Re: A Short Definition of Synarchism, by Lyndon H. LaRouche,
Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2015 11:23 pm
PART 1 OF 2
Synarchy Against America
by Anton Chaitkin
This article appears in the September 2, 2003 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
This article is the product of a task force of EIR historians studying the history of Synarchism for the past half year. Together with Lyndon LaRouche's treatment of the current strategic threat of Synarchism ("World Nuclear War When?" EIR, Aug. 29, 2003), and other material, it will be published in September in a LaRouche in 2004 campaign report. More articles are forthcoming.
Contributing to this article were Pierre Beaudry, Irene Beaudry, Jeffrey Steinberg, Antony Papert, and the late H. Graham Lowry.
Introduction: The Adversaries at Bowood
The menace now confronting humanity from Washington's Cheney-Rumsfeld regime is a usurpation of power by financier terror leaders; the final, mad phase of a two-centuries-long project—to counteract the stunning success of the American Revolution and America's intervention in world affairs. This enemy totalitarian project came to be self-named, about a century ago, as "Synarchism."
To defeat it requires historical understanding, which can never consist merely of stupid lists of crimes and plots, however complex. It must instead be the story of the central fight for man's mind—and for the strategic direction of nations—over the question: Does the Creator give man Reason to shape scientific and social progress, or must "authority" manage men, as indistinguishable from beasts?
This is the persistent, nagging problem in intelligence analysis generally: Here are perpetrators, associated for such and such a purpose; here are those we judge good, in their earnest projects; yes, but how have those, with the power to shape large events, intervened to fuel or stall these actors, in line with the global, paradigmatic ideas guiding the power of those strategy-shapers?
The creation of the American republic was projected and built for by Europe's republican philosophers and statesmen, from Plato's humanism through and beyond the revival of knowledge in the 15th-Century Golden Renaissance. The American settlements of the 1600s were designed to make a renewed Renaissance base, safe from the tyranny of Europe's Venice-centered imperial rulers and their manipulated wars of religion and revenge. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia gave Europe a respite and a direction for survival. But the world's real hope was in America. Increase and Cotton Mather, John Winthrop, Alexander Spotswood, and at length, the scientist Benjamin Franklin—allied in ideas and action with the greatest minds of Europe, Gottfried Leibniz, Jonathan Swift, and their friends—all together contesting with Europe's feudal-minded financial powers over the fate of the human race.
Benjamin Franklin's world-famous scientific inquiries were informed by Plato's teaching, and by Franklin's participation in the trans-Atlantic war for the mind,[1] led by Leibniz, against the British empiricist "dead universe" advocates Isaac Newton and John Locke.
Franklin was already to be seen, in the early 1770s, leading a world movement for self-government and scientific progress. Then living in England as the agent of the colonies, Franklin frequently visited the Earl of Shelburne at his Bowood estate. Shelburne chaired the all-powerful three-man "Secret Committee" of the East India Company, which also included Francis Baring of the banking house that bore his name. Shelburne was the most sophisticated representative of the frankly Satanic financier powers behind the British throne.
The East India Company, a Royal-chartered private joint-stock company, represented the pinnacle of mid-18th-Century power, of what was known as the "Venetian Party" of rentier-financier oligarchs, who derived their global power from near monopoly control over key raw materials and commodities, insurance, banking, and shipping routes. The East India Company of Shelburne's "Secret Committee" deployed a more modern and large-scale military force than did the British Crown, maintaining control over their private fiefdoms in India and other parts of the world. The Company represented the gradual merger of British and Dutch financier factions, and, thus, operated above any notion of individual national loyalties. In effect, Shelburne was the "doge" of the combined British and continental European financier oligarchy.
The two wary, urbane, chief opponents—Franklin and Shelburne—constantly took each others' measure. Shelburne had to be the negotiating partner: Franklin knew Shelburne favored some concessions to the Americans, fearing that simple, brutal British repression would lead to an uncontrolled colonial revolt.
Their overlapping international circles often met and mingled at Bowood for liberal colloquy and friendly, tense, mutual intelligence-gathering. One might see there, for example, Shelburne's pagan French priest, Abbé Morellet, jousting with Franklin over magic and reason; while Franklin's scientific protégé and agent, Joseph Priestley, arranged his employer Shelburne's library.
Soon the U.S. declared independence, and Franklin won the kingdom of France as its Revolutionary ally. He inspired, at England's back door, the anti-British freedom struggle in Ireland, now emboldened by Britain's united enemies. America's cause was increasingly popular, praised as just and rational, esteemed as mankind's future, from Russia, to Joseph II's Austria, to Charles III's Spain, to South America.
For the threatened imperialists, Shelburne raised a positively hellish counterattack against the increasing American momentum. Shelburne's cadres and occultist agents threw France into bloody confusion and terror, then "solved" the chaos with Napoleon's tyranny that plundered Europe, leaving France ruined and America isolated.
This criminal initiative echoed down through the 19th and 20th Centuries, the model for the Synarchist movement of leading bankers, who opposed the persisting American power by spawning fascism and fundamentalist terror.
Shelburne's Bestiary
The world saw in Franklin's America the resurgent principles of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, that had ended Europe's Thirty Years' War: national sovereignty, coupled with renunciation of revenge, the banning of religious crusades and similar pretexts for eternal war. This orderly framework, with government protection for industry, and public credit, would lead to educated citizens, truth-seekers, inventors, who could increase their productive power and prosperity—man in the Divine image.
The British rulers and their Continental European factional allies went to total war to reverse the gears of mankind's progress, to obliterate the Peace of Westphalia they hated, and its American incarnation. Shelburne acted for the imperial looters, adventurers, and speculators who gained absolute power behind Britain's Kings George I, II, and III.
This oligarchy had spoken most bluntly through the shameless Mephistophelian writer, Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733). He demanded absolute "free market" lawlessness to satisfy man's alleged inherent evil, all his criminal appetites. He said the safety of the powerful depends on the maximum cheapness and brutalization of their subjects. "The surest wealth consists in a multitude of Laborious Poor.... To make the Society Happy ... it is requisite that great numbers ... should be Ignorant as well as Poor.... Going to School in comparison to Working is Idleness.... Men who are to remain and end their Days in a Laborious, tiresome and Painful Station of Life, the sooner they are put upon it at first, the more patiently they'll submit to it for ever after."
Mandeville argued that "the best policy is to preserve men in their native simplicity, strive not to increase their numbers; let them never be acquainted with strangers or superfluities, but remove and keep from them everything that might raise their desires or improve their understanding."[2]
Lord Shelburne's English estate housed the agents of influence for those financier powers, literary justifiers of their dominion over men, script-writers for managed insurrection. And Shelburne maintained Continental bases for his allies and subversive agents within French-speaking Switzerland, Geneva and its environs, and inside France proper, as will be described below.
Shelburne assigned two projects to East India Company propagandist Adam Smith. First, to prepare the research outline for a study of the Roman Empire, needed to aid conceptually in erecting a new such pagan empire with London as its headquarters. (This assignment was later turned over to another East India Company researcher, Edward Gibbon, and completed as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which blamed the intrusion of Christianity, the religion of the weak, for the collapse of the mighty.)
Shelburne also commissioned Smith's work on an apologia for Free Trade. This, Smith completed in 1776 as The Wealth of Nations. He claimed that the power of an "invisible hand," and each man's pursuit of his selfish interest rather than anyone's desire to do good, causes economic well-being. (Wise men have since asked, is this invisible hand, financiers who rig stock bubbles, or Shelburnes who rig insurrections?) Smith warned Americans and Frenchmen not to dare the "artificial," government-promoted change from agrarian to industrial society; he attacked specifically the protectionist tradition of Jean Baptiste Colbert, finance minister for France's Louis XIV.
In the 1780s, Shelburne installed as his agent the Nero-imitating writer Jeremy Bentham, in an apartment at Bowood. Bentham had written with contempt in October 1776, against the defense of human rights in America's July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence: "This they 'hold to be' a 'truth self-evident.' At the same time, to secure these rights they are satisfied that Government should be instituted. They see not ... that nothing that was ever called Government ever was or ever could be exercised but at the expense of one or another of those rights, that ... some one or other of those pretended unalienable rights is alienated ... In these tenets they have outdone the extravagance of all former fanatics."
Bentham was to write speeches, translated by the Genevan Etienne Dumont, which went by diplomatic pouch and through other means to Paris, to be spoken by the street leaders of the Jacobin Terror: Marat, Danton, and Robespierre.
In preparation for this work, Bentham wrote a 1785 essay defending "Paederasty," arguing that penalties against men's sex with children stem from society's "irrational antipathy" to pleasure, especially sexual pleasure; and a 1787 pamphlet, In Defense of Usury, attacking all restrictions on the lenders' right to take the highest interest rates they could get away with.
The Shelburne-Bentham collaboration from this period is reliably considered the beginning of the modern British Secret Intelligence Service.
England, Switzerland, France
On the shores of Switzerland's Lake Geneva there were assembled, by the 1700s, a most peculiar set of banker-nobles. Some of these families descended from the Cathar chieftains, pagan buggerers who gravitated up the Rhône river. Some were well-to-do Protestant (Huguenot) emigrés from French religious strife. Most adhered to the sect of the earlier French emigré Genevan, John Calvin; this gave them ties to the Dutch financiers, and religious denominational affiliation with those Scots who served London's empire. They were joined later by embittered aristocratic refugees from the Terror in France. Thus for the corrupted Anglo-Dutch monarchies, French Switzerland became a knife pointed at the heart of France.
The misnamed 18th-Century Enlightenment stank from Geneva to Paris, from Amsterdam to London. The undead Cathar pagan reverence for possessed objects—such as gold, land, piles of grain, the bodies of serfs—yielded the doctrine of physiocracy: that wealth is simply transferred from natural earth and the treasure under it, so man's creative discoveries and scientific advancements have no economic value. Adam Smith formed his Free Trade notions from the physiocrats while in France and Switzerland in the 1760s. He only chided their assertion that manufacturing is not equally necessary (e.g., no cannons, uniforms, or ships; no empire), while adhering to the mania that conscious Reason, by its nature benevolent, must never be permitted to intrude in economics.
Geneva was ruled through the Council of 200, whose leading families intermarried and engaged jointly in espionage, covert propaganda, grain monopoly, colonial slave management, and foreign imperial military careers. Their life work often emulated the strategic tradition of Venice's higher aristocracy.
Among Geneva family names notable in the late-18th-Century political storms, were Necker, André, Gallatin, Mallet, de Saussure, du Pan, and Prevost.
The massively wealthy Geneva-born banker Jacques Necker was appointed the ambassador of Geneva to the court of France in 1764, and became French finance minister in 1777. Necker worked secretly with the British against the American-French alliance, and to wreck the French government. Necker's wife was formerly the fianceé of British imperial historian Edward Gibbon. Necker and his famous daughter, Germaine Necker de Staël, intrigued for both the "left" and "right" phases of the French turmoil.
British army officer John André, son of a Geneva merchant banker, returned to Geneva University to be militarily trained before going to America as a master spy. Gen. George Washington hanged André for procuring Benedict Arnold's treason. The André family merged into the de Neuflizes and joined with Schlumberger and Mallet, forming a politically powerful financier grouping to be of great influence in the project known as Synarchism. These combined interests also appeared in Schlumberger, the huge oil services and covert operations specialists paralleling Dick Cheney's Halliburton.
Albert Gallatin, raised on the knee of Geneva corruptionist writer Voltaire, hid out in the Maine woods during the American Revolution, then led the political attack, within Pennsylvania, against adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Later a U.S. Treasury Secretary, Gallatin led the Free Trade faction against American nationalists.
Banker Jacques Mallet du Pan founded the British branch of the Mallet family. An intimate of Voltaire, and Britain's main French-speaking intelligence officer, Mallet du Pan teamed with Necker and Joseph de Maistre in leading the opposition to an American-style constitution in Europe.
Gen. Augustin Prevost, very close to Voltaire, commanded Britain's invasion of South Carolina against the American Revolution. General Prevost introduced Britain's Scottish Rite Freemasonry onto American soil. His brother James Mark's widow married Aaron Burr and familiarized Burr with top British intelligence circles. Augustin's son Gen. George Prevost, the British Governor General of Canada, invaded New York state during the War of 1812. When Aaron Burr was in exile in England following his U.S. treason trial, the Mallet-Prevosts and Jeremy Bentham were Burr's co-hosts.
Geneva's de Saussure family, emigrating to become leaders of the South Carolina plantation owners, coordinated the Massachusetts Tories and southern secession agitators, for British intelligence. Their Swiss castle, Frontenex, remained a mecca for visiting British noblemen, and they would later boast of intimacy with Britain's statesman and spymaster Lord Palmerston.
In the lower social ranks, Jean-Paul Marat, from Neuchatel and Geneva, was trained for ten years by British intelligence in England before going on to murder thousands of France's intellectuals in the Reign of Terror. Geneva's Etienne Dumont was intimate with Gallatin, was the worldwide promoter and translator for Jeremy Bentham, and tutored Lord Shelburne's sons.
The Shelburne machine owned France's Philippe Duke of Orleans, cousin and enemy to Louis XVI, and opponent of the French nation-building tradition which was now being applied to the American cause. Shelburne and the Duke of Orleans employed creatures from the swamp of mystics and charlatans centered in the freemasonic lodges of Lyons, France, in particular the Martinist Order. Among the Martinists who performed in the staged 1780s-1790s French destabilizations were Franz Anton Mesmer, Count Cagliostro (real name Giuseppe Balsamo), Jacques Cazotte, Fabré d'Olivet, and Joseph de Maistre.
Martinism, a mocking perversion of Catholicism, considers Fallen Man to be in exile in this earthly existence, deprived of his powers. Man can only restore his original condition by initiation to the inner ranks of a secret society, through purgative violence—sado-masochistic rituals, torture, and human sacrifices. As a candidate learns to tolerate injury to others, he gives up his human identity, the sympathy which was celebrated in the Peace of Westphalia as the "Advantage of the Other." He loses the Platonic and Christian truth that men prosper by seeking to benefit others rather than themselves.
This pagan ritualism breeds heartless imperial soldiers and fanatic gang leaders, as Mithraic Stoicism did for the Roman Caesars. After Martinism guided successive French coups, its banker-proprietors spun it into Synarchy and fascism—while labeling it Conservatism or fundamentalist Christianity.
The Shelburne Revolution
France announced in the Spring of 1778 that it was joining America's war for independence. Franklin and his friends acted quickly to strike a winning blow.
Franklin's open letter to the Irish people, printed November 1778 in Dublin's Hibernian Journal, pleaded the common cause of America and Ireland against the British.
The following Spring, 1779, France and Spain agreed to send a joint fleet carrying 60,000 soldiers to invade England and decide the war. Elements of the fleet set sail into the English Channel. An invasion of Ireland was also contemplated. Lafayette, back from his first North American fighting, planned to lead that invasion. He told the pro-American foreign minister, Count Vergennes, "the thought of seeing England humiliated, crushed, makes me thrill with joy."[3] Indecision, smallpox, and faulty intelligence combined to wreck the plan, but the fleet's presence in the Channel, coupled with events to the west, cast a dark shadow over London.
Irish Protestant "Volunteers" began arming themselves, ostensibly to repel an expected American-French invasion. By late 1779, one hundred thousand Irishmen were drilling, and overtures for Catholic-Protestant solidarity were circulating. Thousands of handbills were distributed in Ireland: The American Congress offered Irish emigrants free land and full religious toleration.
Lord Shelburne wrote from Ireland that he found "all classes more animated about America than in England. In every Protestant or Dissenter's house the established toast is success to the Americans."[4] His spies informed Shelburne that Franklin personally coordinated Ireland's alliance with the American rebels.[5]
Meanwhile Shelburne acted through former East India Company director Thomas Walpole, to coordinate the treason of Walpole's close friend and banking colleague, Jacques Necker, the French finance minister. Necker and Walpole intrigued in France against Vergennes, to stop the "wasteful spending" for the French-American alliance. Another British spy, Geneva professor Paul-Henri Mallet, on King George III's payroll, "spent a good part" of Spring 1780 in the company of his cousin, Necker. He soon divulged Necker's views "under solemn oath of secrecy" to Lord Mountstuart, Mallet's intermediary to King George III and Lord Shelburne. " 'Were these talks to be disclosed,' he cautioned, they might 'greatly prejudice M. Necker,' who was now winning the support of the King [Louis XVI] ... Necker had been frank with the Swiss historian, according to the latter's own account. To introduce fiscal reforms, the court of France had to have peace [i.e., stop France's aid to the American Revolution, which was] a war he had never had nor could approve.... Necker ... was quoted by Mallet as expressing the fervent hope 'in God the English would be able to maintain their ground a little better this campaign.' "
Mountstuart reported to London that "Necker was prepared to go behind [French Foreign Minister] Vergennes' back and effect a peace without satisfying even the minimum goals of France's ... allies and without regard to Louis XVI's own honored commitments. On December 1st, Necker, in the full assurance of his growing power, dispatched a secret message to [British Prime Minister] Lord North.... 'You desire peace,' Necker wrote. 'I wish it also.'"[6]
Paul-Henri Mallet and Necker also proposed to the British government strategems to split the rebelling American colonies against each other, North versus South, in order to weaken their fight for independence.
But Necker was soon forced out of his cabinet post.
In the face of the tightening American-Irish-French-Spanish noose, Shelburne's protégé, British Col. Isaac Barré, wrote to Shelburne attacking the weakness and inept policy of the government: "We cannot stand aside and permit the country to take a cowardly course." The opposition should "by some bold and daring measure stun the Court, awake the people, and then take the reins of government into their hands."[7]
Weary of the failed prosecution of the war in North America, and convinced that the Ministry of Lord George North would ruin his dreams of permanent empire, Lord Shelburne, through the East India Company and its allied Baring Bank, bankrolled a Jacobin mob to descend on London in June of 1780. The pretext was the nervous North government's granting of extremely limited "reforms" of the longstanding legal oppression of Catholics.
Led by Lord George Gordon, the Protestant rabble stormed Westminster, sending parliamentarians and Lords alike down flights of stairs, out windows, and to the hospitals. For eight days, London was ransacked, culminating in the storming of the Newgate Prison and the freeing of all the prisoners, who joined in the assault on the Parliament. Eight hundred people died, with terrible property damage.
Lord Shelburne, as head of the interior committee of the House of Lords, personally assured the maximum terror by delaying the reading of the Riot Act which called out the Home Guard until violence had spread to every corner of the City. When the rioting began, Shelburne "was one of the few peers to reach the House of Lords without molestation. He was conspicuous in opposing the calling out of the military. 'I will ever resist and prevent such a matter if possible,' he [told the Lords]. The next day ... he defended the assemblages of the people, and felt that their shouts of 'No Popery!' ... came from sincere, if misguided, conviction."[8] The Lord Mayor of London was a spectator of the smashing and burning, declining to intervene on the grounds that "there are very great people at the bottom of the riot."[9]
After a brief incarceration in the Tower of London, foreshortened by Shelburne's personal intervention with the Crown, the useful Lord Gordon went off to friendlier ground in the Netherlands. There, to the astonishment of his Scottish Presbyterian cronies, he became a convert to Jewish Cabalism, taking the name Israel bar Abraham. He shortly thereafter surfaced in Paris, working with the magician Cagliostro as a provocateur against Queen Marie-Antoinette, while situated as an occult advisor of hers; and from that position participated in Shelburne's intrigues against the French state. Later, the Jacobin insurrection in Paris would replay on a grander scale the earlier Shelburne-instigated Gordon Riots, down to the storming of the Bastille Prison and the unleashing of the criminals.
When the London flames died, the Ministry of Lord North was in ashes as well. North held on to office, paralyzed and frightened, until the victory of the Washington's and Lafayette's American and French forces at Yorktown in October 1781, ushered him out.
Shelburne went into the new Rockingham cabinet (March-July 1782) as Foreign Secretary for the Northern District, subsuming the North American colonies. Shelburne became Prime Minister upon Rockingham's death. His brief personal command of the British government (July 1782 to April 1783) gave him imperial-overlord factional policy control at this decisive turning point. Shelburne set up parallel, separate peace negotiations with the U.S.A. and France, through which arrangement the seeds of the death of France were planted. Suspicions between the American and French allies were fanned; the pro-American faction, the intelligent inheritors of Colbertism, were weakened, as Shelburne prepared a new war within the peace.
By this time, King George III had declared himself wholly subservient to the Shelburne-led East India Company faction, the Venetian Party. As the result of these events, the shadow government formally took charge of the official state apparatus. The intelligence operations formerly housed at the East India Company were henceforth run out of the newly formed Foreign Office and the British Secret Intelligence Services (SIS).
The Company and its financiers reigned supreme in Britain. The new British Empire would focus on subduing India under the Company's private army of 300,000, far exceeding the regular British government's forces; conquering China with Indian opium; and looting the world through uneven trade relations. Shelburne's imperial bankers permanently controlled British strategy, even after the East India Company per se was phased out in the 19th Century.
Six months after Yorktown, General Washington's chief aide, Alexander Hamilton, who coordinated military intelligence for the alliance, described publicly the economic tradition which the American leaders would use to develop their country, when they had the necessary energetic government:
Rapid progress ... is in a great measure to be ascribed to the fostering care of government.... The trade of] France ... [would not] have been at this time in so prosperous a condition had it not been for the abilities and indefatigable endeavors of the great COLBERT. He laid the foundation of the French commerce, and taught the way to his successors to enlarge and improve it. The establishment of the woolen manufacture, in a kingdom, where nature seemed to have denied the means, is one among many proofs, how much may be effected in favour of commerce by the attention and patronage of a wise administration. The number of useful edicts passed by Louis the 14th, and since his time, in spite of frequent interruptions from the jealous enmity of Great Britain, has advanced that of France to a degree which has excited the envy and astonishment of its neighbors.[10]
In 1783, as Shelburne's new government signed a peace treaty, Adam Smith issued an updated version of the Wealth of Nations, complaining that "Mr. Colbert, the famous minister of Lewis XIV ... [endeavored to regulate] the industry and commerce of a great country upon the same model as the departments of a public office; and instead of allowing every man to pursue his own interest in his own way ... he bestowed upon certain branches of industry extraordinary privileges, while he laid others under as extraordinary restraints ... [Colbert preferred] the industry of the towns above that of the country."
This unfair policy—by which France had become a greater manufacturing power than England—said Smith, was responsible for provoking cycles of retaliation between France and England, and peace could only be secured on the basis of "free trade" between them.
Prime Minister Shelburne made his own public demand for unbridled free trade and usury on Jan. 27, 1783, while arguing in the House of Lords for ratification of the Treaty of Paris formally ending the American Revolution. Shelburne warned, "Situated as we are between the old world and the new, and between southern and northern Europe, all we ought to covet on earth is free trade.... With more industry, with more capital, with more enterprise than any trading nation on earth, it ought to be our constant cry: Let every market be open."
After the 1783 Peace treaty, before the Americans had a strong Federal government to protect their industry, British ships deluged U.S. ports with cheap goods, their brashly public purpose being to stifle America's infant manufacturing.
In France, Adam Smith's theory of free trade was popularized by Swiss banker Jacques Mallet du Pan, who called Smith "the most profound and philosophic of all the metaphysical writers who have dealt with economic questions." Mallet du Pan's cousin Pierre Prevost, professor at the University of Geneva, would translate the works of Adam Smith and East India Company professor Thomas Malthus.
Attacking Colbert's policies in 1786, Mallet du Pan lobbied strenuously with France's King Louis XVI to accept British Prime Minister William Pitt's offer of a treaty that would force France to give up all protective measures, and put the country at the mercy of Britain's "free trade" policies. At the same time the international banking houses, led by the Swiss, suddenly refused credit to the French government, and Louis XVI was forced to sign Pitt's Eden Treaty. The British trade war began immediately; they dumped cheap British manufactures on the French market and cut off the supply to France of vital Spanish wool.
Within France, employment, agriculture, and trade quickly collapsed and starvation followed. In 1789, credit was again withdrawn from the French government. King Louis XVI was forced to reinstall Genevan banker Jacques Necker as minister of finance—after having fired him several times before—in order to "regain the confidence" of the banking community. Necker proposed austerity as the only solution to the crisis. He told the people of France that their troubles stemmed from "wasteful spending" by the King and Queen. A showdown approached.
But in the years leading up to this decisive moment, the American faction had been battling the spooks swarming all about the Royal and wealthy circles of Paris.
King Louis had appointed Benjamin Franklin head of a nine-member commission to probe the pretenses of the Martinist, Franz Mesmer, whose hypnotism ("mesmerism") was attributed to Animal Magnetism flowing from his hands. Astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly, secretary of the Academy of Sciences, wrote the report for Franklin's group, demolishing Mesmer's claims.
Lyons Martinist Jacques Cazotte made a chilling and self-fulfilling "prophecy" at a 1788 dinner of the Academy of Sciences. Cazotte declared that the pro-Americans sitting at the table, including Jean Sylvain Bailly, were going to be executed within the next few years—that Bailly would die on the scaffold.
Cagliostro had already published a Letter to the French (June 20, 1786) prophesying that "The Bastille shall be completely destroyed, and the land upon which it had been erected shall become a promenade area." The "Count" made this pronouncement after his meetings with the Scottish Rite Mother Lodge in London.
Queen Marie-Antoinette was the particular target of Shelburne's Martinists. The Queen's brother, Austrian Emperor Joseph II, sponsored Wolfgang Mozart, whose music illuminated Joseph's Vienna and his sister Marie-Antoinette's Paris. Marie personally acted in a performance of The Marriage of Figaro, a play by Franklin's arms supplier Caron de Beaumarchais, satirizing the pornographic, still-feudal oligarchy (Mozart's opera was based on the play). The enraged Orleanists repeatedly interfered, trying to stop the play's performance at the Royal court, just as the Duke of Orleans—"Philippe Égalité" as he called himself for the Jacobins—had forced Mozart himself out of Paris in 1778.
The gossip roiling Parisian streets against Marie-Antoinette came from the assassination warmup known as the Affair of the Necklace. Cagliostro and his occultist brothers enabled a designing countess, down on her luck, to embroil a Cardinal in a scam involving the purchase, for the Queen, of an exorbitantly expensive necklace she explicitly did not want. The arrest of the countess and Cardinal was played into a scandal vilifying Marie-Antoinette as extravagant, unfeeling, and foreign, amidst starvation. The Countess who stole the necklace escaped prison and fled to England where she was falsely celebrated as a poor victim of tyranny. The French King and Queen would be executed.
Synarchy Against America
by Anton Chaitkin
This article appears in the September 2, 2003 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
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This article is the product of a task force of EIR historians studying the history of Synarchism for the past half year. Together with Lyndon LaRouche's treatment of the current strategic threat of Synarchism ("World Nuclear War When?" EIR, Aug. 29, 2003), and other material, it will be published in September in a LaRouche in 2004 campaign report. More articles are forthcoming.
Contributing to this article were Pierre Beaudry, Irene Beaudry, Jeffrey Steinberg, Antony Papert, and the late H. Graham Lowry.
Introduction: The Adversaries at Bowood
The menace now confronting humanity from Washington's Cheney-Rumsfeld regime is a usurpation of power by financier terror leaders; the final, mad phase of a two-centuries-long project—to counteract the stunning success of the American Revolution and America's intervention in world affairs. This enemy totalitarian project came to be self-named, about a century ago, as "Synarchism."
To defeat it requires historical understanding, which can never consist merely of stupid lists of crimes and plots, however complex. It must instead be the story of the central fight for man's mind—and for the strategic direction of nations—over the question: Does the Creator give man Reason to shape scientific and social progress, or must "authority" manage men, as indistinguishable from beasts?
This is the persistent, nagging problem in intelligence analysis generally: Here are perpetrators, associated for such and such a purpose; here are those we judge good, in their earnest projects; yes, but how have those, with the power to shape large events, intervened to fuel or stall these actors, in line with the global, paradigmatic ideas guiding the power of those strategy-shapers?
The creation of the American republic was projected and built for by Europe's republican philosophers and statesmen, from Plato's humanism through and beyond the revival of knowledge in the 15th-Century Golden Renaissance. The American settlements of the 1600s were designed to make a renewed Renaissance base, safe from the tyranny of Europe's Venice-centered imperial rulers and their manipulated wars of religion and revenge. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia gave Europe a respite and a direction for survival. But the world's real hope was in America. Increase and Cotton Mather, John Winthrop, Alexander Spotswood, and at length, the scientist Benjamin Franklin—allied in ideas and action with the greatest minds of Europe, Gottfried Leibniz, Jonathan Swift, and their friends—all together contesting with Europe's feudal-minded financial powers over the fate of the human race.
Benjamin Franklin's world-famous scientific inquiries were informed by Plato's teaching, and by Franklin's participation in the trans-Atlantic war for the mind,[1] led by Leibniz, against the British empiricist "dead universe" advocates Isaac Newton and John Locke.
Franklin was already to be seen, in the early 1770s, leading a world movement for self-government and scientific progress. Then living in England as the agent of the colonies, Franklin frequently visited the Earl of Shelburne at his Bowood estate. Shelburne chaired the all-powerful three-man "Secret Committee" of the East India Company, which also included Francis Baring of the banking house that bore his name. Shelburne was the most sophisticated representative of the frankly Satanic financier powers behind the British throne.
The East India Company, a Royal-chartered private joint-stock company, represented the pinnacle of mid-18th-Century power, of what was known as the "Venetian Party" of rentier-financier oligarchs, who derived their global power from near monopoly control over key raw materials and commodities, insurance, banking, and shipping routes. The East India Company of Shelburne's "Secret Committee" deployed a more modern and large-scale military force than did the British Crown, maintaining control over their private fiefdoms in India and other parts of the world. The Company represented the gradual merger of British and Dutch financier factions, and, thus, operated above any notion of individual national loyalties. In effect, Shelburne was the "doge" of the combined British and continental European financier oligarchy.
The two wary, urbane, chief opponents—Franklin and Shelburne—constantly took each others' measure. Shelburne had to be the negotiating partner: Franklin knew Shelburne favored some concessions to the Americans, fearing that simple, brutal British repression would lead to an uncontrolled colonial revolt.
Their overlapping international circles often met and mingled at Bowood for liberal colloquy and friendly, tense, mutual intelligence-gathering. One might see there, for example, Shelburne's pagan French priest, Abbé Morellet, jousting with Franklin over magic and reason; while Franklin's scientific protégé and agent, Joseph Priestley, arranged his employer Shelburne's library.
Soon the U.S. declared independence, and Franklin won the kingdom of France as its Revolutionary ally. He inspired, at England's back door, the anti-British freedom struggle in Ireland, now emboldened by Britain's united enemies. America's cause was increasingly popular, praised as just and rational, esteemed as mankind's future, from Russia, to Joseph II's Austria, to Charles III's Spain, to South America.
For the threatened imperialists, Shelburne raised a positively hellish counterattack against the increasing American momentum. Shelburne's cadres and occultist agents threw France into bloody confusion and terror, then "solved" the chaos with Napoleon's tyranny that plundered Europe, leaving France ruined and America isolated.
This criminal initiative echoed down through the 19th and 20th Centuries, the model for the Synarchist movement of leading bankers, who opposed the persisting American power by spawning fascism and fundamentalist terror.
Shelburne's Bestiary
The world saw in Franklin's America the resurgent principles of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, that had ended Europe's Thirty Years' War: national sovereignty, coupled with renunciation of revenge, the banning of religious crusades and similar pretexts for eternal war. This orderly framework, with government protection for industry, and public credit, would lead to educated citizens, truth-seekers, inventors, who could increase their productive power and prosperity—man in the Divine image.
The British rulers and their Continental European factional allies went to total war to reverse the gears of mankind's progress, to obliterate the Peace of Westphalia they hated, and its American incarnation. Shelburne acted for the imperial looters, adventurers, and speculators who gained absolute power behind Britain's Kings George I, II, and III.
This oligarchy had spoken most bluntly through the shameless Mephistophelian writer, Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733). He demanded absolute "free market" lawlessness to satisfy man's alleged inherent evil, all his criminal appetites. He said the safety of the powerful depends on the maximum cheapness and brutalization of their subjects. "The surest wealth consists in a multitude of Laborious Poor.... To make the Society Happy ... it is requisite that great numbers ... should be Ignorant as well as Poor.... Going to School in comparison to Working is Idleness.... Men who are to remain and end their Days in a Laborious, tiresome and Painful Station of Life, the sooner they are put upon it at first, the more patiently they'll submit to it for ever after."
Mandeville argued that "the best policy is to preserve men in their native simplicity, strive not to increase their numbers; let them never be acquainted with strangers or superfluities, but remove and keep from them everything that might raise their desires or improve their understanding."[2]
Lord Shelburne's English estate housed the agents of influence for those financier powers, literary justifiers of their dominion over men, script-writers for managed insurrection. And Shelburne maintained Continental bases for his allies and subversive agents within French-speaking Switzerland, Geneva and its environs, and inside France proper, as will be described below.
Shelburne assigned two projects to East India Company propagandist Adam Smith. First, to prepare the research outline for a study of the Roman Empire, needed to aid conceptually in erecting a new such pagan empire with London as its headquarters. (This assignment was later turned over to another East India Company researcher, Edward Gibbon, and completed as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which blamed the intrusion of Christianity, the religion of the weak, for the collapse of the mighty.)
Shelburne also commissioned Smith's work on an apologia for Free Trade. This, Smith completed in 1776 as The Wealth of Nations. He claimed that the power of an "invisible hand," and each man's pursuit of his selfish interest rather than anyone's desire to do good, causes economic well-being. (Wise men have since asked, is this invisible hand, financiers who rig stock bubbles, or Shelburnes who rig insurrections?) Smith warned Americans and Frenchmen not to dare the "artificial," government-promoted change from agrarian to industrial society; he attacked specifically the protectionist tradition of Jean Baptiste Colbert, finance minister for France's Louis XIV.
In the 1780s, Shelburne installed as his agent the Nero-imitating writer Jeremy Bentham, in an apartment at Bowood. Bentham had written with contempt in October 1776, against the defense of human rights in America's July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence: "This they 'hold to be' a 'truth self-evident.' At the same time, to secure these rights they are satisfied that Government should be instituted. They see not ... that nothing that was ever called Government ever was or ever could be exercised but at the expense of one or another of those rights, that ... some one or other of those pretended unalienable rights is alienated ... In these tenets they have outdone the extravagance of all former fanatics."
Bentham was to write speeches, translated by the Genevan Etienne Dumont, which went by diplomatic pouch and through other means to Paris, to be spoken by the street leaders of the Jacobin Terror: Marat, Danton, and Robespierre.
In preparation for this work, Bentham wrote a 1785 essay defending "Paederasty," arguing that penalties against men's sex with children stem from society's "irrational antipathy" to pleasure, especially sexual pleasure; and a 1787 pamphlet, In Defense of Usury, attacking all restrictions on the lenders' right to take the highest interest rates they could get away with.
The Shelburne-Bentham collaboration from this period is reliably considered the beginning of the modern British Secret Intelligence Service.
England, Switzerland, France
On the shores of Switzerland's Lake Geneva there were assembled, by the 1700s, a most peculiar set of banker-nobles. Some of these families descended from the Cathar chieftains, pagan buggerers who gravitated up the Rhône river. Some were well-to-do Protestant (Huguenot) emigrés from French religious strife. Most adhered to the sect of the earlier French emigré Genevan, John Calvin; this gave them ties to the Dutch financiers, and religious denominational affiliation with those Scots who served London's empire. They were joined later by embittered aristocratic refugees from the Terror in France. Thus for the corrupted Anglo-Dutch monarchies, French Switzerland became a knife pointed at the heart of France.
The misnamed 18th-Century Enlightenment stank from Geneva to Paris, from Amsterdam to London. The undead Cathar pagan reverence for possessed objects—such as gold, land, piles of grain, the bodies of serfs—yielded the doctrine of physiocracy: that wealth is simply transferred from natural earth and the treasure under it, so man's creative discoveries and scientific advancements have no economic value. Adam Smith formed his Free Trade notions from the physiocrats while in France and Switzerland in the 1760s. He only chided their assertion that manufacturing is not equally necessary (e.g., no cannons, uniforms, or ships; no empire), while adhering to the mania that conscious Reason, by its nature benevolent, must never be permitted to intrude in economics.
Geneva was ruled through the Council of 200, whose leading families intermarried and engaged jointly in espionage, covert propaganda, grain monopoly, colonial slave management, and foreign imperial military careers. Their life work often emulated the strategic tradition of Venice's higher aristocracy.
Among Geneva family names notable in the late-18th-Century political storms, were Necker, André, Gallatin, Mallet, de Saussure, du Pan, and Prevost.
The massively wealthy Geneva-born banker Jacques Necker was appointed the ambassador of Geneva to the court of France in 1764, and became French finance minister in 1777. Necker worked secretly with the British against the American-French alliance, and to wreck the French government. Necker's wife was formerly the fianceé of British imperial historian Edward Gibbon. Necker and his famous daughter, Germaine Necker de Staël, intrigued for both the "left" and "right" phases of the French turmoil.
British army officer John André, son of a Geneva merchant banker, returned to Geneva University to be militarily trained before going to America as a master spy. Gen. George Washington hanged André for procuring Benedict Arnold's treason. The André family merged into the de Neuflizes and joined with Schlumberger and Mallet, forming a politically powerful financier grouping to be of great influence in the project known as Synarchism. These combined interests also appeared in Schlumberger, the huge oil services and covert operations specialists paralleling Dick Cheney's Halliburton.
Albert Gallatin, raised on the knee of Geneva corruptionist writer Voltaire, hid out in the Maine woods during the American Revolution, then led the political attack, within Pennsylvania, against adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Later a U.S. Treasury Secretary, Gallatin led the Free Trade faction against American nationalists.
Banker Jacques Mallet du Pan founded the British branch of the Mallet family. An intimate of Voltaire, and Britain's main French-speaking intelligence officer, Mallet du Pan teamed with Necker and Joseph de Maistre in leading the opposition to an American-style constitution in Europe.
Gen. Augustin Prevost, very close to Voltaire, commanded Britain's invasion of South Carolina against the American Revolution. General Prevost introduced Britain's Scottish Rite Freemasonry onto American soil. His brother James Mark's widow married Aaron Burr and familiarized Burr with top British intelligence circles. Augustin's son Gen. George Prevost, the British Governor General of Canada, invaded New York state during the War of 1812. When Aaron Burr was in exile in England following his U.S. treason trial, the Mallet-Prevosts and Jeremy Bentham were Burr's co-hosts.
Geneva's de Saussure family, emigrating to become leaders of the South Carolina plantation owners, coordinated the Massachusetts Tories and southern secession agitators, for British intelligence. Their Swiss castle, Frontenex, remained a mecca for visiting British noblemen, and they would later boast of intimacy with Britain's statesman and spymaster Lord Palmerston.
In the lower social ranks, Jean-Paul Marat, from Neuchatel and Geneva, was trained for ten years by British intelligence in England before going on to murder thousands of France's intellectuals in the Reign of Terror. Geneva's Etienne Dumont was intimate with Gallatin, was the worldwide promoter and translator for Jeremy Bentham, and tutored Lord Shelburne's sons.
The Shelburne machine owned France's Philippe Duke of Orleans, cousin and enemy to Louis XVI, and opponent of the French nation-building tradition which was now being applied to the American cause. Shelburne and the Duke of Orleans employed creatures from the swamp of mystics and charlatans centered in the freemasonic lodges of Lyons, France, in particular the Martinist Order. Among the Martinists who performed in the staged 1780s-1790s French destabilizations were Franz Anton Mesmer, Count Cagliostro (real name Giuseppe Balsamo), Jacques Cazotte, Fabré d'Olivet, and Joseph de Maistre.
Martinism, a mocking perversion of Catholicism, considers Fallen Man to be in exile in this earthly existence, deprived of his powers. Man can only restore his original condition by initiation to the inner ranks of a secret society, through purgative violence—sado-masochistic rituals, torture, and human sacrifices. As a candidate learns to tolerate injury to others, he gives up his human identity, the sympathy which was celebrated in the Peace of Westphalia as the "Advantage of the Other." He loses the Platonic and Christian truth that men prosper by seeking to benefit others rather than themselves.
This pagan ritualism breeds heartless imperial soldiers and fanatic gang leaders, as Mithraic Stoicism did for the Roman Caesars. After Martinism guided successive French coups, its banker-proprietors spun it into Synarchy and fascism—while labeling it Conservatism or fundamentalist Christianity.
The Shelburne Revolution
France announced in the Spring of 1778 that it was joining America's war for independence. Franklin and his friends acted quickly to strike a winning blow.
Franklin's open letter to the Irish people, printed November 1778 in Dublin's Hibernian Journal, pleaded the common cause of America and Ireland against the British.
The following Spring, 1779, France and Spain agreed to send a joint fleet carrying 60,000 soldiers to invade England and decide the war. Elements of the fleet set sail into the English Channel. An invasion of Ireland was also contemplated. Lafayette, back from his first North American fighting, planned to lead that invasion. He told the pro-American foreign minister, Count Vergennes, "the thought of seeing England humiliated, crushed, makes me thrill with joy."[3] Indecision, smallpox, and faulty intelligence combined to wreck the plan, but the fleet's presence in the Channel, coupled with events to the west, cast a dark shadow over London.
Irish Protestant "Volunteers" began arming themselves, ostensibly to repel an expected American-French invasion. By late 1779, one hundred thousand Irishmen were drilling, and overtures for Catholic-Protestant solidarity were circulating. Thousands of handbills were distributed in Ireland: The American Congress offered Irish emigrants free land and full religious toleration.
Lord Shelburne wrote from Ireland that he found "all classes more animated about America than in England. In every Protestant or Dissenter's house the established toast is success to the Americans."[4] His spies informed Shelburne that Franklin personally coordinated Ireland's alliance with the American rebels.[5]
Meanwhile Shelburne acted through former East India Company director Thomas Walpole, to coordinate the treason of Walpole's close friend and banking colleague, Jacques Necker, the French finance minister. Necker and Walpole intrigued in France against Vergennes, to stop the "wasteful spending" for the French-American alliance. Another British spy, Geneva professor Paul-Henri Mallet, on King George III's payroll, "spent a good part" of Spring 1780 in the company of his cousin, Necker. He soon divulged Necker's views "under solemn oath of secrecy" to Lord Mountstuart, Mallet's intermediary to King George III and Lord Shelburne. " 'Were these talks to be disclosed,' he cautioned, they might 'greatly prejudice M. Necker,' who was now winning the support of the King [Louis XVI] ... Necker had been frank with the Swiss historian, according to the latter's own account. To introduce fiscal reforms, the court of France had to have peace [i.e., stop France's aid to the American Revolution, which was] a war he had never had nor could approve.... Necker ... was quoted by Mallet as expressing the fervent hope 'in God the English would be able to maintain their ground a little better this campaign.' "
Mountstuart reported to London that "Necker was prepared to go behind [French Foreign Minister] Vergennes' back and effect a peace without satisfying even the minimum goals of France's ... allies and without regard to Louis XVI's own honored commitments. On December 1st, Necker, in the full assurance of his growing power, dispatched a secret message to [British Prime Minister] Lord North.... 'You desire peace,' Necker wrote. 'I wish it also.'"[6]
Paul-Henri Mallet and Necker also proposed to the British government strategems to split the rebelling American colonies against each other, North versus South, in order to weaken their fight for independence.
But Necker was soon forced out of his cabinet post.
In the face of the tightening American-Irish-French-Spanish noose, Shelburne's protégé, British Col. Isaac Barré, wrote to Shelburne attacking the weakness and inept policy of the government: "We cannot stand aside and permit the country to take a cowardly course." The opposition should "by some bold and daring measure stun the Court, awake the people, and then take the reins of government into their hands."[7]
Weary of the failed prosecution of the war in North America, and convinced that the Ministry of Lord George North would ruin his dreams of permanent empire, Lord Shelburne, through the East India Company and its allied Baring Bank, bankrolled a Jacobin mob to descend on London in June of 1780. The pretext was the nervous North government's granting of extremely limited "reforms" of the longstanding legal oppression of Catholics.
Led by Lord George Gordon, the Protestant rabble stormed Westminster, sending parliamentarians and Lords alike down flights of stairs, out windows, and to the hospitals. For eight days, London was ransacked, culminating in the storming of the Newgate Prison and the freeing of all the prisoners, who joined in the assault on the Parliament. Eight hundred people died, with terrible property damage.
Lord Shelburne, as head of the interior committee of the House of Lords, personally assured the maximum terror by delaying the reading of the Riot Act which called out the Home Guard until violence had spread to every corner of the City. When the rioting began, Shelburne "was one of the few peers to reach the House of Lords without molestation. He was conspicuous in opposing the calling out of the military. 'I will ever resist and prevent such a matter if possible,' he [told the Lords]. The next day ... he defended the assemblages of the people, and felt that their shouts of 'No Popery!' ... came from sincere, if misguided, conviction."[8] The Lord Mayor of London was a spectator of the smashing and burning, declining to intervene on the grounds that "there are very great people at the bottom of the riot."[9]
After a brief incarceration in the Tower of London, foreshortened by Shelburne's personal intervention with the Crown, the useful Lord Gordon went off to friendlier ground in the Netherlands. There, to the astonishment of his Scottish Presbyterian cronies, he became a convert to Jewish Cabalism, taking the name Israel bar Abraham. He shortly thereafter surfaced in Paris, working with the magician Cagliostro as a provocateur against Queen Marie-Antoinette, while situated as an occult advisor of hers; and from that position participated in Shelburne's intrigues against the French state. Later, the Jacobin insurrection in Paris would replay on a grander scale the earlier Shelburne-instigated Gordon Riots, down to the storming of the Bastille Prison and the unleashing of the criminals.
When the London flames died, the Ministry of Lord North was in ashes as well. North held on to office, paralyzed and frightened, until the victory of the Washington's and Lafayette's American and French forces at Yorktown in October 1781, ushered him out.
Shelburne went into the new Rockingham cabinet (March-July 1782) as Foreign Secretary for the Northern District, subsuming the North American colonies. Shelburne became Prime Minister upon Rockingham's death. His brief personal command of the British government (July 1782 to April 1783) gave him imperial-overlord factional policy control at this decisive turning point. Shelburne set up parallel, separate peace negotiations with the U.S.A. and France, through which arrangement the seeds of the death of France were planted. Suspicions between the American and French allies were fanned; the pro-American faction, the intelligent inheritors of Colbertism, were weakened, as Shelburne prepared a new war within the peace.
By this time, King George III had declared himself wholly subservient to the Shelburne-led East India Company faction, the Venetian Party. As the result of these events, the shadow government formally took charge of the official state apparatus. The intelligence operations formerly housed at the East India Company were henceforth run out of the newly formed Foreign Office and the British Secret Intelligence Services (SIS).
The Company and its financiers reigned supreme in Britain. The new British Empire would focus on subduing India under the Company's private army of 300,000, far exceeding the regular British government's forces; conquering China with Indian opium; and looting the world through uneven trade relations. Shelburne's imperial bankers permanently controlled British strategy, even after the East India Company per se was phased out in the 19th Century.
Six months after Yorktown, General Washington's chief aide, Alexander Hamilton, who coordinated military intelligence for the alliance, described publicly the economic tradition which the American leaders would use to develop their country, when they had the necessary energetic government:
Rapid progress ... is in a great measure to be ascribed to the fostering care of government.... The trade of] France ... [would not] have been at this time in so prosperous a condition had it not been for the abilities and indefatigable endeavors of the great COLBERT. He laid the foundation of the French commerce, and taught the way to his successors to enlarge and improve it. The establishment of the woolen manufacture, in a kingdom, where nature seemed to have denied the means, is one among many proofs, how much may be effected in favour of commerce by the attention and patronage of a wise administration. The number of useful edicts passed by Louis the 14th, and since his time, in spite of frequent interruptions from the jealous enmity of Great Britain, has advanced that of France to a degree which has excited the envy and astonishment of its neighbors.[10]
In 1783, as Shelburne's new government signed a peace treaty, Adam Smith issued an updated version of the Wealth of Nations, complaining that "Mr. Colbert, the famous minister of Lewis XIV ... [endeavored to regulate] the industry and commerce of a great country upon the same model as the departments of a public office; and instead of allowing every man to pursue his own interest in his own way ... he bestowed upon certain branches of industry extraordinary privileges, while he laid others under as extraordinary restraints ... [Colbert preferred] the industry of the towns above that of the country."
This unfair policy—by which France had become a greater manufacturing power than England—said Smith, was responsible for provoking cycles of retaliation between France and England, and peace could only be secured on the basis of "free trade" between them.
Prime Minister Shelburne made his own public demand for unbridled free trade and usury on Jan. 27, 1783, while arguing in the House of Lords for ratification of the Treaty of Paris formally ending the American Revolution. Shelburne warned, "Situated as we are between the old world and the new, and between southern and northern Europe, all we ought to covet on earth is free trade.... With more industry, with more capital, with more enterprise than any trading nation on earth, it ought to be our constant cry: Let every market be open."
After the 1783 Peace treaty, before the Americans had a strong Federal government to protect their industry, British ships deluged U.S. ports with cheap goods, their brashly public purpose being to stifle America's infant manufacturing.
In France, Adam Smith's theory of free trade was popularized by Swiss banker Jacques Mallet du Pan, who called Smith "the most profound and philosophic of all the metaphysical writers who have dealt with economic questions." Mallet du Pan's cousin Pierre Prevost, professor at the University of Geneva, would translate the works of Adam Smith and East India Company professor Thomas Malthus.
Attacking Colbert's policies in 1786, Mallet du Pan lobbied strenuously with France's King Louis XVI to accept British Prime Minister William Pitt's offer of a treaty that would force France to give up all protective measures, and put the country at the mercy of Britain's "free trade" policies. At the same time the international banking houses, led by the Swiss, suddenly refused credit to the French government, and Louis XVI was forced to sign Pitt's Eden Treaty. The British trade war began immediately; they dumped cheap British manufactures on the French market and cut off the supply to France of vital Spanish wool.
Within France, employment, agriculture, and trade quickly collapsed and starvation followed. In 1789, credit was again withdrawn from the French government. King Louis XVI was forced to reinstall Genevan banker Jacques Necker as minister of finance—after having fired him several times before—in order to "regain the confidence" of the banking community. Necker proposed austerity as the only solution to the crisis. He told the people of France that their troubles stemmed from "wasteful spending" by the King and Queen. A showdown approached.
But in the years leading up to this decisive moment, the American faction had been battling the spooks swarming all about the Royal and wealthy circles of Paris.
King Louis had appointed Benjamin Franklin head of a nine-member commission to probe the pretenses of the Martinist, Franz Mesmer, whose hypnotism ("mesmerism") was attributed to Animal Magnetism flowing from his hands. Astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly, secretary of the Academy of Sciences, wrote the report for Franklin's group, demolishing Mesmer's claims.
Lyons Martinist Jacques Cazotte made a chilling and self-fulfilling "prophecy" at a 1788 dinner of the Academy of Sciences. Cazotte declared that the pro-Americans sitting at the table, including Jean Sylvain Bailly, were going to be executed within the next few years—that Bailly would die on the scaffold.
Cagliostro had already published a Letter to the French (June 20, 1786) prophesying that "The Bastille shall be completely destroyed, and the land upon which it had been erected shall become a promenade area." The "Count" made this pronouncement after his meetings with the Scottish Rite Mother Lodge in London.
Queen Marie-Antoinette was the particular target of Shelburne's Martinists. The Queen's brother, Austrian Emperor Joseph II, sponsored Wolfgang Mozart, whose music illuminated Joseph's Vienna and his sister Marie-Antoinette's Paris. Marie personally acted in a performance of The Marriage of Figaro, a play by Franklin's arms supplier Caron de Beaumarchais, satirizing the pornographic, still-feudal oligarchy (Mozart's opera was based on the play). The enraged Orleanists repeatedly interfered, trying to stop the play's performance at the Royal court, just as the Duke of Orleans—"Philippe Égalité" as he called himself for the Jacobins—had forced Mozart himself out of Paris in 1778.
The gossip roiling Parisian streets against Marie-Antoinette came from the assassination warmup known as the Affair of the Necklace. Cagliostro and his occultist brothers enabled a designing countess, down on her luck, to embroil a Cardinal in a scam involving the purchase, for the Queen, of an exorbitantly expensive necklace she explicitly did not want. The arrest of the countess and Cardinal was played into a scandal vilifying Marie-Antoinette as extravagant, unfeeling, and foreign, amidst starvation. The Countess who stole the necklace escaped prison and fled to England where she was falsely celebrated as a poor victim of tyranny. The French King and Queen would be executed.