Every mystic degrades in politics and all politics is divided into racketeering. If one believes in the books, and the articles which have been devoted in recent years to the issue, Freemasonry has reached the final stage of an inexorable decline. Yet the French Freemasonry also displays exuberant health, staffing up - while those of Anglo-Saxon world melt like snow in the sun - spread over fifteen Obediences - another French exception! The grumpy - or cynics, or lucid - would point out that success is not incompatible with the decline: the more networks exist and are powerful, more business are successful.
This vision is legitimately based on irrefutable facts but it is partial. Freemasonry is also a heaven of spirituality where some of our contemporaries disillusioned about the major monotheistic revelations proceed in their quest for the sacred and the self-knowledge.
This complexity is reflected since the beginning. Freemasonry is an English creation of the early eighteenth century, in 1717. She kept the marks of its origin and its age. The Anglican religion close to Protestantism, have not the prejudices of the Catholicism against money. It does not separate spiritual quest from profit and taste. The financial success of the individual is a proof of his election. The relational networks like Freemasonry in Lutheran countries establish the social bond forged in the Latin countries, for all its pomp and works, by the Catholic religion. (Luthero below)
The eighteenth century is the century of enlightenment and reason. But it is also that of the Enlightenment, the occult, Kabbalah revisited, a century when Mesmer was also well-known as Voltaire. On his arrival in France, in 1725, Freemasonry is doubly foreign. It contributes to development in our country of individualism, rationalism, and anti-clericalism inherited from Luther. As the Jansenism, it will be one of those in the French Protestantism that rise in rivalry to the Catholic Church. But this is not the great revolutionary machinery that magnify a brilliantly Alexandre Dumas, or that denounce the polemicists monarchists.
Before 1789, Brother Joseph de Maistre - future providential theorist of the counter-revolution – looks a more active brother than even Voltaire. By dint of writing horrible things, they eventually arrive. Freemasonry became the "Church" of the French Republic between 1870 and 1914. His power is at its zenith.
Organized, ideological and political. She inspires all the major liberal laws of the Third Republic. She cocked his arm against "clericalism". She defended Dreyfus courageously (Dreyfus above). She lives its Austerlitz in 1905, when the separation of church and state. She also became entangled in his "Spanish guêpier" with the case files that uncover a petrified pubic opinion that Catholic officers are "flagged" as criminals. Freemasonry has won the ideological and political war. The trouble starts. The intoxication of power. The intellectual drying. The racketeering. On February 6, 1934, anti-Republican demonstrators shout "Down with thieves. Behind Stavisky is Freemasonry that is targeted.
After the Vichy repression, Freemasonry believes resuming the thread of his history gilded with the Fourth Republic. His parliamentary networks give her that illusion. With De Gaulle, the Freemason king finds himself naked. The marginalization of Parliament in the decision making process of the state implies that of Freemasonry. The brothers hardly inspire the legislature, if not on manners, such as the contraception issue authorized in 1967 under the leadership of the freemason Lucien Neuwirth. (Neuwirth below)
The historical role of Freemasonry in France is completed. Business remain. The racketeer crisis find Freemasonry as impoverished - mutatis mutandis- as the Catholic Church against the pedophile priests. Between the temptation to cover up scandals in order not to tarnish the institution and the need for eradication of black sheep, we should not be confused with the herd. But the crisis of Freemasonry is much deeper. Since the eighteenth century, its members live as the frontline of progressivism against conservatism. However, since the 1970s, the new protest movements, feminist, antiracist, multiculturalists bypass freemasonry by the left. Freemasonry remains a men's club, for whom secularism and equality remain the cardinal values.
Faced with this onslaught of political correctness coming from the United States, which is really the opposite of the values of the Enlightenment rationalists, the institutional leaders, willingly or unwillingly, hesitate with the fear of "mediocrity," but many brothers question themselves in silence, and quietly break. Some arrive, others leave, and each finding what he looked for, a quest for the esoteric, for hold up its "business", for rites of initiation into a desecrated society, which looks more and more like a Spanish inn.
