—Protocols, v
The Protocols are a series of twenty-four declarations, a program of action, attributed to the Elders of Zion. To us, these Elders’ intentions seemed somewhat contradictory. At one point they wanted to abolish freedom of the press, at another they seemed to encourage libertinage. They criticized liberalism, but supported the sort of thing today’s leftist radicals attribute to the capitalist multinationals, including the use of sports and visual education to stultify the working class.
They analyzed various methods of seizing world power; they praised the strength of gold; they advocated supporting revolution in every country, sowing discontent and confusion by proclaiming liberal ideas, but they also wanted to exacerbate inequality. They schemed to establish everywhere regimes of straw men they would control; they fomented war and urged the production of arms and (as Salon had said) the building of métros (the underground world!) in order to have a way of mining the big cities.
They said the end justified the means and were in favor of anti-Semitism both to control the population of Jewish poor and to soften the hearts of gentiles in the face of Jewish tragedy (an expensive ploy, Diotallevi said, but effective).
They candidly declared, “We have unlimited ambition, an all-consuming greed, a merciless desire for revenge, and an intense hatred” (displaying an exquisite masochism by reinforcing, with gusto, the cliché of the evil Jew that was already in circulation in the anti-Semitic press, the stereotype that would adorn the cover of all the editions of their book). They called for abolishment of the study of the classics and of ancient history.
“In other words,” Belbo said, “the Elders of Zion were a bunch of blockheads.”
“Don’t joke,” Diotallevi said. “This book was taken very seriously. But there’s something that strikes me as odd. While the Jewish plot was meant to seem centuries old, all the references in the Protocols are to petty fin-de-siècle French questions.
The business about visual education stultifying the masses is a clear allusion to the educational program of Léon Bourgeois, who had five Masons in his government. Another passage advises electing people compromised in the Panama Scandal, and one of these was Emile Loubet, who in 1899 became president of the French republic.
The Métro is mentioned because in those days the right-wing papers were complaining that the Compagnie du Métropolitain had too many Jewish shareholders. Hence the theory that the text was cobbled up in France in the last decade of the nineteenth century, at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, to weaken the liberal front.”
“That isn’t what impresses me,” Belbo said. “It’s the sense of déjà vu. The upshot is that these Elders are planning to conquer the world, and we’ve heard all that before. Take away the references to events and problems of the last century, replace the tunnels of the Métro with the tunnels of Provins, and everywhere it says Jews write Templars, and everywhere it says Elders of Zion write Thirty-six Invisibles divided into six…. My friends, this is the Ordonation of Provins!”
Voltaire lui-même est mort jésuite: en avoitil le moindre soupçon?
—F. N. de Bonneville, Les Jésuites chassés de la Maçonnerie et leur poignard brisé par les Maçons, Orient de Londres, 1788, 2, p. 74
All along it had been right in front of us, the whole thing, and we had failed to see it. Over six centuries, six groups fight to achieve the Plan of Provins, and each group takes the text of that Plan, simply changes the subject, and attributes it to its adversaries.
After the Rosicrucians turn up in France, the Jesuits reverse the Plan, replace it with its negative: discrediting the Baconians and the emerging English Masonry.
When the Jesuits invent neo-Templarism, the Marquis de Luchet attributes the Plan to the neo-Templars. The Jesuits, who by now are jettisoning the neo-Templars, copy Luchet, through Barruel, but they attribute the Plan to all Freemasons in general.
Then the Baconian counteroffensive. Digging into the texts of this liberal and secular polemic, we discovered that from Michelet and Quinet down to Garibaldi and Gioberti, the Ordonation was attributed to the Jesuits (perhaps that idea originated with the Templar Pascal and his friends). The subject was popularized by Le Juif errant of Eugène Sue and by his character, the evil Monsieur Rodin, quintessence of the Jesuit world conspiracy. But as we looked further into Sue, we found far more: a text that seemed copied—but half a century in advance—from the Protocols, almost word for word.
This was the final chapter of Les Mystères du peuple, where the diabolical Jesuit plan is exposed down to the last criminal detail: in a document sent by the general of the Society, Father Roothaan (historical figure), to Monsieur Rodin (who appears in the earlier Juif/errant).
Rudolphe de Gerolstein (previously the hero of the Mystères de Paris) comes into possession of this document and reveals it to the other democracy-loving characters: “You see, my dear Lebrenn, how cunningly this infernal plot is ordered, and what frightful sorrows, what horrendous enslavement, what terrible despotism it would spell for Europe and the world, were it to succeed….”
It seemed Nilus’s preface to the Protocols. Sue also attributed to the Jesuits the motto (which will be found in the Protocols, attributed to the Jews), “The end justifies the means.”
There is no need to multiply the evidence to prove that this degree of Rosy Cross was skillfully introduced by the leaders of Masonry…. The doctrine, its hatred, and its sacrilegious practices, exactly those of the Cabala, of the Gnostics, and of the Manicheans, reveals to us the identity of the authors, namely the Jewish Cabalists.
—Mons. Léon Meurin, S.J. La Franc-Maçonnerie, Synagogue de Satan, Paris, Retaux, 1893, p. 182
When Les Mystères du peuple appears and the Jesuits see that the Ordonation is attributed to them, they quickly adopt the one tactic not yet used by anyone. Exploiting Simonini’s letter, they attribute the Ordonation to the Jews.
In 1869, Henri Gougenot de Mousseaux, famous for two books on magic, publishes Les Juifs, le judaisme et la judaisation des peuples chrétiens, which says that the Jews use the cabala and are worshipers of Satan, since a secret line of descent links Cain directly to the Gnostics, the Templars, and the Masons. Gougenot receives a special benediction from Pius IX.
But the Plan, novelized by Sue, is rehashed by others, who are not Jesuits.
There’s a nice story, almost a thriller, that takes place a bit later. In 1921—after the appearance of the Protocols, which it took very seriously—the Times of London learns that a Russian monarchist landowner who fled to Turkey has bought from a former officer of the Russian secret police, now a refugee in Constantinople, a number of old books, and among them is one without a cover. On its spine it has only “Joli,” and there is a preface dated 1864. This is the source of the Protocols.
The Times does some research in the British Museum and discovers the original book, by Maurice Joly, Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel, Bruxelles (though it says Genève on the title page), 1864. Maurice Joly has no connection with Crétineau-Joly, but the similarity of the names must mean something.
Joly’s book is a liberal pamphlet against Napoleon III, in which Machiavelli, who represents the dictator’s cynicism, argues with Montesquieu. Joly is arrested for this revolutionary venture, he serves fifteen years in prison, and in 1878 he kills himself. The Jewish plot enunciated in the Protocols is taken almost literally from the words Joly puts in Machiavelli’s mouth (the end justifies the means); after Machiavelli, the words become Napoleon’s. The Times, however, does not realize (but we do) that Joly had shamelessly copied Sue’s document, which predates it by at least seven years.
An anti-Semite authoress, devotee of the plot theory and the Unknown Superiors, a certain Nesta Webster, faced by this development, which reduces the Protocols to the level of cheap plagiarism, provides us with a brilliant idea, the sort of idea that only a true initiate or initiate-hunter can have: Joly was an initiate, he knew the Plan of the Unknown Superiors, and attributed it to Napoleon III, whom he hated. But this does not mean that the Plan does not exist independently of Napoleon.
Since the Plan outlined in the Protocols is a perfect description of the customary behavior of the Jews, then the Jews must have invented the Plan. We had only to reread Mrs. Webster in the light of her own logic: since the Plan coincided exactly with what the Templars wanted, it was the Plan of the Templars.
Besides, we had the logic of facts on our side. We were particularly attracted by the episode in the Prague cemetery. This was the story of a certain Hermann Goedsche, an insignificant Prussian postal employee who published false documents to discredit the democrat Waldeck. The documents accused him of planning to assassinate the king of Prussia. Goedsche, after he was unmasked, became the editor of the organ of the big conservative landowners, Die Preussische Kreuzzeitung.
Then, under the name Sir John Retcliffe, he began writing sensational novels, including Biarritz, 1868. In it he described an occultist scene in the Prague cemetery, very similar to the meeting of the Illuminati described by Dumas at the beginning of Giuseppe Balsamo, where Cagliostro, chief of the Unknown Superiors, among them Swedenborg, arranges the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. In the Prague cemetery the representatives of the twelve tribes of Israel gather, to expound their plans for the conquest of the world.
In 1876 a Russian pamphlet reprints the scene from Biarritz, but
