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ABBÉ BARRUEL, SJ, WILLIAM TAYLOR, AND THE PELICAN BUSINESS
David Chandler
1998 is a good year to remember Abbé Augustin Barruel (1741-
1820), for it was in 1798 that he published the final volumes of his
Mémoires Pour Servir A L’Histoire Du Jacobinisme, one of the defining
works of that important decade. Forced into London exile by the
Revolution, he was motivated by a deep hatred of the Enlightenment,
which—as he understood events—had given birth to the Revolution. That
hatred inspired him to produce in the Mémoires (1797-8) a
comprehensive, if hardly neutral, history of the movement, which he
explained as a plot or conspiracy hatched by a handful of individuals
(Voltaire prominent among them) to destroy Christianity, dethrone
kings and demolish existing social structures. Barruel was not, of
course, the first to make these charges—Burke had prepared the way
with his famous Reflections (1790), and the dying Burke gave the
Mémoires his blessing —but he was the first to present them in a
fully developed historical context and his ‘evidence’ was on a quite
unprecedented scale.
This points to something rather paradoxical about the Mémoires. Barruel became the
centre of a vast witch-hunt, his alarmist theories briefly provoking what may be
reasonably called a ‘Jacobins-under-the bed’ scare, y
et the manner in which he presented these theories was, or affected to be, perfectly
sane and rational. Quite possibly he had learned from the ‘Jacobin’ response to Burke,
which almost inevitably commented on the emotiona
l, unreasonable style of the Reflections; certainly he felt that he could take on the
Enlightenment with its own favourite weapon of Reason. Barruel’s tactic was to cite
document after document with a commentary that effe
ctively said ‘isn’t this perfectly clear (and damning)?’ The constructed reader was
that non-existent entity, a political neutral, who might (very reasonably) doubt some
of Barruel’s inferences, but who would eventually b
e overwhelmed by the sheer weight of evidence against the Enlightenment. This strategy
was safe enough, given the temper of the times, though deliberate misreading was
obviously possible. Indeed one of Barruel’s most famo
us readers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, read the Mémoires as a handy guide to Enlightenment
thought .
I am concerned here with the British reception of Barruel’s work. The fact that
Burke’s Reflections inspired a massive ‘Jacobin’ response in 1791 while Barruel’s
Mémoires (quickly translated into English) were largely
ignored by British radicals in 1797-8 is a telling demonstration of how much had
changed in the interim . Indeed the only serious challenge to Barruel’s arguments came
from William Taylor of Norwich (1765-1836), and that
was from within the anonymous pages of the Monthly Review. Nevertheless, this was
heavyweight opposition. The Monthly Review was easily the most successful of the
influential reviewing periodicals, and Taylor was the fin
est reviewer of the decade . Taylor’s speciality, moreover, was reading against the
grain . The first volume of the Mémoires had in fact been reviewed favourably in the
Monthly Review by another reviewer, Charles Butler (
1750-1832) . It was only after the second and third volumes had appeared that the work
was transferred to Taylor. This was unusual, but it can be assumed that Ralph
Griffiths, the editor, was unwilling to have the traditi
onally liberal Monthly Review express any further support for Barruel. Taylor’s long
review of the second and third volumes appeared in an Appendix published in May 1798 .
His criticism exasperated Barruel, who wrote a lo
ng letter to Griffiths on 20 June. Griffiths refused to publish the letter, but did
(as was his wont) allow Taylor to respond to it . Taylor’s brief reply was
unapologetic and suggested a willingness on his part to contin
ue the dispute: ‘The Abbé ... threatens to denounce us as illuminated: he is at full
liberty to accuse or compliment us by such a description’ . Barruel promptly added
‘Observations Sur Quelques Articles Du Monthly Review
’ to the fourth volume of the Mémoires. Taylor gave this volume another long review in
an Appendix published in January 1799 . He also reviewed translations, abridgements,
and replies to the Mémoires, but these were brief
notices, adding little to the position developed in the two principal reviews.
Understanding Taylor’s response to Barruel requires some knowledge of his own
religious background. He was raised in a Unitarian household, and sent to a school run
by the famous Unitarian educational theorist, Anna L
etitia Barbauld. As a young man he took part in the efforts of Protestant dissenters
to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts. He was well aware that a particular grievance
of Protestant dissenters was the fact that these
Acts placed them on a par with Catholics, moreover that no group was more galled by
this than the Unitarians, who regarded their ‘rational’ faith as diametrically opposed
to Catholic ‘superstition’. As Taylor’s thinking a
bout religion developed under the influence of Hume in the 1790s, however, he came to
value the idea of an ‘established’, unified Church. Religion, he believed, should not
be judged in terms of its ‘truth’ or ‘error’—that
could only lead to endless controversy —but rather as its practical effects tended to
social harmony or discord. A unified Church, its doctrines and forms of worship
adjusted to the desires and needs of the vast majority
of any population, was most conducive to this end. But two classes of people would
always position themselves outside this: those who believed much more, or much less,
than the ‘orthodox’ norm. The former would attempt t
o draw the body of the people towards ‘superstition’, the latter towards irreligion.
However both were best left alone, as demonstrations of intolerance are always
counterproductive .
In his first review Taylor drew a sharp distinction between the relevance
Barruel’s name-calling might have in countries where Catholicism was the ‘orthodox’
norm, and in Britain, where Catholicism was part of the ‘su
perstitious’ fringe. Writing in England, as the champion of Christianity and the
political status quo, Barruel had naturally downplayed his own Catholicism. Taylor
responded by stressing Barruel’s party interests. By way
of restoring balance he hinted immediately that whatever the threat from ‘atheist’
conspiracies there was also a threat from the ‘superstitious’ side:
the Jesuits, notwithstanding their nominal suppression, have continued to receive
proselytes, and maintain to this day throughout Europe a silent concert in behalf of
ecclesiastical despotism and popular credulity. (XXV,
501)
And he concluded his second review by again warning of the ‘danger from
catholicism, and of the religious ascendency of jesuits in this country’ (XXVII, 523).
Taylor’s reviews took the form of a larger and more sophist
icated balancing gesture, however. He probed Barruel’s ‘indiscriminating hostility’
(XXVII, 513) to show that he had loosely categorised together persons and groups from
both sides of ‘orthodoxy’ as ‘atheists’: ‘with the
good Abbé, whatever is not popery is atheism’ (XXV, 505). Understanding that
‘orthodoxy’ was actually threatened from two sides—as it always had been—meant that
Barruel’s theory of a single great conspiracy was fundamenta
lly flawed. Rather there were at least two ‘conspiracies’ aiming at different ends.
The dispute was not carried on in these abstract terms, and it will be of some
interest now to examine a specific point of contention: one that is typical and
revealing, that involves Oxford, and that has long stood i
n need of scholarly attention. Barruel identified one of his main enemies as
Freemasonry. He surveyed the history of Masonry and maintained that its higher
mysteries had always been of an atheist and republican cast. Tayl
or disagreed, arguing that Masonry was developed by ‘professors of occult science’
(XXV, 502), in other words the ultra-superstitious. He accepted that in the eighteenth
century the French Lodges had adopted the character
ascribed to them by Barruel, but he urged that this be understood simply as a
reflection of the period. There was no intrinsic relationship between Masonry and
advanced Enlightenment thought, and Taylor offered evidence
that in the seventeenth century the English Lodges had shown ‘an excessive zeal for
regal power, and a disloyal leaning towards Popery’ (XXV, 503). One of the sources he
cited was Friedrich Nicolai’s Versuch über die Besc
huldigungen welche dem Tempelherrenorden gemacht worden...[etc] (1782). Nicolai—the
‘Proktophantasmist’ of Goethe’s Faust—was a Berlin bookseller, publisher and writer.
He was also a member of the Illuminati, a group that
Barruel identified as another principal enemy, and this book was one of several that
the group directed against the Jesuits in the 1780s.
Taylor’s (very slight) use of Nicolai’s Versuch infuriated Barruel, who, as noted
above, threatened to ‘denounce’ the Monthly Review ‘as illuminated’. Taylor’s ironic
response then inspired the ‘Observations Sur Quelques
Articles Du Monthly Review’, which contains the following extraordinary passage:
Nous prierons M. Griffith, de nous montrer le fameux Pélican découvert à Oxford, &
surtout de nous dire comment ce Pélican se trouve remplacé par l’épervier qui se
remplune; & comment l’épervier qui se remplume démontre l
es Jésuites cachés depuis longtemps dans les Loges Angloises, & si l’on y prend garde,
tous prêts à en sortir pour faire un terrible ravage (Mémoires, IV, x) .
This is cryptic in the extreme, not least because Barruel did not directly relate
it to Taylor’s passing reference to Nicolai’s Versuch (neither Taylor nor Barruel had
previously mentioned the Oxford pelican). Recoveri
ng the sense of the passage took me several hours in the British Library, and I doubt
very much that any reader of the Mémoires in 1798—even Taylor—would have understood
it. The connection with the Versuch is, however, co
nfirmed by a note in the latter which reads as follows:
In Oxford in verschiedenen Kollegien, besonders auch im vorigen Jahrhunderte, sind
immer solche Leute gewesen, die mit dem Innersten der Freymaureren genau bekannt
waren.... Im Magdelenkollegium sind eine Parthie sonderba
rliche Figuren, die man lange bloß für ungereimte Grillen gehalten hat, die aber, wie
eine zwischen 1687 und 1687 geschriebene und nachher aufgefundene schriftliche
Erklärung besagt, hieroglyphische Andeutungen sind (Vol.
2, p. 238) .
For his information about the hieroglyphs Nicolai cited the Pocket Companion for
Oxford (1756), but reference to this suggests this he had misremembered or
(deliberately?) misinterpreted his source. The Pocket Companion n
oted in passing that the antiquary William Stukely had described the ‘Hieroglyphics’
as ‘the licentious Inventions of the Mason’, but the manuscript referred to by Nicolai
was by William Reeks, and there is no suggestion
in the Pocket Companion that Reeks considered the hieroglyphs as Masonic—indeed quite
the reverse . Reeks’ information, as cited in the Pocket Companion, does lead us to
the mysterious pelican, however:
... the two first Figures we meet with [in the south-west corner of the quadrangle]
are the Lion, and the Pelican. The former of these is the Emblem of Courage and
Vigilance, the latter of parental Tenderness, and Affecti
on. Both of them together express to us the complete Character of a good Governor of a
College. Accordingly they are placed under the Windows of those Lodgings, which,
originally, belonged to the President, as the Instruc
tions they convey ought particularly to regulate his Conduct. (p. 29)
Nicolai’s reference to the Magdalen hieroglyphics (still, incidentally, to be seen
there) had, then, been scrupulously pursued by Barruel, who reasonably found an
unacceptable latitude of interpretation. But here scholarl
y protocols ended. Barruel made the Magdalen pelican, only indirectly referred to by
Nicolai—and that in a footnote—stand for the whole weight of the latter’s argument. By
extension he then made Taylor’s authority as a cr
itic rest on his use of Nicolai’s Versuch, ergo on a (mis)reading of the Magdalen
pelican. Needless to say the ‘l’epervier qui se remplume’ was hatched by Barruel’s
fertile sarcasm; unlike the pelican, the sparrow-hawk ha
s never been a Masonic symbol.
In his second review Taylor made no mention of the pelican business, but simply
continued to expose the dangers of Barruel’s ‘indiscriminating hostility’. Given the
anger he had incited in the ‘Observations’ he must h
ave felt that the victory was his, but no note of exultation entered his usual
reasoning, discursive prose. I suggested earlier that the paradox of the Mémoires is
that Barruel managed to hide the fanaticism which inspire
d the project behind an ostensibly neutral and objective exterior. In the
‘Observations’, and particularly in the pelican passage, the mask slipped. Indeed the
pelican episode demonstrated in condensed and extreme form ju
st that aspect of Barruel’s working method which Taylor was attacking: a tendency to
make quite arbitrary connections in the belief that his enemies were somehow all one.
It is very hard to determine how much Taylor influ
enced sales of the Mémoires, and how much he checked the spread of Barruel’s alarmism.
This would be true in any case, but Napoleon’s dramatic rise to power inevitably
shifted attention away from the issues raised by Barr
uel and rendered the Mémoires more of a curiosity than a public opinion maker. For all
that, the Mémoires have been republished more than once since, and as long as we make
a fairly instinctive connection between the Enli
ghtenment and the French Revolution Barruel deserves to be remembered as the person
who laboured hardest, however misguidedly, to prove how intimately those events are
connected.
1. A reprint of the first English translation of the Memoires is currently available
from American Opinion Book Services, PO Box 8040, Appleton, Wisconsin 54913, USA,
price $29.95 plus $4.00 P&P.
2. Burke saw the first volume of the Mémoires and wrote an enthusiastic letter to
Barruel which begins: ‘I cannot easily express to you how much I am instructed and
delighted by the first Volume of your History of Jacobin
ism.’ See The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W. Copeland, 10 vols
(Cambridge and Chicago, 1958-78), IX, 319-20.
3. One of the best examples of how easy it was to attract the ‘Jacobin’ smear is
supplied by Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis. When he included the statement ‘The Coquette fishes
for hearts which are worthless; the Courtier, for titl
es which are absurd’ in his play, The Castle Spectre, he found that: ‘On the strength
of this single sentence, it was boldly asserted on the morning after the first
performance, that the whole Play was written to support
the Cause of Equality; and that I said in it, all distinctions of rank ought to be
abolished...’ (The Castle Spectre [London, 1798], p. 47).
4. See Walter E. Peck, ‘Shelley and the Abbé Barruel’, PMLA XXXVI (1921), 347-53.
5. The best account is still Albert Goodwin’s The Friends of Liberty: The English
Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London, 1979).
6. In 1797 it had a regular sale of 5,000 copies. The Critical Review, its main
competitor, sold 3,500 copies. See C. H. Timperly, Encyclopaedia of Literary and
Typographical Anecdote (London, 1842), p. 795.
7. See Hazlitt’s approving comment in The Spirit of the Age (London, 1825), p. 308.
8. The earliest example is his review of John Wagstaffe’s Burkite poem Stone Henge
(1792) in the Monthly Review for July 1793 (N. S. XI, 344-5). Wagstaffe’s poem
represented an ideal of political absolutism in a tribal g
athering of the Ancient Britons, but Taylor countered with a delightful piece of
tongue-in-cheek antiquarian speculation: ‘Probably ... this ring of huge stones was
not a religious, but a political place of assembly, the
amphitheatre in which the Pendragon, or elective chief of the Britons, was chosen by
the collected nation.’ For the identification of this review as Taylor’s, and the poem
as Wagstaffe’s, see my article ‘The Foundation of
‘philosophical criticism’: William Taylor’s Connection with the Monthly Review,
1792-3’, Studies in Bibliography L (1997), 359-71, pp. 368-9.
9. Reviewers are identified in Ralph Griffiths’ own set of the Monthly Review, now in
the Bodleian Library. Butler was a Catholic: see Benjamin Christie Nangle, The Monthly
Review Second Series, 1790-1815 (Oxford, 1955),
pp. 10-11.
10. N. S. XXV, 501-11; subsequent references in text. See the Monthly Review N. S.
XXVII (1798), 24, for a statement that the Appendix for one volume was published ‘at
the same time’ as the first part of the following vol
ume.
11. Barruel’s letter was retained among Taylor’s papers and published in John Warden
Robberds’ Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Late William Taylor of Norwich, 2
vols (London, 1843), I, 175-80.
12. N. S. XXVI, 240.
13. N. S. XXVII, 509-24; subsequent references in text.
14. Taylor seems to have accepted this by 1791 when he satirised the prominent
Unitarian Joseph Priestley in a poem entitled ‘Hudibras Modernized’, subsequently
published in the Iris (a Norwich newspaper) between 19 Novem
ber and 24 December 1803. Priestley had argued in a whole series of polemical
publications that reason would eventually lead everyone to Unitarianism.
15. This sketch of Taylor’s beliefs is distilled from his many contributions to the
Monthly Review and Monthly Magazine, an index to which is supplied in Robberds’
biography. Taylor’s important ‘Imitation of Wieland’, Mon
thly Magazine II (1796), 463-7, reveals the strong influence of Hume’s History of
Natural Religion.
16. Literally ‘Anal Apparition’.
17. I.e. ‘Mr. Griffiths is kindly requested to show us the famous Pelican discovered
at Oxford, and above all to tell us how this Pelican happens to have been replaced by
the ‘re- pluming’ sparrow-hawk and how the ‘re-pl
uming’ sparrow-hawk proves that the Jesuits have been hiding for a long time in the
English Lodges, and, if no care is taken, are all ready to come out to wreak terrible
havoc.’
18. I.e. ‘In different colleges in Oxford, particularly indeed in the last century,
there have always been people who were familiar with the secrets of the Freemasons....
In Magdalen College there is a group of strange fi
gures which were for a long time thought to make no sense, but which according to a
written testimony composed between 1677 and 1687, and afterwards discovered, are
hieroglyphical.’
19. The point is left a little ambiguous, perhaps: the Pocket Companion concludes its
account of the ‘Hieroglyphics’: ‘We hope, by this Time, the Reader is convinced, that
so exact a System of Morals, could not easily hav
e been produced from the licentious Inventions of the Mason’ (pp. 31-2).
David Chandler, of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, has recently
completed his doctoral thesis, ‘Norwich Literature 1788-97: A
Critical Survey’ (1997) which includes discussion of poems and plays
by William Taylor. He has published widely on various aspects of the
Romantic period, and on Shakespeare (‘the god of his idolatry’).
End<{{{
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