Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, a Mystical Freemason (Part 3)

Willermoz during the revolutionary upheavals

Willermoz had partially succeeded in his project of creating a new Masonic rite to incorporate the doctrine of Martinès de Pasqually, which he considered to be the true Masonic secret. It is impossible to say what would have become of the Rectified Scottish Rite if the Revolution had not broken out in 1789. In fact, from the start of the Revolution, French Freemasonry kept a low profile and even went dormant during the Terror (1793-1794). While some leaders of Freemasonry were openly in favour of the new ideas, such as Louis-Philippe duc d'Orléans, Grand Master of the Grand Orient of France, many of them, aristocrats attached to the old order, chose to go into exile, such as Anne Charles Sigismond, duc de Montmorency-Luxembourg (1737-1803), the Grand Master's right-hand man. This was not a favourable time for the development of the Rectified Scottish Rite, which had already been weakened by the lack of interest shown in the craft lodges by several of the Rite's leaders, who had concentrated on mesmerism and the communications of the mysterious Unknown Agent, as we showed in our previous article.

At the beginning of the Revolution, Willermoz continued to develop his knowledge of the higher Degrees of Freemasonry, taking a particular interest in Dom Pernety's Illuminés d'Avignon (1716-1796). A Benedictine monk with a Catholic faith that was, to say the least, heterodox, Dom Pernety was fascinated by alchemy, but also attached great importance to the Virgin Mary and the angels, who were supposed to be mediators of the divine. Around 1783, he founded the Illuminés d'Avignon, a group that followed his theories but was not a Masonic rite. It is not even known whether Dom Pernety himself was a Freemason, but his work was of interest to spiritualist Freemasons such as Willermoz.

However, historical events were to take precedence, leaving Willermoz little time to pursue his research. In 1791, persuaded by two Grands Profès from Lyon (Millanois and Périsse du Luc, both deputies in the National Assembly), but against the advice of many others, he joined the Société des Amis de la Constitution in Lyon, affiliated to the Jacobin Club in Paris. This decision marked a break with many Rectified Freemasons, most of whom were hostile to the Revolution, and affected Joseph de Maistre's (1753-1821) friendship with Willermoz.

The Hospice of Lyon

In 1791, Willermoz's reputation for charity led him to be appointed one of the eight administrators of the Hospice of Lyon, a recently secularised religious institution. He set about restoring the institution's disastrous financial situation and restoring adequate supplies, even managing to build up reserves for the benefit of the patients under his care. But the Terror began in 1793. The city of Lyon sided with the Girondins against the Jacobins, and the Convention sent its armies to besiege Lyon in August 1793. The city was bombarded and finally taken on 9 October 1793. The people of Lyon were severely repressed and several of the Grand Professed were guillotined, including François Henri de Virieu (1754-1793) and Antoine Willermoz. Jean-Baptiste Willermoz narrowly escaped on 6 January 1794, although he had already moved his precious archives to a safe place on 8 August. He took refuge with one of his brothers in the Ain department.

The Terror came to an end on 9 Thermidor, Year II (27 July 1794), when a coup d'état put an end to the regime of Robespierre and the Jacobins. Robespierre himself was guillotined on 28 July 1794. Willermoz was then able to return to Lyon, which he did on 10 November 1794. He was again appointed administrator of the hospice and in May 1796, at the age of 65, he married Jeanne Marie Pascal, aged 24.

Willermoz's Masonic activities under the Consulate and the Empire

Although the French lodges began to awaken timidly from their slumber under the Directoire (26 October 1795-9 November 1799), it was only under the Consulate (13 December 1799-18 May 1804) that the situation for French Freemasonry seemed to really normalise. And under the Empire (18 May 1804-4 April 1814), Freemasonry in France became a veritable institution devoted to the Emperor, who wanted to control it by placing loyal members at the head of the Masonic obediences. Thus, in 1804, Joseph Bonaparte was appointed Grand Master of the Grand Orient de France, but it was Jean Jacques Régis Cambacérès (1753-1824), the former Second Consul who became Archchancellor of the Empire, who exercised power. And in 1806, the same Cambacérès became the head of the Supreme Council of France of the Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite.

Jean Jacques Régis Cambacérès

It was at this time that Willermoz worked to re-establish the rectifiés provinces of France and to complete the rituals left unfinished since Wilhelmsbad. The old provinces were reconstituted, the province of Burgundy was transferred from Strasbourg to Besançon, and a new province, called Neustria, was created in Paris in 1808. The craft lodges were placed under the jurisdiction of Cambacérès and the Grand Orient of France. At over 75 years of age, he was only directly involved in the re-establishment of the Auvergne Province in Lyon. On the other hand, it was he who completed the work on the rituals: from 1801, with the request of the Triple Union Lodge of Marseilles, he completed all the rituals up to the Grand Profession. Although the first rectifeied rituals were approved by the Convent des Gaules in 1778 and then officially adopted by the Convent of Wilhemsbad in 1782, it is in the form rewritten by Willermoz for the Triple Union of Marseilles that they are most commonly practised today, except by a few purists who refer only to the documents of 1778.

Old and tired, Willermoz, the soul and inspiration behind the rebirth of the Rectified Scottish Rite in France, devoted himself to his task with the strength he had left. Although on paper all the provinces of the Order had been restored and even one more was added, the edifice remained fragile and declined after Willermoz's death on 29 May 1824, at the respectable age of 94. His designated successor, Joseph Antoine Pont, had already died in 1817.

The peculiar personality of Willermoz 

Who was Willermoz, this man with an astonishing life story and impressive longevity for his time? Was he a charlatan, like so many others in the history of the higher degrees of Freemasonry? Certainly not, and his aversion to materialistic pursuits (alchemy, recovering the Templars' property) clearly shows that he never saw Freemasonry as a means of enriching himself. In fact, he never benefited financially from it.

A rather gifted self-taught man, Willermoz was clearly sincere in his spiritual quest, driven by an almost obsessive thirst for higher knowledge. A fervent, if unorthodox, Catholic, his view of Freemasonry was purely spiritual, but not disembodied. He believed that Freemasons should not pay lip service to charity, but should practise active benevolence. The proof of this was his management of the Hospice of Lyon, where he put his undeniable business skills at the service of the most practical charity.

But let's not make him a saint. While his material selflessness is undeniable, Willermoz probably expected a different return on his investment, in terms of prestige. He did not seek power per se, and he never held the position of supreme leader (Grand Master or otherwise) for long, preferring more modest roles such as chancellor and archivist. But his bourgeois ego was visibly flattered by the opportunity to work among the highest nobles, to correspond on an equal footing with reigning princes, and thus to be recognised as a valid interlocutor by the great and good of the world. Even Tsar Alexander I wanted to meet him in 1815 because of his spiritual reputation.

Aldo, although Willermoz is unanimously recognised as a sincere, honest, benevolent and peaceful man, he was no less cunning when it came to extracting secret information from his interlocutors belonging to other Masonic systems. He was quite capable of preaching falsehood in order to know the truth, or bluffing about the knowledge he really possessed in order to deceive the vigilance of his competitors. After all, he was and remained a skilful trader !

Silhouette of Willermoz

Although he was never a charlatan, Willermoz did have one weakness. His incredible thirst for secret knowledge made him susceptible to the manipulations of real charlatans, and his lack of critical thinking and even credulity did a disservice to the cause of the Masonic Order he claimed to be building. He was certainly capable of denouncing the charlatanism of Cagliostro, but he plunged headlong into mesmerism and the incredible adventure of the Unknown Agent, to the detriment of the Order.

One aspect of Willermoz's personality is rarely highlighted in the biographical notes devoted to him. This is his relationship with women, where his attitude seems to have been rather surprising for his time. In terms of his secular life, he did not marry until he was 65, and no children survived this union. Most of his adult life seems to have been marked by a form of quasi-sacerdotal or monastic asceticism : this attitude seems to have stemmed from a certain form of Catholic ascetic morality, reinforced in him by the Martinezian discipline, which required sexual abstinence at least before theurgical operations that would lead to contact with spiritual entities.

But Willermoz's suspicion on sexuality did not mean that he despised women. On the contrary, he seems to have been convinced of the spiritual and initiatory potential of women, and perhaps even of their mystical superiority, particularly in hypnosis. He was very close to his sister, Claudine Thérèse Provensal (1729-1810), who had lived with him since her widowhood, running her house like a priest's maid. He allowed her to join the Order of the Elect Coens of Martinès, where she was initiated to the final degree of Réau-Croix. It is not certain that Willermoz would have been prepared to accept women into ordinary Freemasonry, but we can assume that his reluctance would have been justified only by the social conventions of the time, and not by the idea that women were unworthy of initiation. We also remember that he used a female medium for his magnetism sessions.

Willermoz was undoubtedly a complex personality, not without contradictions. He gives us the image of a man torn between an unquenchable thirst for the absolute and a very concrete pragmatism in his daily life, where he always tried to put his faith into practice. There are probably few Freemasons who have taken Freemasonry so seriously that they have made it a spiritual path in its own right, guiding their entire existence. His fascinating personality will probably always remain something of a mystery to those who wish to discover him.