By: Jay

As with my article on the prevalence of the masonic-Illuminati in top, mainstream historians’ works, the truth is often uncovered even in scholarship opposed to the principle of “secret cabals” influencing history.  Cambridge historian David Thomson writes on the back cover of his Penguin Europe Since Napoleon that “The pattern of European development since 1789 can be understood only by study of those all-embracing forces that have affected the whole continent, from Britain to the Balkans.” [emphasis mine]

One of these dark forces was the Carbonari.  Thomson writes:

“The ultimate models for most secret societies were the Lodges of eighteenth century Freemasonry and from them was derived much of the ritual, ceremonies of initiation, secret signs, and passwords.  The more immediate models were the secret societies formed in Italy and Germany to resist the rule of Napoleon: especially the Tugenbund (League of Virtue) in Germany and the Carbonari (the charcoal burners) of Italy, both founded by 1810.  But a rich variety of similar organizations appeared throughout Europe: the Federati of Piedmont and the Adelphi in Lombardy, the Spanish liberal societies after 1815, the Philomathians of Poland modelled on the German students’ Bursenschaften, the Russian Union of Salvation of 1816 and the Republican Society of the South.” (pg. 140)

Thomson continues:

“Mazzini and Buonarroti. Typical of the romantic enthusiasm infused into the new revolutionary movements was the career of Giuseppe Mazzini. He was the son of a doctor and professor of anatomy in Genoa.  From very early youth he was brought into the nationalist and democratic movement in Italy.  In 1815 when he was only ten years old, Genoa was put under the rule of Piedmont, and Genoa as a city bitterly resented this forfeiture of its republican liberties.  When Carbonari risings of 1820-21 were crushed, the city was filled with defeated Piedmontese liberals, and their plight left a deep impression on the young Mazzini.  As a student in the 1820s he devoured most of the great works of romantic writers of Italy, France, Britain and Germany.  He claimed later that his favourite books were the Bible and Dante, Shakespeare and Byron; but he read,too, Goethe and Schiller, Scott and Hugo, Herder and Mickiewicz.  His life is one of the best examples of how close became the affinities between romanticism and revolution.  Mazzini and his friends saturated themselves in contemporary romanticism, with a good leavening of the greatest Italian writers of the past-Dante and Machiavelli especially – who embodied traditions of Italian patriotism….he drifted more and more into the work of a liberal agitator.  He joined the Carbonari, though he was well aware of its defects and its relative ineffectiveness.  From these experiments he derived the idea of a new movements of his own, appealing more directly to the younger generation.  By 1831 this idea bore more fruit in the ‘Young Italy’ movement.  It was men of Mazzini’s generation and outlook who were to make the European revolutions of 1848.

It was amid this stirring of nationalist sentiments and in this swiftly changing scene that the secret societies and conspirators went to work.  The Carbonari spread its activities throughout Europe and gave rise in 1821 to its French counterpart, the Charbonnerie.  In 1828 there appeared in Brussels a work, written by a veteran French revolutionary, Phillipe Buonarroti that was to become the textbook of revolutionaries.  This strange man had shared in the famous plot led by Gracchus Babeuf in 1796.  Buonarroti’s book now made it the basis of a great republican legend.  He had promised his fellow conspirators that he would eventually tell the full story of the plotters and their aims, and this task was fulfilled in his two volumes on Conspiration pour l egalite dite de Babeuf.  It gave the revived liberal movement a direct and symbolic link with the great Revolution.  Since 1815 Buonarroti, who was by birth an Italian, had turned his attention to the liberation and unification of Italy through republicanism.  This preoccupation brought him into touch with the Carbonari and with Mazzini’s ‘Young Italy’ movement.  He tried to found a Society of Sublimus-Maitres-Parfaits, or trained revolutionary elite, and urged the use of Freemasonry as a facade for conspiracy.  He lived in Geneva until 1823, when he moved to the Netherlands.  He did not return to France until after the July Revolution of 1830.  But meanwhile, through the Carbonari and through his book, he acquired the respect and attention of the new generation of young revolutionaries of western Europe.  This influence grew rapidly in France after 1830.” (pgs. 143-144)

We see again that even in mainstream academia, there is no doubt that these secret entities were conspiring to overthrow monarchies and the relatively Christian established order.  Dr. Thomson obviously has no interest in conspiracy ‘theories,’ and yet the evidence is abundant that these clandestine revolutionary groups were intimately connected with secret societies.  Are humans any different 200 years later?

See also: The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita

Catholic Encyclopedia on the Carbonari

Papal Encyclical on the Carbonari, Quo Graviora