Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival

6. The Holy King

6 The Holy King Before looking any further at the growth of occult movements in France it would be helpful to examine the general condition of the country as it developed in the years after 18I 5. Mter the debacle of that year the monarchy returned in the person of the obese Louis XVIII, brother of the lucklessLouis XVI, an astute man of some personal charm, but a reactionary unaware of the real crisisthat faced his country-a crisisofpurpose, resulting from the events of the previous thirty-six years. The ideals of the Revolution had burnt themselves out; the brief imperial glory of the Napoleonic years had vanished with the exiled emperor. For the next half-century France was to be ruled by a series ofinadequate monarchs. It was also to be haunted by ghosts. First there was the ghost of Napoleon; for, barely had he vanished to St. Helena before his legend began to grow, exercising a powerful hidden influence on the destiny of France. But there was also another legend that flourished during these years-the legend that the Dauphin, son of the decapitated Louis XVI, had not been killed during the revolution, but had survived and was now entitled to claim the throne as Louis XVII. The movement that gathered around this legend had this in common with many of the other cults that flourished at this time: that it began as a political movement and ended as a quasi-mystical one. The same thing happened in the case of the movement based on the economic ideas of Saint-Simon, which became a religion with its own Pope.! The 'Saviours ofLouis XVII', as the royalist movement came to be called, was backed by a strange and powerful mythology. One of the beliefsheld by its more fanatical proponents was that the Revolution and the execution of Louis XVI were a form 62 Bliphas Levi andthe French Occult Revival of revenge taken by the Templars on the descendant of the King who had been responsiblefor the execution ofthe Templar Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, in the fourteenth century. According to this theory the freemasonic movement was a resurrection of the Templar order. These romantic ideas may have owed something to the Abbe Barruel. Many candidates offered themselves as pretenders to the throne, but the most persuasivewas Charles Edouard Naundorff, who styled himself the Due de Normandie and bore a striking resemblance to his alleged father, Louis XVI. He arrived from Prussiain the early 1830Sand lived in France until 1836 when he was banished by Louis Philippe. He sought refuge in England, where he lived for a time at Camberwell. He died in 1845 at Delft, in Holland, and was buried as Louis XVII. It is significant that Naundorff was also a religious visionary. He wrote a number of books allegedly under divine inspiration, one of which was entitled The Heavenly Doctrine oftheLordJesus Christ. He left behind one son, Charles Guilluame, who continued the claim and lived until the end of the nineteenth century. For many years the Naundorffist cause was represented by a weekly newspaper. The purpose of the more extreme elements in the royalist movement went beyond the mere perpetuation ofthe legitimate line. They saw France as the centre of a new world order based on the institution of monarchy and ordained by providence. There appeared a number of sects holding these beliefs, the two main ones being led by Ganneau and Eugene Vintras. Ganneau's sect was short-lived, but that of Vintras survived to undergo a strange metamorphosis. Vintras himself was one of the most extraordinary of the many bizarre figures of this era, and his career isworth examining in some detail. His full name was Pierre Michel Eugene Vintras, and he was born in 1807 at Bayeux, in Normandy, to poor and devout parents. Though he acquired little education, he was endowed with great native intelligence and shrewdness which enabled him to rise from his poor background to the extent ofbecoming in 1839, foreman-manager of a small cardboard-box factory at Tilly-sur-Seule. It was also in 1839 that he met the man who was to start him on the strange road that he subsequently followed. The man was Ferdinand Geoffroi, a rascally notary who was one of The Holy King Naundorff's most fervent supporters, Vintras, who already showed signs ofa mystical turn ofmind, was enthused by Geoffroi 's elevated...