On June 7, 2009 Trinity Sunday, Michel Montvert submits Bosch’s apologia, appendices and accompanying annotations to the editor of the Travaux du Grand Orient, where they are published a week later. Dedicated to “Brother Manuel Albeniz, martyred at the altar of dogma and political expediency,” the controversial document is reprinted in the prestigious Proceedings of the International Academy of Arts. Excerpts are showcased in an article penned by Montvert, The Trowel and the Cross -- Art and Heresy at the Dawn of Enlightenment. Bosch’s testament is also reprinted in Secret Architectures, a scholarly Masonic publication circulated worldwide.
Predictably, Le Calvaire fights back. Alleging that a “an anti-Christian cabal” is at the root of “this latest expedition into the distant past by imaginative counterfeiters,” the unsigned editorial blames “the subversive forces of secularism, abetted by Marxists, Israelites and Freemasons for this latest assault on the good name of the Church.”
The rhetoric sounds oddly familiar. Montvert swears he’s heard that sequence of words before. Then he remembers. Bishop Touvier. But in print, his words take on an ominous hue. This is not the spur-of-the-moment outburst of an angry man set afire in the heat of debate. The enshrinement of platitudes in the pages of an influential ecclesiastical publication, Montvert concludes, hints at a new phase in the war of ideas. Is he being warned? Threatened?
On July 8, on the eve of a global economic summit in Italy, Pope Benedict XVI lashes out at capitalism, calling it, “nearsighted and short on ethics.” The pontiff is right. The history of human society is the history of class struggle and capitalism, the offspring of greed, wholly dependent on the exploitation of the masses for the enrichment of a few. But His Holiness says nothing about the myopia of religion or the immense wealth the Vatican has amassed over the centuries, much of it the spoils of wars -- at least nine Crusades and the Holy Inquisition -- and booty siphoned off during the Second World War.
On July 14, on the 220th anniversary of the French Revolution, Jacques Lelouch, Grand Master of the Grand Orient of France, speaks to the nation. His address, a history lesson for the ages, is broadcast as is custom on French TV, aired on radio and carried by the leading dailies. Championing the cause of secularism, Lelouch reminds his fellow Frenchmen of the events that took the country from serfdom to democracy and he uses the occasion to throw a well timed jab at Bishop Touvier and at the Catholic Church, an institution that maligned and persecuted Freemasons for three hundred years. He gallantly refrains from naming the bishop. He is less gracious with the Church. France’s largely secular society openly delights in his irreverence.
“A widely circulated caricature dated 1787, two years before the storming of the Bastille, shows a monkey -- the king -- asking the fowl in the yard (the people) in what sauce they would like to be cooked.
“Another famous French pre-revolutionary political cartoon depicts a rakish nobleman and a smiling, overfed cleric riding on the back of an old, exhausted peasant. The metaphor, concise and painfully real, may have inspired French philosopher and encyclopedist, Denis Diderot, who wrote, “Superstition is more harmful than atheism,” to exclaim, uncharitably but to the delight of many Frenchmen, “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
“This was the twilight of the 18th century, the dawning of Enlightenment, and France was tired of the ancient and traditional order in which the king is commander in chief, judge, jury and executioner, and Frenchmen were wary of a system that called for the nobility to defend the nation with its sword, the clergy to pray for victory while engaging in political intrigue and cavorting with women of ill repute, and the rabble to toil and pay merciless taxes until they dropped. The king’s power was absolute, limitless and issued from God himself. But this king -- Louis XVI -- was an inept military strategist. His officers had lapsed into mediocrity and the Church, fat and venal, made a mockery of religion. The clergy paid no taxes but charged tolls on behalf of the crown, took their cut, and sold indulgences and first-class passage to paradise, with much of the gold they collected diverted and adding to the personal fortunes of many princes of the Church. The commoners -- peasants and bourgeois alike -- crushed by unfair and exorbitant levies, were fuming. Soon, they would open the shutters wide, lean out their windows and shout, ‘We’re mad as hell and we won’t take it anymore….’
“Talking about the French Revolution, informally but factually and rationally, and without resorting to trendy banalities, is a daunting and humbling task. It’s made all the more difficult by the sheer complexity of this event, the contradictory or falsified accounts of its origins, the role of assorted players and by the myths, half-truths and distracting anecdotes that have since entered public consciousness. For these reasons, and given my own views on the subject, this talk will be neither exhaustive nor entirely dispassionate. In the interest of time and decorum, I will focus on the root causes of this history-altering affair -- which I consider more significant than the incidents that marked it. Owing the gravity of recent happenings, I will unavoidably veer off my prepared statement, not to take needless detours, but to call attention to these troubling distractions.
“About a month ago, in response to a series of widely circulated documents detailing the secret life and provocative work of a legendary artist, and in anticipation of this yearly communication by the Grand Orient, a man unable to subdue his passions but cloaking himself in anonymity, told an untruth in the press. He alleged without a shred of verifiable evidence that Jews and Freemasons are plotting to sully the reputation of the Catholic Church. On this day of remembrance, he would have you believe that the French Revolution, to which we owe our enduring civil liberties, among them freedom of conscience and expression, and the radical separation of Church and State, was an outrage masterminded by Jewish financiers, Freemasons, degenerate philosophers and other irreligious libertines. It was not, as every clear-headed Frenchman knows. Nor was the regrettable violence that followed the storming of the Bastille a grotesque act of barbarism against Christian values, as this fellow citizen asserts. Yes, many innocent heads rolled during the two–year frenzy that followed. Alas, this same fellow-citizen, in defiance of fact and against all reason, denies that the uprising was an outburst of irrepressible rage against centuries of misery and oppression. Nor can he countenance the notion that the Revolution lifted the yoke of feudalism from the bone-wearied backs of France’s serfs and vassals, or that it helped rid France of a dissolute and manipulative clergy. It is easy to label as murder the beheading of two royal idlers who bankrupted France while they wined, dined, gambled, gathered in prayer, made war, partied and cheered their dogs on helpless foxes. It takes infinitely more courage and integrity to concede that revolution is a process, not an isolated occurrence and, in the case of France, that it was the culmination of a trend whose seeds -- the burgeoning concepts of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, universal suffrage and the abolition of absolute monarchy -- had been sown long before the conflagration.
“A century earlier, in a letter to Louis XIV, François Fénelon, the king’s almoner and a writer well known to French school children, wrote:
‘Sire: For thirty years your ministers have violated all the ancient laws in the state so as to enhance your power. They have increased your revenues and your expenditures to the infinite and impoverished all of France for the sake of your luxury at court. They have made your name odious. Meanwhile, your people are starving. Sedition is spreading and you are reduced to either letting it spread unpunished or resorting to massacring the people that you have driven to desperation.’
“A sharp critic of the monarchy, Fénelon was dismissed by the king for uttering truths the king did not want to hear. A hundred years later, under the ham-fisted reign of Louis XVI, the long simmering embers of poverty and despair set fire to the Revolution. Two centuries later, George Orwell defined freedom as ‘the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.’ History has a habit of repeating itself when the truth is recklessly ignored –- or distorted by the minions of reactionary ideology.
“Now, this fellow citizen’s contempt for Christian denominations other than his own assumes subtler hues when it comes to Jews. His brand of anti-Semitism is abstruse and furtive, tempered no doubt by an agonizing reality: Anti-Semitism is no longer as politically correct as it was, say, during the Inquisition, the Dreyfus Affair or at the height of the German occupation, when his family applauded the Nazi onslaught, wined and dined the enemy and cheered on Hitler’s Final Solution.
“His antipathy toward Jews, encoded and tenacious, predates him. The Dreyfus Affair, which dragged for nearly ten years, aroused passions and prejudices that divided France and very nearly triggered a civil war. An epic of treachery, intimidation, fraud, and injustice, it revived and widened the philosophical rifts that polarize the French in times of unrest and discontent: the right against the left, the aristocracy against the proletariat, the clerical elite against the secular masses, anti-Semites against liberals and freethinkers, the Church against Freemasons. The same antithetical ideologies polarized the French during the Revolution, the German occupation and the wars of Algeria and Indochina.
“The ‘Affair,’ as it is still referred to, began as a banal case of espionage during which French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was arrested on the flimsiest evidence, which included forged documents, found guilty by a collusive kangaroo court and condemned to deportation and life imprisonment in a ‘fortified compound,’ a sinister euphemism for the hell hole that Devil’s Island would prove to be. Dreyfus was publicly stripped of his rank and his saber broken in half as crowds shrieked ‘Death to Jews! Death to the traitor!’ After enduring five years of incarceration in one of the world’s most infamous penal colonies, Captain Dreyfus was first pardoned, thanks to the tireless efforts of Emile Zola. The Supreme Court later exonerated him.
“Dreyfus, who attended Zola’s entombment at the Pantheon, was shot and slightly wounded by a French journalist, a royalist and a pious Catholic whose acquittal following a hasty trial added to the public bile. Unmoved by a growing wave of repugnance sweeping France, most politicians continued to insinuate that Dreyfus was guilty, or they aligned themselves with factions opposed to his rehabilitation in the court of public opinion, among them the Catholic Church. Fresh rumors were cooked up and circulated to perpetuate and legitimize further antagonism toward the officer’s defenders.
“On more than one occasion, our fellow citizen has accused Freemasons of engineering Dreyfus’ release. He continues to insist in casual conversation that his innocence has never been proven.
“What this citizen has no way of knowing -- or could be consciously disregarding -- is that Masonic lodges, not quite ready to open their doors to Jews at the time, had retreated behind their statutory shield during the ‘Affair.’ The founding principles of modern Freemasonry firmly oppose interference in matters of state. Sympathizing with Dreyfus, let alone negotiating on his behalf, would have violated Masonic protocols and envenomed the historic antipathy of the Church -- which was openly anti-Semitic and fiercely anti-Dreyfus -- toward the fraternity. Thus, Freemasons not only could not intervene, they responded with diffidence and irresolution in the face of gross injustice; and the Widow’s Son was immolated, once again, at the altar of political expediency.
“The moral of this tale: History is written by historians. It is often falsified in the classroom, further distorted by subjective amateurs wed to ideology, not fact, and hopelessly vulgarized by filmmakers who take liberties on the assumption that fact somehow needs to be embellished by fantasy.
“The French Revolution was an extraordinarily complex affair, ignited by the antagonisms between the first two Estates, a bloated aristocracy and a corrupt and gluttonous clergy, and the third Estate, the crushing mass of dirt-poor, uneducated and downtrodden people whose antagonism was fueled by decades of abuse and frustration.
“Much like the Russian Revolution, which had already begun to simmer, the French Revolution was a genuine insurrection born from centuries of mismanagement, corruption, oppression and exploitation of the people by small, all-powerful and brutal oligarchies.
“In 1789 France was a nation of twenty-six million. Society was made up of three distinct and grossly unequal groups. At the top was the aristocracy of the sword (some 500,000 people or about two percent of the population) families close to the throne, hangers-on and slackers. Next was the petty nobility, composed of provincial gentlemen of lesser means but matching affectation and greed, and the nouveaux-riches nobility, the parvenus, those who bought nobility titles but who, despite their wealth, were scorned by the bluebloods for their plebeian origins.
“The second tier was the clergy –- 120,000 strong, among them one hundred and thirty-nine bishops, also divided between high clergy (members of the aristocracy) and the common clergy -- both corrupt, depraved and decadent.
“Last was the Third Estate, the masses -- ninety-eight percent -- representing day laborers, farmers, peasants, craftsmen and a petite bourgeoisie composed of bankers, lawyers and trades people.
“The king’s power was absolute, limitless and issued from no less an authority than God. The king hired and fired his cabinet at will. All power was centralized in Paris and in the hands of Louis XVI, a gutless kinglet who would have much preferred to fly kites or repair locks than govern. Injustice, ineptitude and fraudulence were rampant. Louis’s remedy? He tightened the reins of power and subjected France to the kind of despotism then in vogue in Russia, Austria and Prussia.
“This was the twilight of the 18th century, the era of Enlightenment, and France was tired and wary of the ancient and traditional order in which the king reigned supreme, a parasitic clergy prayed for victory, and the rabble toiled and paid crippling taxes until they dropped. But this king was a bungling military strategist, his officers were inept and his spiritual advisers, fat and crooked, made a mockery of religion.
“Louis’ prime minister, Jacques Necker, attempted to restore France’s finances, severely crippled by its participation in America’s war of independence. He suggested cutting the entitlements that the nobility received tax free from the crown. Threatened by Necker’s sound but draconian scheme, the king’s freeloaders, secular and religious, conspired against the prime minister and he was sidelined. Other fiscal reforms failed to repair the immense and growing gash in the public treasury. The nobles were not only unwilling to part with their stipends, they wanted to retain their political clout and dominance in society. The petty nobility, the bourgeoisie and the people, resenting their deprivations, sought to improve their lot and promulgate their rights. Rocked by scandals -- sex and fraud -- the high clergy was in a pitiful state. Resentful, but no less debauched, the low clergy was now ready to rebel against their superiors.
“Meanwhile, philosophers, writers, scientists –- Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Saint-Simon and Lavoisier -- saw in revolution a weapon against the despotism of absolute monarchy and the clergy’s fanaticism and cupidity.
“The ensuing uprising was less an act of insubordination against dictatorship than an insurrection against a grotesque class disparity between the haves and the have not. It was a social, not a political movement that purged France of hereditary kings and parasitical clergy. Given sufficient impetus, social movements eventually prevail.
“The economic crisis sweeping France accentuated the inequality between the classes. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Thousands died of hunger. It was obvious to most that France could not escape revolution. Would it be short or protracted, violent or peaceful? Would much needed reforms forestall the inevitable? Only the king, his queen, the blue-bloods, the knights and the princes of the Church could answer that, but they were all opposed to change.
“Louis hid behind his neurotic piety (and a bad case of phimosis). He neglected his wife in favor of hunting and tinkering with locks and clocks. He was drawn neither by royal duty, love, sex, politics, nor war, which he entrusted to pompous and ham-fisted generals. Inattentive to fact, deaf to reason, unwilling to heed advice, incapable of making decisions on his own, he took solace in his wife’s opinion of him:
‘Pauvre homme, il est bon -- poor man, he is kind.’
“Goodness in 1789 was apparently not enough. Marie-Antoinette, a spendthrift with a colossal disregard for the well being of her people, her reputation further sullied by the famous Necklace Affair and allegations of infidelity, became not only unpopular but loathed. The affair of the diamond necklace, you all have learned in school, was a mysterious and sordid incident involving Marie Antoinette, a cardinal, a con artist -- the famous charlatan Cagliostro, better known as Joseph Balsamo -- and a prostitute. The queen, whose reputation was already tarnished by gossip and scandal, was implicated in a crime that further increased the French people’s disillusionment with the monarchy.
“A propos of the famous brioche quote, it's a myth. Marie-Antoinette was so out of touch with the lives of her subjects that she had no way of knowing whether they dined on moldy bread, escargots or filet mignon. Revisionists of all stripes have attempted to rehabilitate the queen -- or at least lend her a human visage. She was in fact a pretentious scatterbrain and a squanderer who, with her cuckold husband Louis' approval, ruined France. Some have argued that she was tried on trumped up charges. Indeed, Marie-Antoinette's trial had nothing to do with the legal definition of treason but everything to do with treachery, meaning deceitfulness, disloyalty and duplicity. Her accusers fittingly charged her (and Louis) with unscrupulousness; corruption; embezzlement; cruelty; a perverse disregard for the well being of the people; profligacy; avarice; squandering the national treasury; and when all was lost, flight to avoid prosecution.
“Modern France can well understand the hatred, the rage Louis and Marie-Antoinette’s bankrupt, abject, merciless and dehumanizing reign provoked among the people. Some, among them the fellow citizen I keep mentioning but will not name, are still fixated on the royal heads that rolled into the wicker basket but they have no memory of the despair of the wretched masses or of the thousands of Lettres de Cachet, signed by the King and countersigned by princes of the Church, which sent innocent people, among them Huguenots, Jews, nonconformists and dissenters into exile or to the gallows.
“Much of the world has come to regard royalty as an anachronism, if not an obscenity. Perhaps evolution will endow the human brain with the capacity to regard organized religion as yet another form of entrapment by an elite engaged in its own preservation, as were the dynasties of thugs who called themselves kings. I know that the fellow citizen to whom I’ve been referring all along will recoil at the thought, but tradition is a poor excuse for the perpetuation of costly eccentricities. Time has come to recognize that what gives dignity to one individual ensures the dignity of all.
“In parting, Hieronymus Bosch, the artist behind the recent spasm of priestly rancor, said it all in his paintings five centuries ago. I urge my Fellow Freemasons and the public at large to discover what a mind free of absurd beliefs, an unerring eye, an attentive ear and a heart dedicated to knowledge and justice can do to make the world look at itself. Vive la France. Vive la République. Vive la Laïcité.”
Grand Master Lelouch’s nationally televised speech triggers instant and feverish interest in Hieronymus Bosch. People flock to museums around Europe to gawk at his fantastical creations. Reproductions of his work sell in record numbers. The Louvre contacts the El Prado in Madrid, asking it to grant the temporary loan of several of his masterpieces. Books about the Flemish master fly off the shelves.
Lelouch’s speech also stirs France’s republican soul, eliciting editorials, essays and political cartoons eulogizing the innovative and civilizing changes brought on by the Revolution. Several newspapers, among them Le Monde, Libération and L’Humanité, publish retrospectives extolling secularism and urging untiring vigilance against the intrusion of the Church into affairs of state.
Archbishop Trente-Trois is apoplectic. He orders Le Calvaire “not to engage the enemy.” He instructs priests throughout France to steer clear of the controversy and directs them to keep their sermons pastoral. He then convenes an emergency consistory. Father Hubert François de Ravaillac, Opus Dei’s and the Knights of Malta’s most promising star, will be all ears.