Napoleon must have known something, because in 1806 he convoked an assembly of French Jews. The official reasons were banal: an attempt to reduce usury, to assure himself of the loyalty of the Jewish population, to find new financing…. None of which explains why he called that assembly the Grand Sanhédrin, a name suggesting a directorate of superiors more or less unknown. The truth is that the shrewd Corsican had identified the representatives of the Jerusalemite branch, and was trying to unite the various scattered Templar groups.
“It’s no accident that in 1808 Maréchal Ney’s troops are at Tomar. You see the connection?”
“We’re here to see connections.”
“Now Napoleon, about to defeat England, has almost all the European centers in his hand, and through the French Jews he has the Jerusalemites as well. What does he still lack?”
“The Paulicians.”
“Exactly. And we haven’t yet decided where they end up. But Napoleon provides us with a clue: he goes to look for them in Russia.”
Living for centuries in Slavic regions, the Paulicians naturally reorganize under the labels of various Russian mystic groups. One of the most influential advisers of Alexander I is Prince Galitzin, connected with sects of Martinist inspiration. And who do we find in Russia, a good ten years before Napoleon, as plenipotentiary of the House of Savoy, tying bonds with the mystic cénacles of St. Petersburg? De Maistre.
At this point de Maistre distrusts any organization of Illuminati; for him, they are no different from the men of the Enlightenment responsible for the bloodbath of the Revolution. During this period, in fact, repeating Barruel almost word for word, he talks of a satanic sect that wants to conquer the world, and probably he has Napoleon in mind. If our great reactionary is aiming, then, to seduce the Martinist groups, it is because he suspects that they, though drawing their inspiration from the same sources as French and German neo-Templarism, are the heirs of the one group not yet corrupted by Western thought: the Paulicians.
But apparently de Maistre’s plan does not succeed. In 1815 the Jesuits are expelled from St. Petersburg, and de Maistre returns to Turin.
“All right,” Diotallevi said, “we’ve found the Paulicians again. Let’s get rid of Napoleon, who obviously failed in his purpose—otherwise, on St. Helena, he could have made his enemies quake by merely snapping his fingers. What happens now among all these people? My head is splitting.”
“At least you still have a head.”
Oh, how well you have unmasked those infernal sects that are preparing the way for the Antichrist…. But there is still one sect that you have touched only lightly.
—Letter from Captain Simonini to Barruel, published in La civiltà cattolica, October 21, 1882
Napoleon’s rapprochement with the Jews caused the Jesuits to alter their course. Barruel’s Mémoires had contained no reference to the Jews. But in 1806 he received a letter from a certain Captain Simonini, who reminded him that Mani and the Old Man of the Mountain were also Jews, that Masonry had been founded by the Jews, and that the Jews had infiltrated all the existing secret societies.
Simonini’s letter, shrewdly circulated in Paris, was an embarrassment for Napoleon, who had just got in touch with the Grand Sanhédrin. This move obviously alarmed the Paulicians too, because the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church declared: “Napoleon now proposes to unite all the Jews, whom the wrath of God has scattered over the face of the earth, so that they will overturn the church of Christ and proclaim Napoleon the true Messiah.”
The good Barruel accepted the idea that the plot was not only Masonic but also Judeo-Masonic. Further, this Satanic element allowed him to attack a new enemy: the Alta Vendita Carbonara, and later the anticlerical fathers of the Risorgimento, from Mazzini to Garibaldi.
“But this all happens in the middle of the nineteenth century,” Diotallevi said, “whereas the big anti-Semitic campaign gets under way at the end of the century, with the publication of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. And the Protocols appear in Russia. So they are an initiative of the Paulicians.”
“Naturally,” Belbo said. “It’s clear now that the Jerusalemite group had broken up into three branches. The first branch, through the Spanish and Provençal cabalists, went on to inspire the neo-Templar camp; the second was taken over by the Baconian wing, and they all became scientists and bankers. They’re the ones the Jesuits oppose so fiercely. But there is a third branch, and it established itself in Russia.
The Russian Jews are generally small tradesmen and moneylenders, and for that reason are hated by the impoverished peasants; but since Jewish culture is a culture of the Book, and all Jews know how to read and write, they eventually swell the ranks of the liberal and revolutionary intelligentsia. The Paulicians, in contrast, are mystics, reactionaries, hand in glove with the landowners, and they have also infiltrated the court. Obviously, between them and the Jerusalemites there can be no traffic. So they are bent on discrediting the Jews, and through the Jews—this they learned from the Jesuits—they cause trouble for their adversaries abroad, both the neo-Templars and the Baconians.”
There can no longer be any doubt. With all the power and the terror of Satan, the reign of the triumphant King of Israel is approaching our unregenerate world; the King born from the blood of Zion, the Antichrist, approaches the throne of universal power.
—Sergei Nilus, Epilogue to the Protocols
The idea was acceptable. We had only to consider who had introduced the Protocols in Russia.
One of the most influential Martinists at the end of the century, Papus, dazzled Nicholas II during his visit to Paris, then went to Moscow, taking with him one Philippe Nizier Anselme Vachot. Possessed by the Devil at the age of six, healer at thirteen, magnetizer in Lyon, Philippe fascinated both Nicholas II and his hysterical wife. He was invited to court, named physician of the military academy of St. Petersburg, made a general and a councilor of state.
His enemies decided to diminish his influence by setting against him an equally charismatic figure. And Nilus was found.
Nilus was an itinerant monk who, in priestly habit, wandered in the forests (what else?) displaying a prophet’s great beard, two wives, a little daughter, an assistant (or lover, perhaps), all hanging on his every word. Half guru, the kind that runs off with the collection plate, and half hermit, the kind that yells that the end is near, he was in fact obsessed by the Antichrist.
The plan of Nilus’s supporters was to have him ordained, and then, after he married (what was another wife, more or less?) Elena Alexan-drovna Ozerova, the tsarina’s maid of honor, to have him become the confessor of the sovereigns.
“I’m anything but a bloodthirsty man,” Belbo said, “but I begin to feel that the massacre of Tsarskoye Selo was perhaps a justifiable extermination of vermin.”
Anyway, Philippe’s supporters accused Nilus of leading a lewd life, and God knows they were right. Nilus had to leave the court, but at this point someone came to his aid, handing him the text of the Protocols. Since everybody got the Martinists (who derived from Saint Martin) mixed up with the Martínezists (followers of Martínez Pasqualis, whom Agliè so dislikes), and since Pasqualis, according to a widespread rumor, was Jewish, by discrediting the Jews the Protocols also discredited the Martinists, and with the discrediting of the Martinists, Philippe was booted out.
Actually, a first, incomplete, version of the Protocols had already appeared in 1903, in Znamia, a St. Petersburg paper edited by a rabid anti-Semite named Kruscevan. In 1905, with the approval of the government censors, a complete text anonymously appeared, under the title The Source of Our Evils, edited by one Boutmi, who with Kruscevan had founded the Union of the Russian People, later known as the Black Hundreds, which enlisted common criminals to carry out pogroms and extremist right-wing acts of violence. Boutmi later published, under his own name, further editions of the work, with the title The Enemies of the Human Race: Protocols from the Secret Archives of the Central Chancellery of Zion.
But these were cheap booklets. An expanded version of the Protocols, the one that was to be translated all over the world, came out in 1905, in the third edition of Nilus’s book, The Great in the Small: The Antichrist Is an Imminent Political Possibility, Tsarskoye Selo, under the aegis of a local chapter of the Red Cross. The scope was broader, the framework that of mystical reflection, and the book ended up in the hands of the tsar. The metropolitan of Moscow ordered it read aloud in all the churches of the city.
“But what,” I asked, “is the connection between the Protocols and our Plan? We keep talking about these Protocols. Should we read them?”
“Nothing could be simpler,” Diotallevi said. “There’s always someone who reprints them. Publishers used to do it with a great show of indignation, purely out of a sense of duty to make available a historical document, then little by little they stopped apologizing and reprinted it with unrepentant pleasure.”
“What genteel gentiles.”
The only society known to us that is capable of rivaling us in these arts is that of the Jesuits. But we have succeeded in discrediting the Jesuits in the eyes of the stupid populace, because that
