbol of independence from clerical authority and a sign of political maturity. It also became one means of insuring cultural cohesion among Europeans in their colonies, an expression of imperial status just like that offered by the churches and scientific societies.
Government ministers, state employees, liberal professionals like lawyers, doctors and teachers, as well as merchants, flocked to join the lodges. In Sweden the entire court from the king and his ministers on down joined lodges that were feted at the royal palace.30 There, as in Britain and the American colonies, the lodges paraded in public, a sign of their acceptance. In Paris and The Hague British ambassadors played a role in spreading the fraternity. We know about the French connection because in the 1730s the police raided the Paris home of the British ambassador, Lord Waldegrave, in part because a lodge was meeting there.31 In Berlin by 1750 Frederick the Great used the lodges to enhance his own cultlike following. In Vienna in the 1780s Joseph II’s influence permeated the lodges where Mozart sought out his musical commissions.
Everywhere they spread, the lodges also denoted relative affluence, drinking, and merrymaking. Despite their conspicuous consumption, the lodges were also places that sought to instill decorum, at least before dinner. Modifying the behavior of men helped to internalize discipline and manners. In London lodges would sometimes take over the theater for a performance, and there is evidence that brothers behaved better than audiences did typically. The habits of listening and silence in theaters and concerts developed only slowly, largely by the second half of the eighteenth century and as part of a general growth of decorum, politeness, and interiority. The masonic lodges played a role in that self-disciplining process. The Enlightenment needs to be seen as a complex mix of new ideas as well as habits: public discussion, sociability, private, uncensored reading. All required a new, more commonplace sense of an inner self that took pride in discipline and decorum. Lodges, like other forms of sociability, helped to instill it.
In every European country masonic dues were substantial (although graded by ability to pay), and each lodge came to possess a social persona and to give loyalty to a national Grand Lodge. Some lodges spurned anyone but the noble-born; others were entirely for students or doctors. Some lodges admitted lowly merchants, even actors; others banned them. Dues varied according to the means of the brothers and the relationship between the lodge and a brother was partly contractual, based upon dues paid, and partly filial.
In the 1780s, when the French Grand Lodge was dispensing charity to brothers, widows, and aged women freemasons, their letters tell much about being caught between two worlds: one modern and based upon contract, the other essentially feudal and based upon birth and deference. As we will see in greater detail in chapter 4, in the same letter freemasons could beg and supplicate while noting that in their youth or wealth they had paid their dues, feted their brothers, and been good citizens in their respective lodges. They were owed assistance, they implied, yet they knew that it had to come from the aristocratic leadership of the Grand Lodge—hence they pleaded.
Lodge membership could begin to resemble citizenship in a state, a presumed right to participate or even to govern. We can see this forward-looking aspect of lodge membership most clearly in the Austrian case. In the very Catholic Austrian territories after 1750 lodge membership signaled support for enlightened reform against the traditional privileges of the clergy. Men in the secular professions were drawn into such lodges. By the 1780s the Grand Lodge in Vienna worked with the government, in one instance to suppress lodges in the restless western colony of the southern Netherlands, Belgium. The Viennese Grand Lodge authorized only three lodges, closed down all others and drew up lists of appropriate members. In July 1786 the Vienna lodge proudly informed Joseph II that “the General Government of masonry is now in conformity with your edicts.”32 As we shall see in greater detail in Chapter 3, on this occasion a fraternal organization, commonplace in European civil society, assisted the state in remaking the contours of another colonial society under its jurisdiction.
The masonic instinct for governance fueled identification with the center, with national institutions. In 1756 when Dutch freemasons organized their national system of authority and governance, the Grand Lodge of the Netherlands, they adopted “the form” of the Estates General of the Republic. Furthermore they recommended it to German lodges that were having difficulty arriving at a comparable system of national cohesion. An Estates General, the Dutch said, could work as “the sovereign tribunal of the Nation.”33 They meant the masonic nation. Just like the Estates General where each province retained a high degree of sovereignty, in the Dutch lodges decentralized governance permitted independence. In the 1750s the Grand Master in The Hague, the Baron de Boetzelaer, spoke about the freemasons holding a “national
