Politically the son of his father, was emotionally akin to his mother, who transmitted to him a passionate loyalty to the Catholic Church. Finding the Jacobins too expensive and bourgeois, some radical leaders formed in 1790 the "Society of the Friends of Man and the Citizen," which the Parisians soon called the Cordeliers Club, because it met in the former monastery of the Cordelier (Franciscan) friars this gave a platform to Marat, Hebert, Desmoulins, and Danton.Īgainst French carbines the Spanish clergy raised the cross they denounced Joseph as "a Lutheran, a Freemason, a heretic," and summoned their flocks to insurrection "in the name of God, His Immaculate Mother, and Saint Joseph." Perhaps it was in the Club Breton that Sieyes and others planned the strategy by which the nobles and the clergy were to be drawn into united action with the Third Estate.Īn Englishman in Paris in 1791 reported that "clubs abound in every street." There were literary societies, sporting associations, Freemasonry lodges, workmen's gatherings. Freemasonry lodges were active, too, usually on the side of constitutional monarchy but there is no evidence of a secret Freemasonry conspiracy.
Some delegates from Brittany formed the Club Breton soon it opened its members to other deputies, and to other wielders of tongue or pen Sieyes, Robespierre, and Mirabeau made it a sounding board and testing place for their ideas and schemes here was the first form of that powerful organization that would later be called the Jacobins. It was they, even more than the nobility, who joined the Freemasonry lodges to work for freedom of life and thought they who read Voltaire and relished his erosive wit, and agreed with Gibbon that all religions are equally false for the philosopher and equally useful for the statesman. It was they who filled the theaters and applauded Beaumarchais' satires of the aristocracy. Meanwhile the bourgeoisie became the most powerful of the forces that were making for revolution. The Story of Civilization : The Age of Napoleon
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