Weimar Politics in the Age of the French Revolution: Goethe and the Spectre of Illuminati Conspiracy

W. DANIEL WILSON Weimar Politics in the Age of the French Revolution: Goethe and the Spectre of Illuminati Conspiracy Adam Weishaupt is really the father of Bolshevism — not Karl Marx. [...] Thejacobins of the French Revolution were controlled by the Bavarian Illuminati. [...] The "Conspiracy" today controls communism.1 These wild notions were pronounced in an American right-wing journal in 1965. Equally bizarre are the claims by Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, that the German Illuminati of the eighteenth century were ultimately responsible for "everything in the way of 'security' legislation, from the first Workmen's Compensation Acts under Bismarck to the latest Medicare monstrosity under Lyndon Johnson," as well as centralized banking, a graduated personal income tax, both World Wars, the Russian Revolution, the expansion of Communism, the breakup of colonial empires, and the formation of the United Nations.2 The seeds of this theory were sown in the period of the French Revolution itself; in the words of one of its most rabid adherents, in 1793: Nicht die Franzosen sind [...] die eigentlichen Erfinder dieses großen Projects, die Welt umzukehren; diese Ehre kommt den Deutschen zu. [...] [D]en Franzosen gehört nur die Ehre daß sie mit der Ausführung den Anfang gemacht haben. [...] Aus dem in Deutschland entstandenen, und noch ganz und gar nicht erloschenen, sondern nur Verborgenen und um desto gefährlicher sein Wesen treibenden Illuminatismus sind also die Comités politiques entstanden, die dem Jacobinerclubb sein Daseyn gegeben haben.3 The Germans have been accused of many things, often with good reason, but the idea that they instigated the French Revolution evokes only ridicule in most of us today. But this idea stands out from the host of modern conspiracy theories because of its ideological impact: it played a major role in 164 W. Daniel Wilson nineteenth-century politics, and the Nazis were guided by it in their persecution of Freemasons.4 In fact, it can even be found haunting the pages of reputable modern scholarship, two hundred years after the beginning of the Revolution.5 More important for our purposes, it was one of the most important conservative discourses of the revolutionary period itself. My topic is the extent to which this theory infected and frightened the literary elite, some of whom had themselves been Illuminati, and what this phenomenon means for our understanding of subjectivity, especially in times of repression. Adam Weishaupt and his followers were the subject of intense debate in Germany in the late 1780s and the 1790s. He founded the secret society of Llluminaten at Ingolstadt in 1776; within a fewyears it had grown to over two thousand members, not only in Bavaria but in Northern Germany and the Rhineland. While generally the goals of the Illuminati were of a broadly Enlightened and moral-pedagogic nature, some of their writings pointed the way to an eradication of the state: "[...] Fürsten und Nationen werden ohne Gewaltthätigkeit von der Erde verschwinden," Weishaupt wrote in a speech meant only for the highest ranks of the order. Such statements were less radical than they seemed to outsiders, since Illuminati tactics involved a very long-term process of moral improvement — their goals were not revolutionary , but rather an expression of the illusionary ideal of enlightened absolutism: moral influence on an absolutist ruler, resulting in reform ('revolution from above').7 Still, the Illuminati operated by infiltrating the government, clandestinely recruiting (often through Masonic lodges) the highest civil servants and even rulers, and this process seemed very conspiratory. When the Illuminati were suppressed by the Bavarian and other governments in 1784-1785, and when some confiscated documents were published in 1786 and 1787, most Germans were stunned at what they felt was a plot against the political and social order; some even predicted a revolution led by Illuminati.8 When the French Revolution did break out in 1789, conservatives and even moderates almost automatically associated the Illuminati with it.9 Two of the German conspiracy theorists later claimed that when they heard the news of the storming of the Bastille, they looked at each other and said in unison : "Das ist das Werk der 44 [= der llluminaten],"10 and such conclusions hardly...