They did not—and could not—trust the contents of books at face value. In the eighteenth century, both elites and non-elites generally assumed that truth could be evaluated based on the identity and the status of the person making a claim.
Individuals who had achieved refinement, education, and economic independence could be trusted to judge and interpret the truth. History of the Clergy earned a significant amount of praise from prominent Britons and British publications.
But in the early s, many American readers had become deeply distrustful of British institutions of knowledge production. Believing not without some foundation that the British ministry funded anti-revolutionary print, U. Instead, most Americans who took notice of the book understood it to be just another example of deceit pouring in from British shores. In a pamphlet, Congregationalist minister Ezra Stiles argued that Barruel had exaggerated the extent of French irreligion.
An avowed enemy of the French Revolution, Cobbett published a collection of essays and extracts attacking France titled The Bloody Buoy. Yet compared to the other works in this volume, Cobbett provided only brief passages from Barruel. The book appears to have had only a modest influence. One anonymous reviewer in a New York City newspaper plainly made this case. The relative success of the Memoirs owed much to a changing political context.
After years of making excuses for French violence and irreligion, American political elites abandoned the French Revolution in droves in the late s. Federalists in particular now considered revolutionary France to be ill-intentioned and dangerous. The spring of was a low point for American Francophiles.
The American government revealed the X. Affair, in which a French official demanded a bribe from American envoys, to the public in April, sparking a firestorm of protests. Whereas many Americans had once distrusted books, newspapers, pamphlets, and other materials published in London, they increasingly grew suspicious of French print materials.
Moreover, the contents of the Memoirs appealed more to American audiences than those of the History of the Clergy. Instead of recounting the trials of the Catholic clergy—a group whom Americans afforded little sympathy—the Memoirs purported to describe a powerful and dangerous secret association.
As it happened, American Federalists had developed a critique of secret societies in the mids. Democratic-Republican clubs sympathetic to transnational revolutionary politics emerged in the United States from through Massachusetts preacher, geographer, and man of letters Jedidiah Morse stood most prominently among these elite figures. In previous years, Morse had been among the foremost defenders of revolutionary France among the U. In part, this was because the Memoirs was lengthy, tardy, and expensive.
Stretching to nearly 1, pages across four volumes, its girth prohibited its translation and republication in the United States until In the eighteenth century, bound books remained expensive.
While certain forms of print, such as almanacs, broadsides, pamphlets, and primers, were intended to reach a broad audience, four-volume books such as the Memoirs were not among them. Despite its price, Morse hoped that the Memoirs would attract a widespread American readership. In late he unsuccessfully solicited help to publish an abridged version. Robison held a prestigious chair of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and was Secretary to the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Proofs of a Conspiracy was far more accessible, at about a third of the length and price of the Memoirs. His impressive credentials made Robison a more congenial spokesman for the Illuminati theory.
Americans could argue that ministry-financed diatribes from London or the words of a French Jesuit were not worthy of notice, but they had little reason to suspect that the Scottish were tainted by polemical anti-Jacobinism. Much like the United States, Scotland retained elements of radical, pro-revolutionary politics well into the late s. Morse continued to research and write about the Illuminati conspiracy throughout and In an extensive Thanksgiving sermon in November , he included a lengthy appendix of documents that appeared to support the conclusion that a subversive foreign conspiracy existed in the U.
Morse knew that deploying his epistemic authority would prove convincing to some readers—especially those who were politically disposed toward his conclusions. In part, this was because they were relatively cheap, ranging in price from 12 to 25 to 50 cents. His correspondence from is full of letters from acquaintances, family, friends, and fellow preachers thanking him for sending copies of his sermons.
They performed dozens of sermons and orations about the Illuminati and then published them as pamphlets that reached a broad audience. Surely No. American public discourse about the Illuminati evinced an obsession with evidence and authority. Morse and his allies emphasized that their accounts were well-authenticated by Atlantic networks of knowledge production and notable European scholars as Barruel, Robison, and Erskine.
Some of the most well-known American intellectuals and academics concurred. By eighteenth-century standards, this was persuasive evidence. This distribution not only allowed more Americans to hear about the Illuminati, but also created an echo chamber effect that bolstered its credibility by creating the appearance of multiple layers of verification and consensus.
There was good reason for discerning Americans to conclude that the Illuminati had hatched the French Revolution and were encroaching on the United States. From the moment of the disbanding, however, the myth expanded. As described in Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia , documents found in the homes of high-ranking Illuminati members like Xavier von Zwack confirmed some of the spookiest Illuminati theories, like their dreams of world domination and cultish behavior even though those documents may exaggerate the truth about the group.
Almost immediately after the Illuminati were disbanded, conspiracy theories about the group sprang up. The most famous conspiracy theories were authored by physicist John Robison in , who accused the Illuminati of infiltrating the Freemasons, and Abbe Augustin Barruel , whose history of the Jacobins promoted the theory that secret societies, including the Illuminati, were behind the French Revolution. Historians tend to see these as the first in a long line of conspiracy theories though, again, for those who believe the Illuminati run the world today, this is arguably proof of the group's power.
Later on, some of the Founding Fathers managed to stoke interest in the Illuminati in the United States. In , George Washington wrote a letter addressing the Illuminati threat he believed it had been avoided, but his mentioning it helped bolster the myth. In the panic caused by the anti-Illuminati books and sermons, Thomas Jefferson was baselessly accused of being a member of the group.
Though these early Illuminati panics fizzled out, they gave the group a patina of legitimacy that, later on, would help make a centuries-long conspiracy seem more plausible.
Conspiracy theories have always been popular in the United States, but for centuries, the Illuminati were less feared than the Freemasons. The Anti-Masonic Party was based on an opposition to the Freemasons, and though the party died out, Freemasons remained a focal point for paranoia in America.
Because the Illuminati recruited many members in Europe through Freemason lodges, the two groups are often confused for each other. To some degree, Freemason paranoia grew out of the Freemasons' influence in the United States. Many Founding Fathers were members, after all.
And some key American symbols may have been derived from the Freemasons: There's a strong argument that the floating eye on the dollar, the Eye of Providence above a pyramid, comes from Freemasonry. There's also an argument that it was meant as a Christian symbol; the only thing we know for certain is that it has nothing to do with the Bavarian Illuminati.
That early Freemason paranoia can help us understand the conspiracy theories about the Illluminati today. The Illuminati never completely disappeared from popular culture — it was always burbling in the background. But in the mids, the Illuminati made a marked comeback thanks to a literary trilogy that gave the group the simultaneously spooky and laughable image it holds today. This trilogy became a countercultural touchstone, and its intermingling of real research — Weishaupt, the founder of the real Illuminati, is a character — with fantasy helped put the Illuminati back on the radar.
You can be both a serious conspiracy theorist and joke about it. From there, the Illuminati became a periodic staple of both popular culture — as in Dan Brown's massively popular novel Angels and Demons — and various subcultures, where the group is often intermingled with Satanism, alien myths, and other ideas that would have been totally foreign to the real Bavarian Illuminati.
Uscinski clarifies that most Americans today don't actually believe in the Illuminati. In a survey of conspiracy theories he conducted in , he says zero people claimed that groups like Freemasons or Illuminati were controlling politics. We also have an exceptional range of rare spy books, including many signed first editions. We all have valuable spy skills - your mission is to discover yours. By John Hunt. Read mORE News. Shop Now. Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Something went wrong while submitting the form. In the past few years, she says, there have been concerted attempts by the far- right to organise people around specific local issues. And they would gather members into those groups, local members, and they would pretty much just pepper the groups in disinformation and hate about migrants And there was a kind of a bubbling anti-5G community in Ireland over the past couple years.
And then when the pandemic struck they all came together under this one Covid narrative. Conspiracy theories have always existed, says Gallagher. Abbie Richards is an American climate-change researcher who has become something of an anti-disinformation campaigner on Twitter and TikTok. She recently produced a graph explaining different conspiracy theories in a pyramid, from the real to the most malign.
It includes a belief that global warming is a hoax, that chemicals are dispersed to placate the population, and that Covid is made in a lab. The pandemic, she says, has provided particularly fertile ground for conspiracy theories. Richards says she is often struck by the fact that some of the conspiracy theorists she engages with have similar fears about the world to her own but have come to very different conclusions about their causes.
Gallagher also thinks conspiracy theories are an extreme reaction to very real concerns people have. Ultimately, a belief that a cabal of all-powerful elites can control everything is a more comforting solution to these problems than a messy narrative involving bureaucratic ineptitude, existential chaos and a complex system of class bias.
Consumers of conspiracy theories become strangely credulous. If you spend time looking at anti-lockdown threads on Telegram or Facebook, you can see how people could easily slide from a simple belief that the lockdown is too extreme, to a belief that the pandemic was faked to sell pharmaceuticals, to a belief that the disease itself was designed in a lab so that multinationals could tinker with our DNA via a fake vaccine.
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