The University of Chicago Press

Sisters of Another Sort: Freemason Women in Modern France, 1725–1940
Author(s): James Smith Allen
Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 75, No. 4 (December 2003), pp. 783-835
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Sisters of Another Sort: Freemason Women in Modern
France, 1725–1940*
James Smith Allen

Southern Illinois University Carbondale
In an article on “the feminist question” in 1900, a critic of French Masonry

remarked, “There are no women in Freemasonry, but there are Freemason
women.”1 This finely drawn distinction was clear to the author’s audience:
women were not allowed to participate in the Masonic movement on the same
basis as men. At least since 1882, when the lodge of Les Libres Penseurs in
Le Pecq attempted to initiate Maria Deraismes, the issue had been vigorously
debated at the convents, or annual conventions, of deputies to the Grand Orient
de France and to its rival obedience, the Grande Loge de France. No immediate
change in the traditional exclusion of women from the ritual mysteries resulted,
even though much smaller Masonic orders, such as the Droit Humain and the
Grande Loge Symbolique Ecossaise, had started to admit them. This increas-
ingly widespread practice, however, forced the Freemasons in the Grande Loge
de France to re-create special lodges just for women, better known as lodges
of adoption, in 1901. Despite, perhaps even because of, this exclusion, Ma-
sonry’s so-called feminist question did not go away.2
* Earlier versions of the present article were presented at the European Studies Forum
at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (October 2000), at the annual meeting of
the Western Society for French History (Los Angeles, October 2000) and of the Society
for French History (Chapel Hill, March 2001), and at the conference “Lodges, Chapters
and Orders: Fraternal Organisations and the Structuring of Gender Roles in Europe,
1300–2000” (University of Sheffield, July 2002). For generously assisting in my re-
search, I would like to thank Florence de Lussy at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France,
Rebecca Coombes at the library of the United Grand Lodge of England, Hajo Schiewer
at the Freie Universität Berlin, and Pierre Mollier at the Bibliothèque du Grand Orient
de France. For reading and/or critiquing various versions of the manuscript, I also thank
Michel Brodsky, Janet Burke, Eileen Demarco, Bob Nye, Karen Offen, Andrew Pres-
cott, Gretchen Van Slyke, and the anonymous readers for the Journal of Modern His-
tory. All errors remain solely my responsibility.
1
Paul Nourrison, “La question féministe dans la franc-maçonnerie,” Le correspon-
dant, 72nd yr. (February 10, 1900): 600; unless otherwise noted, all translations from
the French are my own. Compare Nourrison’s conservative perspective on public life
generally in his Histoire de la liberté d’association en France depuis 1789, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1920).
2
The initiation of women had been a long-standing Masonic concern; see Léon
[The Journal of Modern History 75 (December 2003): 783–835]
䉷 2003 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2003/7504-0002$10.00
All rights reserved.

784 Allen
The apparent failure of women ever to share in French Freemasonry is

misleading. Almost from its inception in the early eighteenth century, Masonry,
like many closely related fraternal organizations, incorporated women into its
activities.3 Women have always been part of the Masonic movement in France,
and in ways that bear closer examination, especially in light of recent histo-
riography on the role and significance of women in modern French public life.
Women were far more present in associations of various sorts—suffrage so-
cieties, religious and charitable groups, Saint-Simonian communities, labor
unions, and the like—than has often been recognized. A study of Freemason
women in particular provides a valuable perspective on women’s participation
in French voluntary associations generally, a topic of some interest to historians
concerned with the otherwise profoundly limited civic life accorded to women
in modern France. Their exclusion from la cité aside, women’s public socia-
bility suggests yet another form of historical agency in a man’s world.
Addressing several related historiographical issues, this article will argue
that Freemasonry and other men’s organizations like it helped to define modern
French women’s association.4 In an intermediate space between public and
Richer, “Les femmes et la franc-maçonnerie,” Avenir des femmes (August 1, 1875),

pp. 2–3; O. Boué, Les femmes et la franc-maçonnerie: Discours adressé aux dames
dans la fête d’adoption du 23 mai 1880 (Paris, 1880); Charles Malato, Admission de
la femme dans la franc-maçonnerie: Rapport . . . le 26 juin 1901 (Paris, [1901]); and
the response to Malato by “frère docteur Lobit,” recapping the negative position, “De
l’admission de la femme dans la franc-maçonnerie,” L’acacia 2 (July–December 1903):
683–92. Except for members of mixed Masonry, such as Maria Deraismes and Ma-
deleine Pelletier, Freemason women were more discreet; see Yves Hivert-Messeca and
Gisèle Hivert-Messeca, Comment la franc-maçonnerie vint aux femmes: Deux siècles
de franc-maçonnerie d’adoption, féminine et mixte en France, 1740–1940 (Paris,
1997), pp. 254–80; Joy Harvey, “Almost a Man of Genius”: Clémence Royer, Femi-
nism, and Nineteenth-Century Science (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997), p. 168; and
“Louise Michel et la franc-maçonnerie,” Les cahiers de Clio (1965), pp. 45–47. What
is remarkable is how few Freemason women actually joined the men in this conver-
sation about the initiation of women or their political rights in the “profane,” or non-
Masonic, world.
3
See, e.g., Françoise Jupeau-Réquillard, L’initiation des femmes, ou, Le souci per-
manent des francs-maçons français (Paris, 2000).
4
Study of the associative nature of men’s Masonic activity has already begun; see,
e.g., Ran Halévi, Les loges maçonniques dans la France d’ancien régime: Aux origines
de la sociabilité démocratique (Paris, 1984); Maurice Agulhon, Pénitents et francs-
maçons de l’ancienne Provence: Essai sur la sociabilité méridionale, rev. ed. (Paris,
1984); and, more generally, Daniel Roche, Le siècle des lumières en province: Acadé-
mies et académiciens provincaux, 1680–1789, rev. ed., 2 vols. (Paris, 1984). Only
recently has the gendered nature of Masonry’s public role been considered; see the
important theoretical perspectives of Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in
Victorian America (New Haven, Conn., 1989), pp. 76–90; and Mary Ann Clawson,
Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton, N.J., 1989),

Freemason Women in Modern France 785
private—that is, between the familial world in the home and the social world
outside the home—Masonry provided a gender-specific realm in which
women could act in their own right. Freemasonry’s liminal rites actually oc-
curred within a protected sphere, for wives and daughters of Masons primarily,
while at the same time these activities clearly moved women beyond their
familial responsibilities. Masonry’s ritual practice thus suggests a “relational
feminism,” in Karen Offen’s sense, which advocated more freedom for women
within well-defined gender roles and institutionally sanctioned relationships.5
Distinct from the individualistic and legalistic feminisms as understood by
Anglo-American commentators, this particular ideology of and for women was
pervasive in modern France and played a role in moderating the women’s
movement there before 1900. Even more important, however, was its creation
of many more opportunities for women’s public action through various forms
of female sociability.6
Freemasonry’s affinity for gender complementarity, a major feature of re-
lational feminism, was no accident.7 Although the Masons were less the re-
bellious social avant-garde than they were the upholders of proper bourgeois
norms, they embodied the Enlightenment’s ideals of moral virtue, religious
toleration, and fraternal egalitarianism, which were contested for much of the
modern period, as was Freemasonry’s initiation of women. The Masonic pro-
motion of equality in sexual difference was a singular affirmation of women’s
biologically defined social duties as wives and mothers, of course, but also of
their special contribution to public life as more than guardians of personal
morality. The constraints imposed on women by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
eighteenth-century domestic ideology eventually gave way to new responsi-
bilities for them outside the home in everyday nineteenth-and twentieth-cen-
tury practice well beyond Freemasonry itself. In part for this reason, bourgeois
women’s participation in Masonic activities was at once relational and femi-
nist, symbolic and genuine, circumscribed and yet powerful enough to give
new meaning to women’s sociability as distinct from men’s.
pp. 53–83. Both Carnes and Clawson see Freemason women as challenges, rather than
as complements, to associational fraternalism in the American context, precisely the
opposite of the position that I am taking in this article on the same phenomenon in
France.
5
This term was first defined by Karen Offen in “Defining Feminism: A Comparative
Historical Approach,” Signs 14, no. 1 (1988): 134–50; even though it is an anachro-
nistic ideology today, it remains relatively unexplored terrain in the history of French
women.
6
For more on this point, see James Smith Allen, Poignant Relations: Three Modern
French Women (Baltimore, 2000), pp. 152–67.
7
This point is an important theme in Jupeau-Réquillard, L’initiation des femmes,
pp. 224–85, on French women Masons’ response to contemporary feminist issues.

786 Allen
Assumed in this argument are certain notions of Masonry, association, so-

ciability, agency, and feminism that must be made clear from the outset. Con-
trary to what many observers believe, Freemasonry in all its manifestations is
not so much a secret society as it is a fraternal association with private initiation
rituals, whose details all Masons are sworn not to reveal. Nearly all of Ma-
sonry’s activities—such as the time and place of meetings, membership lists,
organizational leadership, even the rituals themselves—are, in fact, matters of
common knowledge, if only because of widespread interest in their publication
by Masons and non-Masons alike.8 It is therefore not a contradiction to speak
of Freemasonry and many allied organizations for both men and women as
public in the broadest sense. Like other social groups, Masonry is not explicitly
political, even though individual members have been very active in politics. It
is more a culture-specific form of sociability, as the French use the term, often
indistinguishable from collective conviviality and associational life. An insti-
tution in its own right, Masonry manifests one form of civil society, as distinct
from but related to civic or political action, in which women’s participation is
easily recognizable and open to study.9
Since the eighteenth century, Freemason women have participated actively
in this version of French civil society.10 Their doing so suggests a public pres-
ence and, as a consequence, a certain historical agency that women’s subor-
dinate status in civic life would seem to belie. Under the Napoleonic Code,
married women were not accorded the same legal and political rights as men,
8
More or less accurate exposés of Freemasonry have been numerous and widely
circulated; see, e.g., the entire life course of a Freemason, Pierre Bézoukhov, discussed
in detail by Leo Tolstoy, himself the son of a Mason, in the 1874 French edition of
War and Peace: Léo Tolstoı̈, La guerre et la paix, trans. Henri Mongault (Paris, 1947),
pp. 253–70, 397–410, 447–64 (depicting Bézoukhov’s initiation), 474–90, 697–706,
771–85, 867–77, 889–90 ff. For how the apparent secrecy associated with Freema-
sonry developed a life of its own, see John M. Roberts, The Mythology of Secret
Societies (London, 1972); n. 29 below provides ample bibliographic reference to pub-
lished materials on the presumably most secret features of Masonry.
9
See the brochure published by the United Grand Lodge of England, Freemasonry:
An Approach to Life (London, 1999), in which these points are made explicitly. On
sociability in the French social, cultural, and intellectual context, see Daniel Gordon,
Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789
(Princeton, N.J., 1994), pp. 242–45. There is, of course, more to the concept than its
eighteenth-century manifestations.
10
Note the effort at defining culturally specific forms of associational life, including
Masonry, in Etienne François, ed., Sociabilité et société bourgeoise en France, en
Allemagne et en Suisse, 1750–1850 (Paris, 1986), pp. 317–19, even though little or
no attention is paid to the gendered nature of these forms. See also the argument and
more recent survey of the literature in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, “Democracy and
Associations in the Long Nineteenth Century: Toward a Transnational Perspective,”
Journal of Modern History 75, no. 2 (2003): 269–99.

but they worked individually and collectively on behalf of many causes, like
those of Masonry, to good effect. Without a specific program of political action,
these women were not feminists in the sense in which most theorists and
historians understand the women’s movement in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. There was considerable agreement on the issues, but not every
woman in public was necessarily a feminist working toward a single political
goal.11 The notion of women’s historical agency is much broader than that and
encompasses the sociability of French Freemason women and their relational
feminism, that is to say, their advocacy of women’s rights on the basis of
complementary gender roles (whose interdependency was to make possible an
organic equality in sexual difference between men and women).12 In this sense,
Freemason women have been collective agents of social change, and the study
of their associational practices sheds light on the development of modern
French society and, ultimately, of modern French political culture.
I. SCHOLARLY CONTEXT AND EARLY MASONIC DEVELOPMENTS

Many scholars have already attended to the role of women in association. Joan
Landes, among others, has shown how very public French women elites were
in the eighteenth century. Correcting the absence of gender analysis in Jürgen
Habermas’s account of the bourgeois public sphere, Landes’s influential work
recognized, for example, the critical role that women played in Enlightenment
salons.13 The likes of Mmes Geoffrin, du Deffand, and de Tencin, she said,
11
This view of the women’s movement is argued in Allen, pp. 152–67.
12
For a fuller explanation and analysis of relational feminism, see Karen Offen,
“Ernest Legouvé and the Doctrine of ‘Equality in Difference’ for Women: A Case Study
of Male Feminism in Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of Modern History 58, no.
2 (1986): 452–84: “It may surprise contemporary readers to learn that, historically
speaking, a case for women’s rights could be predicated on sexual distinctions, family
centeredness, and a sharp division of labor not only in the family but in society as
well” (p. 480).
13
Compare Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:
An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick
Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); and Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public
Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988). Compare the discussion
of Habermas and Landes in Dena Goodman, “Public Sphere and Private Life: Towards
a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime,” History and
Theory 31, no. 1 (1992): 8–14; and Daniel Gordon, “Philosophy, Sociology, and Gen-
der in the Enlightenment Conception of Public Opinion,” David A. Bell, “The ‘Public
Sphere,’ the State, and the World of Law in Eighteenth-Century France,” and Sarah
Maza, “Women, the Bourgeoisie, and the Public Sphere: Response to Daniel Gordon
and David Bell,” French Historical Studies 17, no. 4 (1992): 882–911, 912–34, 935–
50.

788 Allen
“functioned as adjuncts of a system of advancement for merit,” often setting

the agenda and the invitation lists for the philosophes’ gatherings in these
women’s homes.14 Although contested and subject to subsequent redefinition,
the public role of the salonnières has interested researchers for the past decade
especially. According to other social historians of the eighteenth century such
as Dena Goodman and Margaret Jacob, women’s power was no less real for
being more cultural than political, whatever the “masculinist” tendencies of
the great Age of Reason.15
This advantageous position, these historians argue, was finally destroyed by
the Revolution of 1789.16 Because revolutionary leaders perceived the salons
as bastions of aristocratic privilege, the women who led them lost the esteem
necessary to exercise their authority over one important element in public life.
With the reassertion of men’s control of literary salons as well as political
clubs, the Jacobin Revolution redefined gender roles, relegating women almost
exclusively to the home as the guardians of republican familial virtue. In other
respects, as Lynn Hunt has put it, “woman became the figure of fragility who
had to be protected from the outside world.”17 The Napoleonic Code ensured
that the status of married women as legal minors would endure. For many
French social historians, then, the ensuing nineteenth century marked a reac-
tion against prominent women outside of the traditional aristocratic elite.
Evidently the Old Regime was a privileged historical moment. Refashioning
the timeless intellectual tradition concerning women’s supposed moral and
physical weakness, subsequent French writers such as Jules Michelet and Al-
exandre Dumas fils depicted them as passive, even ill, and characterized their
overt activity as hysterical, dangerous, or immoral. The first half of the nine-
teenth century was an especially difficult period for independent women, in-
14
Landes, p. 24.
15
See Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French
Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), pp. 253–57, despite her hostility to Freemason
women; Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in
Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York, 1991), pp. 120–42; and less recent, but still
useful, Samia I. Spencer, ed., French Women and the Age of Enlightenment (Bloom-
ington, Ind., 1984).
16
This position is well summarized by Lynn Hunt, “The Unstable Boundaries of the
French Revolution,” in A History of Private Life, vol. 4, From the Fires of Revolution
to the Great War, ed. Michelle Perrot, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.,
1990), pp. 13–46; and, more radically, by Madelyn Gutwirth, “Citoyens, Citoyennes:
Cultural Regression and the Subversion of Female Citizenship in the French Revolu-
tion,” in The French Revolution and the Meaning of Citizenship, ed. Renée Waldinger,
Philip Dawson, and Isser Woloch (Westport, Conn., 1993), pp. 17–28. Others, like
Landes, pp. 66–89, and Goodman, The Republic of Letters, pp. 233–80, see women’s
loss of agency in the masculinist Age of Reason even before the Revolution.
17
Hunt, p. 45.

cluding the Saint-Simonians. Even after the Revolution of 1848, the women’s
movement in general and various feminisms in particular were widely per-
ceived as threats to the social order. Not until the twentieth century—so Mi-
chelle Perrot and others have remarked recently—did women in public achieve
a more positive reputation, thanks to their growing role, individually and col-
lectively, in the labor market. Women’s economic independence eventually
translated into other forms of associational liberation. From this perspective,
it was women’s contribution to the economy, rather than their political culture,
that mattered in the long term.18
This perspective has not gone without challenge. Steven Kale and Carla
Hesse, for example, have questioned recently the apparent revolutionary de-
mise of women’s activity in public. Kale argues that femmes aristocrates en-
joyed a resurgence of influence in the salons that were reconstituted in exile
during the revolutionary decade and then again in the Napoleonic Empire and
the Bourbon Restoration. Their prominent place in French social and political
life lasted, Kale contends, right through to the Revolution of 1848.19 Similarly,
Hesse’s examination of the “other” Enlightenment—the remarkable growth in
publication by women writers after 1789—charts another route in women’s
transition to modernity in France. “The data on women writers,” Hesse states,
“suggests that the economic and commercial vision of the Enlightenment and
Revolution opened up possibilities for female participation in an absolutely
central arena of modern public life that was at odds with the dominant male
conception of appropriate relations between the sexes.”20 Although the per-
ception of women in public had changed during the Revolution, their cultural
influence remained intact, albeit in new modalities of expression and socia-
bility.
The historiography of the long nineteenth century is also changing. Increas-
ingly historians are exploring how active women have been on their own behalf
in families, schools, and cloisters, as well as in the workplace.21 The separate
18
See Michelle Perrot, Les femmes, ou Les silences de l’histoire (Paris, 1998),
pp. 191–99. The historiography on French women in the nineteenth century is huge.
For a recent survey, see Allen (n. 6 above), pp. 16–31. See also the excellent recent
bibliography in Françoise Thébaud, Écrire l’histoire des femmes (Fontenay-Saint-
Cloud, 1998), pp. 175–217.
19
Steven D. Kale, “Women, the Public Sphere, and the Persistence of Salons,”
French Historical Studies 25, no. 1 (2002): 115–48. Compare another revision of the
feminist view of the Enlightenment salon, in Jolanta T. Pekacz, Conservative Tradition
in Pre-Revolutionary France: Parisian Salon Women (New York, 1999).
20
Carla Hesse, The “Other” Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern
(Princeton, N.J., 2001), p. 42. Hesse is clearly more interested in another notion of
women in public as manifested by their publications, which increased dramatically
after 1789.
21
On the agency of women historically, see, e.g., Evelyne Lejeune-Resnick, Femmes

790 Allen
spheres for men and women, so sharply drawn during the revolutionary and
Napoleonic periods, were much more porous and fluid than previously thought.
Geneviève Fraisse has proposed the term “circulation,” in lieu of “separation,”
of gendered public and private activities.22 The notions of separate spheres—
one public and male, the other private and female—are more ideological than
analytical. Besides Fraisse, Perrot, and their colleagues in social history, his-
torians as different from each other as Karen Offen and Mona Ozouf argue
that French women enjoyed considerable agency, even to the point of a certain
exceptionalism or singularity, which distinguishes the continental European
from the Anglo-American model of modernization.23 Though deeply contro-
versial because of its apparent conservatism, the revisionist perspective re-
mains influential.
Historians have also depicted the role of French women in the Masonic
movement—in unflattering terms.24 The denigration of women’s participation
et associations, 1830–1880: Vraies démocrates ou dames patronnesses? (Paris, 1991),

on bourgeois women in charity work; Yvonne Turin, Femmes et religieuses au XIXe
siècle: Le féminisme “en religion” (Paris, 1989), on women in religious orders; Viviane
Isambert-Jamati, Solidarité fraternelle et réussite sociale: La correspondance familiale
des Dubois-Goblot, 1841–1882 (Paris, 1995), on women in family strategies for col-
lective social promotion; David Barry, Women and Political Insurgency: France in the
Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York, 1996), on women in collective action; Anne Mar-
tin-Fugier, La vie élégante, ou La formation de Tout-Paris, 1815–1848 (Paris, 1990),
on women’s participation in salon life in Paris; and, more generally in France, Michelle
Perrot, Femmes publiques (Paris, 1997).
22
Geneviève Fraisse, Les deux gouvernements: La famille et la cité (Paris, 2000),
p. 18; this work’s theoretical integration of public and private life suggests, I want to
argue, the special role that French Freemasonry played in modern France.
23
See the controversy surrounding Mona Ozouf’s assessment of French exception-
alism, one unflattering to American feminist historiography: Mona Ozouf, Women’s
Words: Essay on French Singularity, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago, 1997), pp. 229–
83; and the sharp response to the French edition of Ozouf’s book by Joan Wallach
Scott in Bronislaw Baczko et al., “Femmes: Une singularité française?” Le débat, no.
87 (1995), pp. 134–39; this article is a prelude to Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes
to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass., 1996). Compare
the more measured perspective of Offen, “Defining Feminism” (n. 5 above), pp. 119–
57; which is a prelude to Karen M. Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political
History (Stanford, Calif., 2000). According to Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies:
Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana, Ill., 1991), the exceptionalism
may not be so much French as American.
24
See the remarks of Pierre Chevallier, Histoire de la franc-maçonnerie française,
vol. 1, La maçonnerie: Ecole de l’égalité (1725–1799) (Paris, 1974), p. 208: “A sup-
plemental and passing ornament of men’s Masonry[,] . . . a minor, unemancipated Ma-
sonry”; of Henri Félix Marcy, Essai sur l’origine de la franc-maçonnerie et l’histoire
du Grand Orient de France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1949–56), 2:133: “Some para-Masonic

exists largely because of their deliberate exclusion from certain Freemason

rituals. An antiquarian interest exists for much the same reason: the more
exceptional the phenomenon, the more curious it is historically.25 Both of these
trends, however, are now reinforced by more recent work on the role of women
in the Old Regime and on the origins of the women’s movement a hundred
years later.26 Well before Janet Burke and Margaret Jacob argued for women’s
larger role in eighteenth-century Freemasonry, for example, Albert Lantoine’s
Hiram couronné d’épines (1926) defended the enduring importance of Ma-
sonic lodges of adoption, a Masonry created exclusively for women, whose
initiations were recognized officially by the Grand Orient de France in 1774.27
groups [were] constituted by regular brothers in order to satisfy the curiosity of women
without much effort”; and of Alec Mellor, La vie quotidienne de la franc-maçonnerie
française du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours (Paris, 1973), p. 192, on the limitation of the
movement to the spouses and daughters of regular Masons.
25
Note the persistent interest in the initiations of Elizabeth Saint-Leger (in 1711, on
her father’s Irish estate) and Mme de Xaintrailles (in 1803, in a military lodge). See,
e.g., John Day, Memoir of the Honble. Elizabeth Aldworth of Newmarket Court, Co.
Cork (Cork, 1941); and Jean Rivet, “Une femme chez les francs-maçons: Madame de
Xaintrailles,” La chaine d’Union (1936–37), pp. 13–16, whose unacknowledged
source is Jean-Claude Besuchet de Saunois, Précis historique de l’ordre de la franc-
maçonnerie depuis son introduction en France . . . , 2 vols. (Paris, 1829), 2:299–301.
Similar initiations of women, mostly apocryphal, are mentioned in Frederick Smyth,
ed., A Reference Book for Freemasons, rev. ed. (London, 1998), p. 313.
26
The historical literature on the nineteenth-century French women’s movement is
well surveyed by Perrot Les femmes (n. 18 above). Three of the more important titles
worth mentioning here, despite their very limited treatment of Masonry’s role, are
Steven C. Hause, with Anne R. Kenney, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the
Third French Republic (Princeton, N.J., 1984), pp. 293–94 n. 43; Laurence Klejman
and Florence Rochefort, L’égalité en marche: Le féminisme sous la Troisième Répu-
blique (Paris, 1989), pp. 64–65; and Anne-Marie Käppeli, “Feminist Scenes,” in A
History of Women in the West, vol. 4, Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World
War, ed. Geneviève Fraisse and Michelle Perrot, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1995), pp. 482–514, without a single reference to Freemasonry.
27
See Janet M. Burke and Margaret C. Jacob, “Freemasonry, Women, and Feminist
Scholarship,” Journal of Modern History 68, no. 3 (1996): 513–49, which is critical
of Goodman (nn. 13 and 15 above); Albert Lantoine, Hiram couronné d’épines, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1926), which is dated; Elianne Briault, La franc-maçonnerie et l’émancipation
des femmes (Paris, 1953), which is better from 1800 onward; Jean Pierre Bacot, Les
filles du Pasteur Anderson: Deux siècles de franc-maçonnerie mixte et féminine en
France (Paris, 1988), which is thin; Hivert-Messeca and Hivert-Messeca (n. 2 above),
which is thorough but antiquarian; and, most recently, Jupeau-Réquillard, L’initiation
des femmes (n. 3 above), which is a scholarly challenge to feminists. Compare more
partial accounts: G. O. Vat, Étude sur les loges d’adoption (Paris, 1933); A.-M. Gentily,
Des loges d’adoption à la Grande Loge Féminine de France: Rapport au convent de
1959 (Paris, 1959); and Philippe Boitel, “Dossier: Femmes en franc-maçonnerie,” Notre
histoire, no. 131 (1997), pp. 30–43.

792 Allen
When Lantoine was writing, after World War I, Masonic adoption was en-
joying a brief revival. As archivist for the Grande Loge de France, he took its
promotion as a special charge. But Lantoine’s narrow purpose needs to be
broadened and the primary sources he used reexamined in the context of more
recent historiography. Moreover, like the work by Jacob and Burke, Lantoine’s
study makes selective use of sources.28 The materials on French Masonic
women are substantial and require not only fuller use but also analysis over a
longer period than just the eighteenth century.29 Most historians of Freema-
28
Thanks to his work with the Grande Loge, Lantoine had access to the materials
on ritual, which were subsequently confiscated by Vichy authorities. But he chose not
to use them, because as a loyal Mason he had sworn to keep Masonic rituals secret.
So his otherwise thorough account omits arguably the most important feature of the
adoption movement. As for Burke and Jacob, they tend to overlook the rituals of closely
related eighteenth-century secret societies. These rituals provide another context for
the origins of Masonic adoption besides the civic function of Enlightenment ideals that
Burke and Jacob emphasize. A closer look at the evolution of French women’s socia-
bility, as I argue, casts a different light on eighteenth-century Masonic “feminism.”
Otherwise, few historians have examined the extensive fonds maçonnique (hereafter
cited as FM) on nineteenth-century ritual in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
(hereafter cited as BNF), the least-explored portion of the enormous collection cata-
loged by Bernard Faÿ during World War II. Similar materials also from the nineteenth
century, the Hp call-number series in particular, have become more freely available
only recently thanks to the BNF’s new online catalog. A special issue of L’histoire is
devoted to updating much of what we know about French Freemasonry in light of these
archival materials and other sources increasingly available on the Internet. Still more
materials dealing with Masonry in the interwar period, also confiscated by the Germans
but captured by the Soviets during the war, have been recently repatriated from Russian
control; see Pierre Mollier, “Paris-Berlin-Moscou: Les archives retrouvées,” L’histoire,
no. 256 (July–August 2001), pp. 78–82; see also, in the same issue of L’histoire, the
article by Yannick Ripa, “Une affaire d’hommes!” (pp. 86–90), which is sharply critical
of the Masonic exclusion of women.
29
Besides the card catalog of the FM and the online catalog, both in the BNF, see
the useful published bibliographies of relevant primary source materials: Grand Orient
de France, Catalogue de la bibliothèque du Grand Orient de France (Paris, 1882),
much of which may now be found in the BNF; August Wolfstieg, Bibliographie der
freimaurerischen Literatur, 2 vols. (Hildesheim, 1904), which is essential, even for
work in France; René Brassel, Inventaire des archives de la ville de Strasbourg: Franc-
maçonnerie de Strasbourg—Legs Gerschel (Strasbourg, 1975), which is a particularly
good private collection of nineteenth-century materials; Jacques Léglise, Catalogue des
manuscrits maçonniques des bibliothèques publiques de France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1984–
86); and much of the Masonic material in Georg Kloss, Bibliographie der Freimaurerei
und der mit ihr in Verbindung gesetzen geheimen Gesellschaften (Frankfurt am Main,
1844), which is available on microfiche in Margaret C. Jacob, Freemasonry: Early
Sources on Microfiche, 1717–1870—From the Grand Lodge in The Hague (Leiden,
n.d.). Despite the array of sources on women Freemasons, the lacunae due to the Ma-
sonic tradition of secrecy and oral transmission are compounded by the highly polem-
ical nature of the literature surrounding the movement.

sonry have focused on the movement’s greatest influence on social elites before
1789. At least since William Sewell’s influential monograph Work and Revo-
lution in France (1980), however, we know that much of French associational
life for nonelites survived or revived soon after the French Revolution and
thus deserves examination in its continuity at least as much as in its alleged
loss.30 The Masons indeed recovered from the centralized state’s efforts to
suppress their collective activity, and they became a powerful political and
social force during the Third Republic. Masonry’s purposes, organization, in-
fluence, and membership, including that of women, changed substantially from
its origins in 1725 to its present configuration of orders in 1940. Because of
the movement’s penchant for secrecy, estimations of the number of Freemasons
must be approximate, especially before 1750 and during World War II and its
immediate aftermath. But the trends are clear (see fig. 1), and they suggest
why the nature and development of civil society in France remains of keen
historical interest.
Beginning with Alexis de Tocqueville’s study of American public culture
in the 1830s, social scientists have long assumed that the centralized French
bureaucratic state hobbled all voluntary association.31 These observations
about a national community’s “habits of the heart” are particularly apt for the
historical stalemates of the Third Republic. According to Stanley Hoffmann,
“the weakness of intermediate bodies prevented France’s style of authority
from becoming fully democratic, for a liberal society requires vigorous asso-
ciations in which many citizens join for positive purposes.”32 The contrast of
France with Britain and the United States in this regard was marked. Re-
inforced by a proclivity for strong central authority, the French republican
tradition certainly appeared to favor Rousseau’s general will over John Locke’s
30
See William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of
Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980).
31
See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George
Lawrence (Garden City, N.Y., 1969), pp. 403–4; Jean-Claude Lamberti, Tocqueville et
les deux démocraties (Paris, 1983), pp. 28–40; Arnold Rose, “Voluntary Associations
in France,” Theory and Method in the Social Sciences (Minneapolis, 1954), pp. 72–
115; Carol E. Harrison, “Unsociable Frenchmen: Association and Democracy in His-
torical Perspective,” Tocqueville Review 17 (1996): 37–56; and Alan R. Baker, Fra-
ternity among the French Peasantry: Sociability and Voluntary Associations in the Loire
Valley, 1815–1914 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 30–52.
32
Stanley Hoffmann, “Paradoxes of the French Political Community,” in Stanley
Hoffmann et al., In Search of France: The Economy, Society, and Political System in
the Twentieth Century (New York, 1965), p. 12. Similar observations are made in
Laurence Wylie, Village in the Vaucluse: An Account of Life in a French Village, rev.
ed. (New York, 1964), pp. 304–7; and, more generally, in Michel Crozier, The Bu-
reaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago, 1964).

FIG. 1.—Estimated number of mixed and/or adoptive Masonic lodges and women initiated into French Masonry,
1750–1950. Sources: see notes 59, 90, 96, 122, 125, and 130.
civil society.33 The apparent result was a notable propensity for political ex-
tremism until at least the first decade of the Fifth Republic.
In France this paucity of associational life affected women much more than
it did men.34 Subject to police surveillance at least until the 1901 law on
associations, whose legal protections provided immediate impetus to the
women’s movement, the public sphere was long a dangerous, male perogative.
Culture as well as the law made it so. Then as social scientists began to rethink
public culture in France after the events of May 1968—especially with the
subsequent proliferation of nongovernmental organizations—labor unions, re-
ligious organizations, political parties, and rural communities all took on
greater importance in the literature.35 In this new context, the state, both before
and after 1789, was seen as less imposing, less of a factor for individuals,
including women, who pursued their collective interests independently of state
direction. Social and political theorists such as Michel Crozier and Jacques
Donzelot expressed guarded optimism about the contributions of these new
interest groups to the Fifth Republic.36 For the past thirty years, the second
wave of feminist activism has certainly shared in this attention to social as
well as political association in France. The recent scholarly work on Free-
masonry reflects a comparable concern to examine the complex nature of mod-
ern French public life.
This interest must be seen, however, in the context of the bewildering variety
33
Compare Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political At-
titudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, N.J., 1963), pp. 1–44, which omits
France from consideration because of the dominant influence of the Parti Communiste
Français and its allies in the French labor movement; Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney
Verba, eds., The Civic Culture Revisited (Newbury Park, Calif., 1989), pp. 16–22;
Gerald Gamm and Robert D. Putnam, “The Growth of Voluntary Associations in Amer-
ica, 1840–1940,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29, no. 4 (1999): 511–58; and
David T. Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social
Services, 1890–1967 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000).
34
See, e.g., Alain Corbin, Jacqueline Lalouette, and Michèle Riot-Sarcey, eds.,
Femmes dans la cité, 1815–1871 (Grâne, [1997]).
35
Besides Sewell (n. 30 above), see, e.g., Sylvie Fayet-Scribe, Associations féminines
et catholicisme: De la charité à l’action sociale, XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris, 1990); Mau-
rice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State,
trans. Barbara and Robert North, rev. ed. (New York, 1959), which is a classic in
political science, earning renewed interest after 1968; and Maurice Agulhon and Ma-
ryvonne Bodiguel, Les associations au village (Le Paradou, 1981), which generalizes
from Agulhon’s earlier work on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Provence.
36
See, e.g., Michel Crozier, Etat modeste, état moderne (Paris, 1987); and Jacques
Donzelot, L’invention du social: Essai sur le déclin des passions politiques (Paris,
1984). Compare a more thoroughgoing assessment in Claire Andrieu, Gilles Le Béguec,
and Danielle Tantakowsky, eds., Associations et champ politique: La loi de 1901 à
l’épreuve du siècle (Paris, 2002).

796 Allen
of obediences, or types, of Masonry and its affiliated organizations. It is im-

portant to distinguish Freemasonry as defined by the Grand Orient de France
and by the Grande Loge de France, the only obedience in France acknowledged
by the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE), neither of which permits the
initiation of women into their local centers (lodges) for Masonic activity. (The
UGLE makes a distinction between the Grand Orient and the Grande Loge
primarily because of the latter’s recognition of a deity, which the Grand Orient
deliberately omits.) Other Mason-like organizations, such as the Scottish Rite,
do provide for women’s fuller participation, but they do not necessarily admit
women on the same footing as men, as does the Droit Humain. Consequently,
when I refer to Freemasonry in this article, I am referring only to the Grande
Loge and Grand Orient branches rather than to the more inclusive movement
of related fraternal groups commonly referred to as Masonry. Other Mason-
like organizations, such as the Memphis Misraı̈m, the Egyptian Rite, and the
Rosicrucians, whose symbolism as well as ideals differ from those of official
Freemasonry, are for this reason often called para-Masonic and have been more
open to the membership of women.37
What a longer-term perspective on Masonic ritual suggests is a significant
variation on earlier accounts.38 The many publicly available sources on this
enduring, purportedly secret organization provide another view of its defini-
tions, origins, development, varieties, and representations of women since the
eighteenth century. The relationship between men and women in the Masonic
movement, the very nature of women’s participation, the types of adoptive
rituals and their evolution into the twentieth century, the first appearance of
mixed Masonry and co-Masonry for women, and the many literary images of
women associated with Freemasonry all deserve reconsideration in France,
Western Europe, and beyond. Clearly these matters require more than an article
to document and explain them in light of the plethora of Masonic and para-
Masonic organizations that are easily confused with Freemasonry. But the
historical issues can at least be outlined here briefly as the prolegomenon to a
larger, more detailed monograph devoted to the specifically gendered associ-
ational life of modern French women.39
37
For clarification of these distinctions, see the article on Freemasonry in Eric Sau-
nier, ed., Encyclopédie de la franc-maçonnerie (Paris, 2000), pp. 306–11; this volume
also has a useful thematic bibliography of secondary sources (pp. 904–18).
38
The approach here owes much to the perspective first developed by Françoise
Jupeau-Réquillard, La Grande Loge Symbolique Ecossaise, 1880–1911, ou Les avant-
gardes maçonniques (Paris, 1998), which is based on her thèse pour le doctorat, written
under the direction of Daniel Ligou in 1989, albeit with a much narrower historical
and historiographical focus than her more recent L’initiation des femmes (n. 3 above).
39
This monograph-in-progress tentatively carries the same title as the present article.

Freemasonry may well be of Scottish origin in the seventeenth century.40

Since then it has been appropriated as something of an English institution.41
By 1717 its most prominent members were wealthy London merchants intent
on promoting the Enlightenment ideals of social equality, moral virtue, and
religious tolerance. Their re-creation of a guildlike association adopted a pri-
vate symbolism and initiation ritual adapted from the craft of independent
stonemasons during the Middle Ages—hence the name Freemasons. “Spec-
ulative,” or ritualistic, Masonry was distinguished from its earlier “operative”
manifestations among practicing stonemasons by a special charter, the Ander-
son Constitutions. Named after the Reverend James Anderson, a founding
member, these widely recognized rules officially defined English Freemasonry
in 1723: all initiates into “the royal art” were required to be men “of good
report”; membership was explicitly closed to the “stupid Atheist” and the “ir-
religious Libertine.” Similarly, the rules stipulated that “no Bondmen, no
Women, no immoral or scandalous Men” need apply.42
Freemasons appeared soon afterward in France.43 Founded by the likes of
40
See David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century, 1590–
1710 (Cambridge, 1988). Compare John Hamill, The History of English Freemasonry,
rev. ed. (Addlestone, Surrey, 1994), pp. 22–23, 31.
41
The historiography of Freemasonry is huge. Besides Hamill’s book, which is a
standard introduction, see Gérard Serbanesco, Histoire de la franc-maçonnerie uni-
verselle: Son Rituel, son symbolisme, 4 vols. (Paris, 1963–69). The best short scholarly
articles on a wide range of selected historical topics may be found in Eugen Lennhoff
and Oskar Posner, Internationales Freimaurerlexikon (Leipzig, 1932), which includes
useful references to primary sources; Henry Wilson Coil, Coil’s Masonic Encyclopedia,
ed. William Mosley Brown et al. (New York, [1961]), which is still useful on American
Masonry; Smyth, ed. (n. 25 above), which is best on English Masonry; and Daniel
Ligou, ed., Dictionnaire de la franc-maçonnerie, rev. ed. (Paris, 1998), which has an
excellent bibliography of secondary sources (pp. 1309–59).
42
[Rev. James Anderson], The Constitutions of the Freemasons . . . (London, 1723),
pp. 50–51, reprinted in Anderson’s Constitutions: Constitutions d’Anderson, 1723, ed.
and trans. Daniel Ligou, 4th ed. (Paris, 1994), pp. 178–80. According to Ligou (p. 11),
the most widely circulated French translation of this document was the La Tierce edi-
tion, published in Frankfurt am Main in 1742 and based on Anderson’s much aug-
mented edition of 1738, whose membership prohibitions also included homosexuals.
Otherwise, the Continental influence of Anderson’s text was muted by its overt Anglo-
centrism and Protestantism.
43
The literature on the history of French Freemasonry is also voluminous and un-
even. Among the most scholarly works, besides those cited in n. 24 above, see Albert
Lantoine, Histoire de la franc-maçonnerie française: La franc-maçonnerie chez elle
(Paris, [1925]), which is well informed, and Histoire de la franc-maçonnerie française:
Le rite écossais ancien et accepté (Paris, 1930), though it is partial to its subject; Jean
André Faucher and Achille Richer, Histoire de la franc-maçonnerie en France (Paris,
1968), which is balanced; Pierre Chevallier, Histoire de la franc-maçonnerie française,

798 Allen
Charles Radcliffe, later Lord Derwentwater, the first French Masonic lodge
was convened in Paris as early as 1725, and it followed the English model
closely. Other lodges were soon created by the pious Jacobite Andrew Michael
Ramsay, who became associated with the Masonic myth of the Knights Tem-
plar. French Freemasons, united into a Grande Loge in 1732, had good reason
to dress up their traditions in order to distinguish themselves from much less
respectable associations. About the same time, there originated a large number
of scandalous sociétés bachiques—drinking, eating, and dancing clubs—with
their own private rituals that were the cause of much critical commentary.44
Among the best known were the Ordre de la Félicité (founded in Paris in
1742), the Chevaliers et Dames d’Ancre (1746), and the Fendeurs et Fendeuses
(1747), besides dozens of others established much earlier.45 Moreover, royal
officials feared the potential political threat that these secret groups posed. In
1737 the police arrested a number of Parisian Masons in order to crack down
on supposed French supporters of the exiled Stuart pretender.46 Excommuni-
cations by the pope in 1738 and again in 1751 only made matters worse. Early
Freemasonry thus needed another means to protect itself from unwanted at-
tention.
The larger purposes of French Freemasonry were protected by the Grande
Loge de France—that is, the first national council responsible for administer-
3 vols. (Paris, 1974–75), which is devoted to Masonry’s internal politics; and Daniel
Ligou, ed., Histoire des francs-maçons en France (Toulouse, 1981), which has been
updated and revised in Daniel Ligou et al., Histoire des francs-maçons en France,
1725–1815 (Toulouse, 2000), and Histoire des francs-maçons en France de 1815 à
nos jours (Toulouse, 2000), despite errors concerning Masonry for women. A very
useful collection of documents is Gérard Gayot, ed., La franc-maçonnerie française:
Textes et pratiques, XVIIIe–XIXe siècles (Paris, 1981). With the exception of Lan-
toine’s, these general accounts have little or nothing, much less anything good, to say
about Freemason women.
44
See the leering treatment of these groups in Arthur Dinaux, Les sociétés badines,
littéraires et chantantes, leur histoire et leurs travaux, 2 vols. (Paris, 1867), which
considers more than six hundred of them in the eighteenth century. It is in this unsavory
context that the Freemasons sought to establish their ideal associational life. For Dinaux
on adoption, see “Franches-maçonnes (Les). L’adoption, ou La maçonnerie des
femmes.—Loge de la Candeur,” in ibid., 1:339–45.
45
See the antiquarian but otherwise well-grounded Marianne Monestier, Les sociétés
secrètes féminines (Paris, 1963), pp. 102–65. Compare André Doré, “La maçonnerie
des dames: Essai sur les grades et les rituels des loges d’adoption, 1745–1945,” Bulletin
du Grand Collège des Rites, no. 96 (1981), pp. 1–26, which is devoted almost exclu-
sively to the eighteenth century; and Francesca Vigni, “Les aspirations féministes dans
les loges d’adoption,” Dix-huitième siècle 19 (1987): 211–20, which offers a perspec-
tive similar to that of Burke and Jacob (n. 27 above).
46
See Albert Lantoine, Histoire de la franc-maçonnerie française: La franc-maçon-
nerie dans l’état (Paris, 1935), pp. 3–62, with supporting documents (pp. 367–86).

ing the ritualistic activities of all affiliated lodges. But the movement’s secrecy
proved a mixed blessing, as it has ever since. Hostile observers quickly filled
the void.47 One of the more frequent confusions was of Freemasonry with other
secret societies, especially those that provided women a prominent role in their
initiation ceremonies, such as the notorious orders of the Mopses and Mé-
duse.48 Without mixed company the infamous chevalier d’Eon’s fellow Free-
masons, for example, left themselves open to satirical charges of homosexu-
ality.49 In 1741 the mock rules to one imaginary Masonic society stated
47
For example, note the improbable dangers of Freemasonry discussed in Ma-
dame***, La franc-maçonne, ou Révélations des francs-maçons . . . (Brussels, 1744).
In this work, in a common literary trope—the curious wife hides in the meeting room
during an initiation ceremony, is caught, and then must be initiated herself in order to
preserve the secrets of the lodge—the author reveals the impractical nature of Ma-
sonry’s idealism: “The secret consists of carefully constructing a universal & demo-
cratic Republic, whose Queen shall be Reason & the supreme Counsel of the assembled
elders. The Plan for such a Republic . . . deserves to be hidden within the mysteries’
inner sanctum” (p. 18). But the best part of the entire affair for the wife was confessing
the transgression to her husband, “& after having toyed much with longitudo, latitudo,
& altitudo, we went to sleep” (p. 76).
48
See Les agréables divertissements de la table, ou Les réglemens de l’illustre société
des frères et soeurs de l’ordre de Méduse (Lyon, 1712); and [Abbé Gabriel-Louis
Calabre Pérau], L’ordre des francs-maçons trahi et le secret des mopses révélé (Am-
sterdam, 1745), pp. 119–42. The order of the Mopses is best known for its initiation
rite involving a small dog (usually stuffed) whose “derrière” the blindfolded candidate
was required to kiss. The anonymous author of Almanach des cocus, ou Amusemens
pour le beau sexe . . . (Constantinople, 1741), pt. 2, pp. 3–11, 46–47, deliberately
conflates the ribald statutes of a secret society for mixed company with a vapid, long-
winded Freemason speech; the point of the conflation, of course, is to link the two
activities. Similarly, the anonymous author of Apologie de la Félicité, qui doit servir
d’introduction à son histoire (n.p., 1746), pp. 17–18, is at pains to make distinctions
between other secret societies, including the Freemasons, and his own. By mid-century,
women’s intrusive inquisitiveness about Freemasonry even becomes a literary trope;
see, e.g., Antoine-Alexandre-Henri Poinsinet, Les fra-maçonnes, parodies de l’acte des
amazonnes, dans l’opéra des “Fêtes de l’amour et de l’himen” en un acte, représentée
pour la première fois sur le Théâtre de la Foire St.-Laurent, le 28 août 1754 (Paris,
1754), which remains even in twentieth-century popular theater, according to the in-
troduction to Albert Lantoine, Les francs-maçons au théâtre, avec un essai de biblio-
graphie du théâtre maçonnique (Paris, 1919).
49
This accusation would haunt Freemasons before the Grand Orient de France ac-
cepted adoption in 1774. See, e.g., the Masonic song on the notorious transsexual
Freemason, the chevalier d’Eon, sometime after his initiation in 1766:
He is of the Freemasons
A very zealous member,
Well schooled in
The most secret mysteries.
All the same, if he’s a woman,

800 Allen
emphatically, “No man suspected of infamous and unnatural vices will be

admitted.”50 Similarly, the pervasive curiosity of women in the families of
Freemasons led to repeated calls for a means to include them in lodge activities,
notwithstanding the exclusions reiterated by a rash of commentaries and reg-
ulations.51 The growing pressure to initiate women clashed with the intractable
Masonic distrust of women.52
As early as 1737, however, evidence exists that women were initiated in
France.53 They must have been admitted at least partly in response to the
No more will he be welcome

Unless everyone can see the crutch
Of Father Barnabus.
In Daniel Ligou, ed., Chansons maçonniques, 18e et 19e siècles (Paris, 1972), p. 43.
Compare the discussion of the chevalier d’Eon in Gary Kates, Monsieur d’Eon Is a
Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade (New York, 1995),
pp. 204–5; and the nature of sexual as well as Masonic initiations described by a
remarkable Freemason, the marquis de Sade, in Juliette, trans. Austryn Wainhouse
(New York, 1968), pp. 815–909. On the nature of Masonic songs generally, see also
Gordon R. Silber, “Poèmes et chansons maçonniques du XVIIIe siècle: Un aspect peu
connu de la franc-maçonnerie,” Revue des sciences humaines 37 (1972): 167–88, which
shows the circulation of songs in and out of Masonry, in and out of France.
50
Alamanch des cocus (n. 48 above), pt. 2, p. 46. Similarly, as one Frère Procope—
aptly named after the famous café where Freemasons met—put it in his song addressed
to women in general,
Alas, for our first lesson, we learn
That it was from your hands that Adam received the apple,
And that without your charms, all men
Would perhaps be Freemasons.
“Apologie des francs-maçons, par le frère Procope, médecin,” in “Recueil de pièces
satiriques sur le XVIIIe siècle” (ca. 1730–45), in Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville
de Paris (hereafter cited as BHVP) MS. 665, fol. 16r. The eighteenth century’s gendered
discourse on women in Freemasonry is well summarized in Hivert-Messeca and Hivert-
Messeca (n. 2 above), pp. 33–50.
51
The initiation of women was a preoccupation of early French Freemasonry. All
seven documents in Johel Coutura, ed., Le parfait maçon: Les débuts de la maçonnerie
française (1736–1748) (Saint-Etienne, 1994), discuss the issue. Compare the account
of women’s requests to be included in Freemasonry in [Abbé Pérau], L’ordre des francs-
maçons trahi (n. 48 above; reprint, ed. Daniel Ligou [Geneva, 1980]): “Women, who
want to be everywhere Men are, have been truly scandalized to see themselves banned
from the Society of Freemasons” (p. 3).
52
Even after the Grand Orient’s regulations on adoption, there was considerable
hostility to the idea; see, e.g., Abbé [Charles-César] Robin, Recherches sur les initia-
tions anciennes et modernes (Paris, 1779), pp. 151–72. Other Masons simply never
took it seriously; see, e.g., [Théodore Henry, le baron de Tschudy], L’étoile flambo-
yante, ou La société des francs-maçons considérée sous tous les aspects, 2 vols. ([Paris],
[1785]), who called adoption “cette agréable bagatelle” (2:247).
53
The first textual evidence of the Masonic initiation of a woman is Naudot, Chan-

growing role played by women in salons and comparable social gatherings in

the tradition of the seventeenth-century précieuses.54 Women’s participation
ultimately lent Masonry in France a certain respectability. Various para-Ma-
sonic organizations had initiated aristocratic figures and thus provided a so-
cially acceptable precedent for Freemasons. In singing the praises of such
women, for example, one anonymous lyricist wrote, “Only by acquiring your
high esteem does / [Every Freemason] earn the worth of his name.”55 It is no
accident that the first loges d’adoption, such as Saint-Jean de la Candeur, soon
admitted extremely prominent figures, including members of the royal family
and the aristocracy of the court, who saw Masonic adoption as a fashionable
way to engage in charitable activity.56 In 1775 Louise Marie Thérèse Mathilde
de Bourbon-Condé actually became the grande maı̂tresse of this new kind of
Masonry.
The first lodge of adoption for French women may have been a Dutch
invention.57 Whether or not this is true, lodges in France soon dominated the
sons notées de la très vénérable confrèrie des francs-maçons précédées de quelques

pièces de poésies convenables au sujet et d’une marche [des franches maçonnes]
(n.p., 1737), though it is of unreliable date. La franc-maçonne (n. 47 above), however,
confirms that women had indeed been initiated by 1744; see Coutura, ed., pp. 12,
143–44.
54
See Françoise Jupeau-Réquillard, La Grande Loge Symbolique Ecossaise (1880–
1911): Le changement dans l’institution maçonnique, 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Université
de Bourgogne, 1989), 1:321–38. Compare the place of women in salons according to
Dena Goodman, “Enlightenment Salons,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 22, no. 3 (1989):
329–50; and Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France
(Cambridge, Mass., 1968), quoting a letter by Jean-Louis Carra, February 12, 1783,
about the participants in eighteenth-century social life: “les hommes, les femmes, de
tout âge, s’y portent en foule” (p. 178).
55
“Vers des francs-maçons,” in “Recueil de pièces satiriques,” in BHVP MS. 665,
fol. 17v.
56
According to Doré, “La maçonnerie des dames” (n. 45 above), p. 23, 80 percent
of all women initiates for whom there are records had aristocratic particles in their
name. Perhaps the best example is the Loge Saint-Jean de la Candeur, whose members
included members of Queen Marie Antoinette’s court. See the anonymously authored
Esquisse des travaux d’adoption, dirigés par les officiers de la loge de la Candeur . . .
([Paris], 1778), addressed to the duchesses de Bourbon and de Chartres and to the
princesse de Lamballe. The illustrious members of this lodge are listed in its extraor-
dinary register book, Archives Nationales de France (hereafter cited as ANF) AB XIX
5000, “Registre de la loge d’adoption de Saint-Jean de la Candeur (1775–85).”
57
According to Margaret C. Jacob, “Freemasonry, Women, and the Paradox of the
Enlightenment,” in Margaret Hunt et al., Women and the Enlightenment (Binghamton,
N.Y., 1984), pp. 69–93, records exist in the Grand Lodge in The Hague of a Masonic
lodge that initiated women on an equal footing with men as early as 1751. But with
the evidence Jacob provides, including the translation of an initiation catechism at the
end of her article, this lodge also resembles the androgynous orders founded years

802 Allen
practice and gave it a distinctive character, one similar to other social groups
that also admitted women.58 For nearly fifteen years after the Grand Orient, a
rival to the Grande Loge, gave its official sanction on June 10, 1774, Free-
masons in small provincial cities also must have allowed their wives, daugh-
ters, and sisters to join. There are documents for no fewer than forty-five lodges
of adoption in Old Regime France, with at least six hundred women initiates
earlier in Paris. See [Claude-Antoine Thory], Annales originis Magni Galliarum O.,
ou Histoire de la fondation du Grand Orient de France et des révolutions qui l’ont
précédée . . . (Paris, 1812), pp. 360–78; and Jean-Marie Ragon, Franc-maçonnerie:
Manuel complet de la maçonnerie d’adoption, ou Maçonnerie des dames (Paris,
[1860]), pp. 106–47, for well-informed alternative perspectives on the origins of adop-
tive rituals, beginning with these earlier societies. According to the rules established
by the Grand Orient in 1774, membership in Masonic adoption was reserved for women
only, even though Freemason men were obliged to attend their initiations. Again in
light of Masonic practice, adoption’s ritual symbolism was deliberately adapted from
that for Freemason men, with important emphases on Jacob’s ladder, Noah’s ark, and
the Tower of Babel. In sharp contrast to these widely accepted features of Masonic
adoption, the sociétés de plaisir (ritualized social organizations) accepted both women
and men, who were generally drawn from the same professional circles as those in The
Hague, and their ritual symbolism omits key Masonic elements: “the tools of the craft.”
Moreover, the preface to Chansons de l’ordre de l’adoption, ou La maçonnerie des
femmes . . . (The Hague, 1751), pp. 5–8, which reproduces the remarks of Frère de
Saint-Etienne, a vénérable in the order, at the establishment of another adoptive lodge
in the same year, defines gender roles based on sexual complementarity rather than
equality tout court. These remarks run counter to Jacob’s view of the lodge’s egalitarian
achievement. Compare also the argument about the role played by the liberal Enlight-
enment in Margaret C. Jacob, “Money, Equality, Fraternity: Freemasonry and the Social
Order in Eighteenth-Century Europe,” in The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays,
ed. Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraeber III (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 102–
35; with the context of other secret societies in eighteenth-century France well studied
in René Le Forestier, La franc-maçonnerie occultiste au XVIIIe siècle et l’Ordre des
Elus Coens (Paris, [1928]), pp. 408–19, and Maçonnerie féminine et loges académiques
(Milan, 1979), pp. 3–18; and Hivert-Messeca and Hivert-Messeca (n. 2 above), pp. 15–
56, which together develop adoption’s looser relationship to Enlightenment ideals. It
is this broader contextual perspective on women’s sociability, similar in spirit to Jupeau-
Réquillard’s (nn. 3, 38, and 54 above), that I take here.
58
By conflating the rituals of nearly all secret societies in France, some specialists
on adoptive rites—F. G. Irwin, Harold V. B. Voorhis, and John Yarker—contend that
adoptive Masonry was a French invention of the eighteenth century and that it never
caught on in the Anglo-American Masonic tradition. These antiquarians of Masonic
ritual do not specify precisely when or where the particular rites originated, but it is
clear from their work that adoption owes much to earlier, non-Masonic societies. See
F. G. Irwin, “Masonic Rituals: Rite of Adoption,” Freemason’s Hall Library (hereafter
cited as FHL), Irwin Papers MS. vol. 1 (1888), pp. 5–7; Harold Van Buren Voorhis,
“Rite of Adoption,” Collectanea 1, pt. 3 ([1943]): 145–47, which was developed from
an unspecified manuscript by John Yarker; and John Yarker, The Secret Rituals of the
Adoptive Rituals of Freemasonry: Masonic Rituals for Women (Kila, Mont., 1992).
Only recently has the FHL made these materials available, by special permission, to
non-Masons.

(the actual numbers are likely to be much higher).59 Although the rituals for
women differed from those for men, both men and women attended tenues, or
induction meetings, which were otherwise directed by the women themselves.
Male auspices did not prevent the Masonic adoption movement from devel-
oping a certain authority to regulate its own affairs.60 Despite repeated ad-
monitions against the practice, pressure grew to initiate women directly into
Freemasonry, and in a few cases lodges such as the Neuf Soeurs in Paris did
so without authorization.61
59
Together, Hivert-Messeca and Hivert-Messeca (n. 2 above), pp. 63–65; and Burke
and Jacob (n. 27 above), pp. 522–23, 546–49, document forty-five; while Jupeau-
Réquillard, L’initiation des femmes (n. 3 above), p. 41, counts more than sixty; and
Yves Hivert-Messeca, “Adoption,” in Saunier, ed. (n. 37 above), p. 8, counts at least
fifty-six—both without documentation. Before 1789 there was approximately one do-
cumentable adoptive lodge in France for every fifteen lodges for men. Olivia Harman,
“‘L’Azille enchanté, ou La réunion des deux sexes’: Réflexions sur le rite d’adoption
dans la franc-maçonnerie de l’ancien régime,” Renaissance traditionnelle, nos. 127–
28 (2001): 252 n. 8, claims more than one thousand women in such lodges. These
vague numbers reflect the fact that, like most Masonic activities based on secrecy and
oral transmission, records of adoptive lodges were not well kept. For example, there
are no tableaux (lists of members) or livres d’architecture (minutes of business meet-
ings) for adoptive lodges until the nineteenth century, with a few exceptions, such as
the register book for Saint-Jean de la Candeur in Paris (ANF AB XIX 5000), and
Tableau des frères et soeurs de la respectable loge Saint-Louis à l’ordre du régiment
d’infantrie du roi . . . (n.p., [ca. 1780]). These figures are very conservative, however,
in light of the actual number of regular Freemason lodges (635) and brethren (35,000)
and of their more modest social, provincial background on the eve of the Revolution—
the movement’s high point, according to Halévi (n. 4 above), pp. 16, 82, 101. A rea-
sonable guess of the actual numbers for women would be more like 15 percent of those
for men—that is, approximately 100 adoptive lodges and 5,000 sisters—about the
same percentage of aristocrats generally in Masonry at the time. This estimate assumes
that Masonic adoption was an aristocratic fad, as most commentators have noted. But
this assumption excludes the significant percentage of bourgeois Masons in France’s
small towns and cities, who formed the backbone of the movement before the Revo-
lution. The participation of women from their families cannot be ruled out entirely,
even though there are very few records about them. Only intensive research on specific
lodges can determine just how widespread adoption actually was. See, e.g., Francis
Masgnaud, Franc-maçonnerie et franc-maçons en Aunis et Saintonge sous l’ancien
régime et la révolution (La Rochelle, 1989), pp. 133–36, which mentions an adoptive
lodge in La Rochelle (1785) which the Hivert-Messecas and Burke and Jacob miss.
60
See Janet Burke, “Freemasonry, Friendship and Noblewomen: The Role of the
Secret Society in Bringing Enlightenment Thought to Pre-revolutionary Women
Elites,” History of European Ideas 10, no. 3 (1989): 283–94.
61
See contemporary accounts, both pro and con, of this incident: Grand Orient de
France, Circulaire du Grand Orient de France, du 19 mars 1779, contenant l’envoi du
jugement de la Grande Loge de Conseil contre la loge des Neuf-Soeurs à Paris, à
l’occasion des irrégularités et indécences commises par un abbé dans cette loge lors
de son assemblée d’adoption du mars. . . . ([Paris], 1779); and [Deladixmérie], Mémoire
pour la loge des Neuf-Soeurs ([Paris], 1779). Also well informed by first-hand infor-

804 Allen
On the eve of the 1789 Revolution, then, women participated in Masonry

in one of two distinct ways. The first, and most distant, influence came from
the mixed company in various secret societies whose social frivolity and/or
mystical ideals were antithetical to the rationalistic Enlightenment. Hundreds
of such groups accepted men and women together.62 Besides the androgynous,
aristocratic societies established before 1750—what Pierre Larousse called
sociétés de plaisir—there were, most prominently, the occultist Martinès de
Pasqually’s Martinists (1772), Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati (1780), and Jo-
seph Balsamo’s cognoscenti of the Egyptian Rite (1785).63 This trend resem-
bled the various intellectual fads, such as mesmerism, that plagued eighteenth-
century salons. Their relationship to Freemasonry proper was not much more
than a shared preference for ritual secrecy, notwithstanding their subsequent
influences on the movement.
The second, more overtly Masonic, practice for women lay in the loges
d’adoption, specially created lodges practicing an initiation comparable to the
men’s. These gatherings were tolerated and regulated by the Grand Orient,
even if the Grande Loge remained opposed to them.64 In the most enduring
institution, one surviving well beyond the Revolution of 1789, Freemasons
established a new kind of Masonry for women in order to incorporate them
more fully into their activities. Although the social and cultural context would
change dramatically, this tradition created the precedent for subsequent de-
velopments in mixed Masonry (for men and women together), co-Masonry
(for women alone), and para-Masonry of various sorts (again for both men and
women, either together or separately), which would make their official ap-
pearance a century later. Clearly the second, more strictly Masonic, tradition
warrants further study.
mation is [Thory] (n. 57 above), pp. 369–73. The issue was less over the initiation of
women into the lodge than over the lodge’s own authority to decide under what cir-
cumstances to do so, according to Louis Amiable, Une loge maçonnique d’avant 1789:
La Respectable Loge des Neuf Soeurs (Paris, 1897), pp. 100–128.
62
See Dinaux, Les sociétés badines (n. 44 above). Compare Hivert-Messeca and
Hivert-Messeca (n. 2 above), pp. 125–51.
63
See Pierre Larousse, “Loge d’adoption,” Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe
siècle, 22 vols. (Paris, 1873), 10:622. On various secret societies of the Counter-En-
lightenment, see Jean Baylot, La voie substituée: Recherches sur la déviation de la
franc-maçonnerie en France et en Europe (Liège, 1968); Marc Haven, Le maı̂tre in-
connu Cagliostro: Etude historique et critique sur la haute magie (Paris, [1912]); and
René Le Forestier, La franc-maçonnerie occultiste au XVIIIe siècle (n. 57 above), and
Les illuminés de Bavière et la franc-maçonnerie allemande, rpt. ed. (Geneva, 1974).
64
See the references to secondary works on French Masonic adoption in nn. 27, 45,
57, and 58 above.

II. MASONIC RITUAL AND ITS EVOLUTION

Adoptive rituals, as they developed in the eighteenth century, reveal much
about the historical role of women. Given the secret and fragmentary nature
of the documentation, however, tracing the definitive origins of Masonic ini-
tiation is impossible. The earliest fully elaborated ritual apparently dates from
the prince de Clermont’s 1763 redactions, drawing on many elements of a
comparable exercise that existed considerably earlier.65 The extant sources sug-
gest that each lodge observed a similar Masonic and biblical symbolism for
women, one derived in part from the Ordre de la Félicité in 1748, which
subsequent ritual enthusiasts modified substantially. Their work was compiled
and more or less standardized by Louis Guillemain de Saint-Victor in 1779.66
65
Compare the initiation catechism reproduced by Jacob, “Freemasonry, Women,
and the Paradox of the Enlightenment” (n. 57 above), pp. 91–93, and probably the
earliest, fully developed adoptive rituals, including the appropriate craft and biblical
symbols, by the prince de Clermont, “Maçonnerie de dames, ou la maçonne d’adoption,
par le prince de Clermont, grand maı̂tre [de l’]Orient de France, deduit en catres
grades,” in Livre contenant tous les grades de la véritable maçonnerie . . . de l’anné[e]
maçonnique 5763, MS. book BNF FM 4.79, fol. 122v–140r, with a number of impor-
tant differences, such as the omission of the Tower of Babel and the addition of the
sacrifice of Abraham and the story of Sodom and Lot. Perhaps the model for all sub-
sequent adoptive rites is [Bassand], “Recueil et collection de toutes les instructions de
la maçonnerie en tous grades, à l’usage du frère Bassand, . . . reçu maçon le 15 février
1761,” MS. book BNF FM 4.148, pp. 303–19, from the same lodge as Clermont. For
the period 1763–87, altogether a dozen more or less complete adoptive rituals have
survived, in both print and manuscript, based on Clermont’s version. See Hivert-Mes-
seca and Hivert-Messeca (n. 2 above), pp. 83–106. The much earlier rituals of the
Ordre de la Félicité reveal a few comparable features—namely, the oath to guard ritual
secrets, the ritual voyage, and symbols from the biblical Book of Genesis—suggesting
the very distant influence of this secret society on Masonic adoption. See the first part
of the oration in L’ordre hermaphrodite, ou Les secrets de la sublime Félicité . . . (n.p.,
1748), pp. 3–16, which traces the mythical history of the order to the Garden of Eden.
Compare [Tschudy], “Discours d’adoption pour un travail d’apprentie, prononcé à M.,
par le F.B.T., le 16 septembre 1765,” L’étoile flamboyante (n. 52 above), 2:249–52,
which develops similar, but less flattering, biblical symbols, including the warning,
“You will eat the apple, but instructed by the rules of the Order, you will not eat any
of the core because it contains the seed. . . . That is the only precaution that Masonry
imposes upon you” (p. 250). None of the other texts relating to this order, however, is
as suggestive, primarily because its purposes were very different from those of Free-
masonry; cf. [Jean-Pierre Moët], “L’antropophile, ou Le secret et les mistères de l’ordre
de la Félicité, dévoilés pour le bonheur de tout l’univers . . .” (1746) in [Bassand],
“Recueil et collection,” pp. 399–464.
66
See [Louis Guillemain de Saint-Victor], Manuel des franches-maçonnes, ou La
vraie maçonnerie d’adoption . . . (Philadelphia, 1787), first published in 1779. This
apology for Masonic adoption recommends changes to ritual more flattering to women.
Because of its wide circulation—fifteen editions in just ten years—Guillemain de
Saint-Victor’s compilation became a standard reference.

806 Allen
By then the outlines of the adoptive ceremony were well established. They
remained little changed into the early nineteenth century, though subject to
considerable variation from lodge to lodge.
Almost all Masonic orders followed the regulations issued by the Grand
Orient in 1774. These bylaws were intended to define the adoptive lodge’s
activities.67 Among the more telling rules was the stricture against the initiation
of pregnant and menstruating women, an echo of ancient Hebraic law. How-
ever gratuitous, this restriction is consistent with Masonry’s efforts to develop
a legitimatizing mythology.68 Another regulation admonished women not to
speak ill of others. Rule 20 states: “Sisters should avoid participation in ma-
licious gossip and defamation so that nothing could harm, either directly or
indirectly, the honor of the order, their brothers, or their sisters.”69 Gendered
differently, a comparable invocation like the one against swearing exists in the
rules for Freemason men.70 But, as intrusive as they were, the Grand Orient’s
bylaws did not specify the rituals for either sex. Each lodge exercised consid-
erable discretion, including whom to initiate and how, as a matter of principle.71
The accounts of adoptive rites of initiation are more revealing.72 For the first
degree, for instance, they describe in detail the layout and decoration of the
67
These statutes, subject to slight modification, appear in Ragon, Franc-maçonnerie
(n. 57 above), pp. 103–5.
68
See, e.g., Jules Boucher, La symbolique maçonnique, 2d ed. (Paris, 1974); and
Roger Luc Mary, Le symbolisme dans la franc-maçonnerie, 2d ed. (Paris, 1994).
69
“Statuts qui doivent s’observer dans les loges de dames” (c. 1800), Bibliothèque
Municipale de Nancy MS. 1639 (932), fol. 5v. Rule 21 calls upon the vénérable maı̂-
tresse, the head of the adoptive lodge, to intervene in settling these personal disputes.
Although comparable admonitions appear in the statutes for male Freemasons, they are
given less pointed emphasis.
70
See obligation 2 (“Conduite quand la Loge est finie et avant que les FRERES soient
parties”), and general rule 9 (“But if any Brother conducts himself badly so as to
indispose his Lodge, he should be duly admonished twice by the maı̂tre or the sur-
veillants, in the assembled Lodge”), in [Anderson] (n. 42 above), pp. 187, 199.
71
The tutelage of women by the Grand Orient, and therefore by the men in adoptive
lodges, is contradicted by these elements of local control. Compare the skeptical femi-
nist perspective on the Masonic control of women by men in Goodman, The Republic
of Letters (n. 15 above), pp. 253–57; and the more generous appraisal in Burke and
Jacob (n. 27 above), p. 540: “The lodges became ‘secret’ places where women’s power
and merit grew and were expressed through elaborate ceremonies (many of them pub-
lished) and where large numbers of women first expressed what we may legitimately
describe as an early feminism.” Although hardly feminists, Masonic sisters did have
some control over their activities in the lodges, including the election of their new
members and officers; see regulations on elections in Ragon, Franc-maçonnerie (n. 57
above), p. 104.
72
Generally kept secret, these features of adoptive ritual were in circulation; see,
e.g., the anonymously authored “Instructions pour la loge d’adoption pour les dames
. . . [,] 1777,” in BNF Baylot FM 4.24, fols. 1–229.

meeting hall, the clothes to be worn by the principals, the preparation of the
candidate, and the sequence of activities constituting her formal induction.
These activities invariably included the installation of the presiding officers,
the formal opening of the lodge, the candidate’s reception into the room for
reflection, her reception into the lodge, and her oath to keep Masonic secrets.
The ceremony reached its climax with the novice’s “voyage to the climates”
and her trials beneath the “vault of steel” and “by fire.” Here, the candidate
was led blindfolded through a series of obstacles at various points in the hall
and then beneath a gauntlet of clashing swords; finally, with her blindfold
removed, she was to be dazzled by a blaze of candles (see fig. 2). The ceremony
then concluded with the solemn admonition by the orator, the catechism of the
candidate, and the formal closing of the lodge. With everyone presumably in
good spirits, the Masons repaired to a meal, punctuated by repeated toasts and
some more or less polite singing.
At first there were only three degrees: apprentie, compagnonne, and maı̂-
tresse. But the influence of the Scottish Rite and various para-Masonic orders
pushed the number to ten or more.73 Few women were ever taken beyond the
third degree, primarily because the candidate had to learn an elaborate set of
symbols and sequence of events for each initiation. Moreover, the first three
degrees are at the heart of Masonic ritual, which was adapted specifically for
women. Its elements include the requirement that officials from a regular Free-
mason lodge be in attendance. Everywhere in evidence are also the “tools of
the trade,” such as the trowel, the compass, and the square. The trowel appears
as a pendant, or “jewel,” to the neck sash, while the square and the compass
are stitched onto the ceremonial aprons worn by the officiating members (see
fig. 3). Similarly, the presiding grande maı̂tresse wields the hammer or gavel.
However far removed from the ritual for men, the first adoption rites are clearly
Masonic in inspiration.
Another feature of the original degrees is a complementary symbolism. Con-
sistent with Masonic mythology, it is based on the biblical Book of Genesis.
This scriptural focus distinguishes adoption from the primary emphasis on the
stonemason’s craft in men’s Masonry, even though its Protestant origins en-
sured that Scripture would continue to play a role in Freemasonry generally.
73
For example, the eight degrees listed in “Rituel maçonnique d’adoption” (c. 1780),
in BNF FM 4.1323: apprentisse, compagnonne, maı̂tresse, parfaite, eluë, ecossaise,
chevalière de la lune, and amazonie anglaise. On this source, see Harman (n. 59 above),
pp. 250–60. Irwin’s MS. volumes in FHL (n. 58 above) list forty-nine degrees, pri-
marily by compiling rituals from multiple orders, most of which are not even vaguely
Masonic. The vast majority of Masonic rituals from the eighteenth century, however,
list no more than four, e.g., [André Honoré], Les quatre grades véritables et uniformes
de l’ordre de l’adoption, ou Maçonnerie des dames (n.p., 1779). Compare Hivert-
Messeca and Hivert-Messeca (n. 2 above), pp. 83–106.

FIG. 2.—Masonic adoption initiation, ca. 1810. Musée du Grand Orient, Paris
808

FIG. 3.—Ceremonial apron for Masonic adoption, ca. 1780. Musée du Grand Orient, Paris
809

810 Allen
During the ceremony for the apprentie, for example, the candidate is initiated
before images of Jacob’s ladder, Noah’s ark, and the Tower of Babel, as ap-
parent on the women’s ceremonial aprons, representing the limitations as well
as the possibilities of redemption. “Make her See the Horror of her Condition,
[which] was, which is, and which will be, that of Original Sin,” as the ritual
put it dramatically and somewhat ungrammatically in 1774.74 The reference to
the Garden of Eden—the symbolic site for adoptive initiation—is suggestive
of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and is entirely appropriate to Masonry’s
intentions of nourishing virtue in a fallen universe. By their induction into
Masonic secrets, men and women are redeemed from the world of the “pro-
fanes,” that is, of the noninitiated. In this way Freemasons have metaphorically
appropriated the role of Christianity in the salvation of lost souls. This figu-
rative redemption was made possible by the symbolic re-creation of the first
lodge, which was reputedly instituted by Adam and Eve.75
At first blush, this rite perpetuates the religious denigration of women.76
Despite the movement’s efforts to promote equality between men, its symbol-
ism obviously insists on women as the source of evil, which must be combated
by Masonic intervention. Women are constantly reminded, it seems, of their
central role in original sin, hardly an innovation in the Western cultural tra-
dition. But in fact the meaning of this imagery is more complex. Men were
also initiated before symbols drawn from Hebraic scripture, like the columns
of Jakin and Boaz, descendants of Cain, which suggest a less illustrious Ma-
sonic heritage. Moreover, the social and cultural context of eighteenth-century
France must have construed the initiation very differently. Given the mock
seriousness of eighteenth-century aristocratic secret societies, such as Mme de
74
La maçonnerie des femmes (London, 1774), pp. 14–15.
75
This redemptive role for women is celebrated in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (1791),
which was first performed in France in a much altered version, entitled Les mystères
d’Isis, only in 1801. Not until Emanuel Schikaneder’s original libretto was translated
by Charles Truinet and Alexandre Beaume in 1865 did French audiences experience
the full impact of this opera inspired by Masonic ideals, including the special role
played by women. Compare Jacques Chailley, “The Magic Flute,” Masonic Opera:
An Interpretation of the Libretto and the Music, trans. Herbert Weinstock (London,
1972), pp. 44–46, 74–79; and Nicholas Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth,
Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart’s Operas (London, 1992), pp. 287–92, which takes a
more ambivalent position.
76
The anthropological literature on the cultural meaning of symbolic rites is too
large to summarize. For the purposes of this article, however, the following works were
most useful: Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and
Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago, 1960); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures:
Selected Essays (New York, 1973); Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in
Cosmology (New York, 1982); Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology
(Philadelphia, 1985); and Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Struc-
ture (New York, 1995). Compare Harman (n. 59 above).

Genlis’s Ordre de la Persévérance, the message was often less than it seemed.77
The fashionably deistic Enlightenment, on the one hand, and the French ten-
dency to gallantry, on the other, surely lent the adoption ritual an innocent,
even banal quality.
For instance, according to one late eighteenth-century handbook reproduc-
ing an oration from 1784, “Masonry’s finest moment was undoubtedly the one
that gave rise to its adoption of an amiable and tender sex, made by the Great
Architect for the perfection of his creation and for our happiness.”78 The ref-
erence to the Great Architect of the Universe is Freemasonry’s bow to religious
tolerance; the overt flattery of women is the movement’s sanction of French
cultural norms regulating relations between the sexes. As for the biblical al-
lusions, they share in Masonry’s elaborate search for origins in the ancient
world. This latter inclination begins as early as Anderson’s invocation of Hiram
Abiff, the builder of King Solomon’s Temple, whose murder made him the
first martyr to Masonic secrecy.79 The symbolic return to Eden is thus a return
to the innate virtue—and pleasure—enjoyed by Adam and Eve’s descendants,
men and women alike, in eighteenth-century polite society.
The commentary on this interpretation of Masonic ritual is varied. Besides
a certain incoherence in Masonic symbolism generally—due to its evolution
over time, from lodge to lodge, without a single, recognized authority to en-
force strict conformity—the discussion of initiation was often a tissue of polite
commonplaces. In Guillemain de Saint-Victor’s generous words, for example,
In our temples everything is symbol;

All prejudices are vanquished;
Masonry is the school
Of decency and virtue;
Here we tame the weakness
That demeans humanity,
And the flame of wisdom
Prepares us all for sensuous pleasure [la volupté].80
77
See the tongue-in-check account of a secret society in Mme de Genlis, Suites des
souvenirs de Félicie L*** (Paris, 1807), pp. 74–80.
78
“Maçonnerie des dames dite d’adoption” (c. 1800) in Bibliothèque Institut de
France MS. 6129, pp. 44–45.
79
On the special mixture of Masonic mythological symbolism for men, see Jules
Boucher, La symbolique maçonnique (Paris, 1948), p. xviii: “Masonic initiation, de-
rived from operative and guild initiations, is ascribed, on the one hand, to the art of
building and, on the other hand, to the ‘ancient mysteries’ with the myth of Hiram,”
which was directly incorporated into the initiation ritual of the third degree for men
(emphasis in the original). Its parallel for women is discussed in Patrick Houque, Eve,
éros, élohim: La femme, l’érotisme, le sacré (Paris, 1982), pp. 141–91.
80
[Guillemain de Saint-Victor], “A une soeur nouvellement initiée, qui demandoit

812 Allen
Freemason brothers attending the initiations for their adopted sisters praised
different virtues. Some, like the one at Saint-Jean de la Candeur in 1778,
lavishly flattered their audience of socially prominent women, “this sublime
& gentle portion of humankind,” while others, like the one at an unspecified
lodge in 1780, sternly catechized their less-esteemed candidates on their re-
sponsibilities and duties: “chastity, humility, temperance, charity, and pru-
dence.”81 The nature of eighteenth-century adoptive Masonry depended as
much on its participants and circumstances as it did on the principles implicit
in the ritual’s symbolic trappings. The gesture of including women at all was
itself significant, as well as controversial, in a movement clearly established
by and for men only decades earlier.
This perspective was warmly affirmed by the few extant statements by eigh-
teenth-century Freemason women.82 The overwhelming majority of Masonic
texts before 1800 were written by men, making all the more remarkable the
comments of women themselves. Typical of their view of Masonry since then
is the speech given by Sister-President Daix after her reception as compa-
gnonne, the second degree in the adoptive ritual, at the Loge de la Concorde
in 1781. After a brief apostrophe to the sisterhood of Freemason women, Daix
expressed her enthusiastic appreciation for the Masonic dignity accorded to
women like her: “Oh, my sisters,” she rejoiced, “let us applaud [our] having
found some fair-minded men. Instead of offering us condescension, an appar-
ent submission, which are the all-too-certain marks of pride and superiority,
they offer us an association, a sharing, which are the precious signs of esteem
ce qu’étoit la maçonnerie, et ce que les francs-maçons faisoient dans leurs loges,” in

Guillemain de Saint-Victor (n. 66 above), p. 101.
81
Esquisse des travaux d’adoption (n. 56 above), p. 2; and “Maçonnerie des femmes”
(ca. 1780), in BNF FM 4.149, fol. 178r. The range of Masonic attitudes toward women
has less to do with the symbols themselves than it does with the nature of the women
initiated—often the wives, daughters, and sisters of the Freemasons officiating at the
ceremony and welcoming them into the Masonic mysteries. As an anonymous Swiss
Freemason noted in his oration, the very idea of adoption implies a celebration: “Far
from flattering ourselves for having succeeded in a matter whose dimensions must
escape us, but of which our heart is full, let us therefore forget our regrets in order to
give way to the transports of so fine and significant a day” (M. D*C****, “Discours
de la première loge d’adoption, dans l’atelier de Thalie,” Recueil des discours moraux
[Geneva, 1782], pp. 80–81).
82
Besides the casual comments by Mme de Genlis cited in n. 77 above, see the
remarks of an eighteenth-century initiate, in “Loge de la maçonnerie des femmes, loge
d’adoption,” Bibliothèque Municipale de Dijon MSS. 1411–22 (44), T. V, No. 8, in
Vigni (n. 45 above), pp. 218–19; also in [Sister-President Daix], “Discours prononcé
à la loge de la Concorde le vingt-cinquième jour du onzième mois de l’an de la Vraie
Lumière 5781 . . . ,” Bibliothèque du Grand Orient (hereafter cited as BGO) MS. 51187,
in Jupeau-Réquillard (n. 3 above), p. 300.

and equality.”83 Masonry provided for women like Daix the dignity of a gen-
uine partnership with men, whose example inspired them to establish the reign
of virtue in society. “Just as the soul has no sex,” this grateful and proud Mason
concluded, “virtue has none anymore, either.”84 Masonic men and women had
made it so together.
Like much else in Old Regime France, Masonry for women was altered by
the Revolution of 1789.85 The changes, manifested by the rapid loss of mem-
bers and the cessation of initiations, were temporary but severe. For ten years
records of Masonic adoption nearly disappear.86 Very few adoptive lodges
continued to meet, for the same reasons that fewer men’s lodges continued to
do so: the distraction of dramatic political events, the outbreak of civil unrest
and warfare, the unsavory reputation of the aristocratic circles, the hostility of
the Jacobin revolution to all apolitical civic life, and the disruption of the
national economy. In 1793, when Philippe Egalité repudiated his participation
in Freemasonry, conditions were hardly conducive to an activity like Masonic
adoption. Women played a much smaller role in fostering the revolutionary
ideology of liberty, equality, and fraternity than embittered reactionaries soon
alleged about the Masonic movement. Thanks to Abbé Augustin de Barruel,
the myth of Freemasonry’s international conspiracy soon developed a life of
its own among the bien-pensant.87 Women Masons became revolutionaries,
however unintentionally, by their very association with this private society.
83
[Sister-President Daix], p. 300.
84
Ibid. Compare another perspective on this document in Janet Burke, “Through
Friendship to Feminism: The Growth of Self-Awareness among Eighteenth-Century
Women Freemasons,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for
French History 14 (1987): 187–96.
85
The Revolution’s erasure of women in Freemasonry is well summarized by Fran-
çoise Gaspard, “Franc-maçonnerie, république et exclusion des femmes,” in La dé-
mocratie “à la française,” ou Les femmes indésirables, ed. Eliane Viennot (Paris,
1996), pp. 63–75.
86
Among the few extant records of Masonic adoption for 1789–95 are A.-M. La-
fortelle, Cantiques faits à l’occasion d’une loge d’adoption . . . (n.p., 1793); and a
certificate of initiation for “Marie-Françoise Bourgeois, épouse de Mr. Molini (27 mars
1792), Loge d’adoption Heureuse Alliance, Lorient” (Grand Orient), in BNF FM 5.555.
Unfortunately, many of the sources used in [Thory] (n. 57 above), pp. 341–432, dealing
with Masonic adoption and secret societies in this period, are now in private hands.
87
See Abbé Augustin de Barruel, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme,
5 vols. (Hamburg, 1798–99), on the international Masonic conspiracy. Barruel was
preceded by others, such as Abbé Jacques-François Lefranc, Le voile levé pour les
curieux, ou Le secret de la révolution de France révélé à l’aide de la franc-maçonnerie
(Paris, 1792), among others. See Roberts (n. 8 above), pp. 146–202. This view was
given scholarly respectability by the original guardian of the BNF FM, Bernard Faÿ,
La franc-maçonnerie et la révolution intellectuelle du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1942),

814 Allen
The Revolution marked only a brief hiatus in adoption’s declining fortunes.

With the active encouragement of Napoléon Bonaparte and his Freemason
family members, the institution quickly revived and exceeded its prerevolu-
tionary reputation, especially in the military.88 Empress Joséphine, for example,
took the Loge des Francs Chevaliers of Strasbourg as her special charge in
1805.89 The number of lodges engaged in adoption (more than twenty-six by
pp. 281–86: “In the eighteenth century Freemasonry was an aristocratic institution that
played a religious role, exerted political influence, and spread English Whig notions to
all countries. In this way it finished by becoming the intellectual and organizational
inspiration of revolutions at the end of the century” (p. 286). On this myth, see Daniel
Ligou, Franc-maçonnerie et la Révolution française, 1789–1799 (Paris, 1989), pp. 9–
47. More balanced views are Lantoine, Histoire de la franc-maçonnerie française: La
franc-maçonnerie dans l’état (n. 46 above), pp. 77–194, which defends French Free-
masonry’s more indirect, more positive contributions to the Revolution; and Agulhon,
Pénitants et francs-maçons de l’ancienne Provence (n. 4 above), pp. 165–211, which
locates Freemasonry’s influence in the broader context of French public social life; this
position is developed more directly in Halévi (n. 4 above): “revolutionary societies
have been the prolongation, the logical outcome of this democratic sociability[,] . . . a
type of social organization—‘sociétés de pensées’ as Augustin Cochin called them,
‘sociétés secrètes’ as the eighteenth century knew them—that appeared at the end of
the Old Regime and expanded quickly after 1760: circles, museums, clubs, literary
societies, lending libraries, and especially Freemason lodges” (p. 9).
88
On the creation of a particularly well-heeled para-Masonic society for women
during the First Empire, see Jean Bossu, “Les dames écossaises de la colline du mont
Thabor,” Renaissance traditionelle, no. 5 (January 1971), pp. 31–35. This pattern,
however, is tempered by the nearly complete withdrawal of the old aristocracy from
Freemasonry. As for the First Empire’s Masonic revival, see Georges Bourdin, “Con-
tribution à l’histoire de la franc-maçonnerie sous l’Empire: L’enquête de 1811,” La
Révolution française 49 (1905): 45–79; John T. Thorp, French Prisoners’ Lodges: A
Brief Account of Twenty-Six Lodges and Chapters of Freemasonry in England and
Elsewhere (Leicester, 1900), most of which is devoted to the Napoleonic period; and
François Collaveri, La franc-maçonnerie des Bonaparte (Paris, 1982). The close rela-
tionship between the state and Masonry is also underscored by the efforts of the Min-
istry of Justice to regulate irregular lodges, including at least one of adoption in a report
dated March 11, 1809; see Dossier Maison de Justice: Loge de francs-maçons saisie
et empêchée, Archives de la Préfecture de la Police (hereafter cited as APP) D.A 244.
According to this document, A. L. Roëttiers de Montaleau, grand master of the Grand
Orient and minister of justice, was alerted to the distribution of printed matter “con-
cerning the so-called lodges of adoption that are held every Saturday at the home of a
Brother Mansuel, noting that these apparent adoption meetings are merely public
dances whose cheapness does not seem to ensure the morality required by the Order’s
administrators in regular Masonic gatherings.”
89
See the anonymously authored account of the empress’s formal adoption of this
lodge: “Approbation de la loge féminine et de la grande maı̂tresse Dietrich” (1805), in
Archives Municipales de Strasbourg Legs Gerschel (hereafter cited as AMS LG), boı̂te
32, d. 5; and Loge d’adoption tenue à l’Orient de Strasbourg . . . 1805 . . . (n.p., 1805),
in the Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire de Strasbourg. Compare another account
of similar lodges in Hivert-Messeca and Hivert-Messeca (n. 2 above), pp. 153–80.

1815) rose dramatically in response to the First Empire’s efforts to re-create

elements of the Old Regime’s social hierarchy.90 The men’s contradictory new
tendencies toward liberalism and occultism, however, did not affect the women
as much. The latter’s Masonic renaissance owed much more to social fashion
than it did to political ideology, though an old gender stereotype remained in
effect: women’s rituals were not to be taken as seriously as the men’s. And so
the records kept by men, while impressive, do not reflect the full extent of
adoption at its high point.91
The First Empire still saw important publications on Masonic adoption.
Besides Claude-Antoine Thory’s efforts to reconstruct the history of French
secret societies for both men and women, “Frère Hérédon” published the most
widely circulated manual on adoptive rituals, based on Guillemain de Saint-
Victor’s 1787 modified compilation.92 Several songbooks celebrated the glories
of women, whether or not they were initiated.93 Unlike the eighteenth century,
when Masonic songs were recycled indiscriminately, this period saw original
works written for special occasions, such as Félix Nogaret’s three-act play, Le
retour à la sagesse, performed in 1807. Just in case anyone in the audience
missed the point, Nogaret concluded his work with the oration “Le triomphe
90
Again according to Hivert-Messeca and Hivert-Messeca, pp. 161–62. The actual
number of adoptive lodges is impossible to determine with precision. Napoleonic Free-
mason lodges exceeded their prerevolutionary numbers by nearly 50 percent. There
were 905 by 1814, according to Gayot, ed. (n. 43 above), p. 35. But those for women
were replaced by special occasions rather than by regular groups. Gentily (n. 27 above),
p. 6, identifies this transition as one from loges to fêtes. Consequently, the number of
adoptive lodges and their members can be estimated not as a percentage of the numbers
for men but by a careful count from the archival and published materials available.
91
No fewer than forty works concerning women in Freemasonry from 1799 to 1815
may be found in French archival and library collections, more than any comparable
period before 1850. For a selective interpretation of a limited range of the available
sources, see Janet Burke, “Leaving the Enlightenment: Women Freemasons after the
Revolution,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33, no. 2 (2000): 255–65.
92
[Thory] (n. 57 above); Frère Hérédon, Maçonnerie d’adoption (Paris, [1807]),
which can be found in the BNF FM, the AMS, and various other libraries and archival
collections in France; and the anonymously authored Régulateur portatif de la maçon-
nerie d’adoption (n.p., [1808]), which includes an oration by a Masonic sister.
93
See, e.g., Elusine: Recueil de chansons à des loges d’adoption (Paris, 1806); De-
lorme, Bluettes maçonniques . . . (Paris, 1806); Grenier, Acte de dévouement, poème
épique . . . (Paris, 1806); Pillon-Duchemin, Essai sur la franc-maçonnerie, poëme en
trois chants . . . (Paris, 1807); and Jean-Louis Brad, Vénus maçonnique, poème (Paris,
1810). According to Ligou, Chansons maçonniques (n. 49 above), pp. 20–22, Masonic
poetasters during the First Empire recycled much earlier material, but all the new work
tended to be supportive of the imperial war effort and assertive of the movement’s
values, reflecting the more political and more missionary nature of Freemasonry in the
nineteenth century.

816 Allen
des femmes.”94 Almost all of the sixteen published accounts of initiations in-
cluded inspired orations, good-humored songs, or long poems. Written for the
Parisian Loge Saint-Eugène in 1809, for instance, Frère Chazet’s six-page ode,
“Les vertus, ou Les lois de la maçonnerie,” is perhaps atypical only in its
logical structure:
. . . Each brother renders homage

To this amiable, enchanting sex,
Which can be the charm
Or consolation of any age.
It is happy to guide childhood;
To impulsive adolescence,
It is the passion for the love of God;
In maturity it is wisdom;
Finally, to sad old age,
It is the flower on the grave.95
In keeping with the restoration of its prerevolutionary fortunes, adoption in

the First Empire enjoyed an abundance of creative work.
Almost all historians consider this Napoleonic revival a swan song.96 The
rest of the nineteenth century witnessed a marked diminution of traditional
adoptive activity. Following the pattern established during the First Empire,
initiations occurred only intermittently among middle-class elites in the largest
cities.97 The old aristocracy and the provincial bourgeoisie seem to have with-
94
Félix Nogaret, Le retour à la sagesse, ou La rentrée des hommes dans le temple
et les femmes dans le jardin . . . (Paris, 1807), pp. 172–234, 241–62, a title suggesting
the gendered meaning of Masonic symbolic ritual.
95
Frère Chazet, “Les Vertus, ou Les lois de la maçonnerie,” in La lyre maçonnique:
Etrennes aux francs-maçons et à leurs soeurs pour l’année MDCCCIX, by J. A. Jac-
quelin et al. (Paris, [1809]), p. 110.
96
See, e.g., Lantoine, Hiram couronné d’épines (n. 27 above), p. 83; Briault (n. 27
above), pp. 42–43; Doré, “La maçonnerie des dames” (n. 45 above), p. 23; and Hivert-
Messeca and Hivert-Messeca (n. 2 above), p. 181: all lament the decline of Masonic
adoption after the First Empire. But Jupeau-Réquillard, La Grande Loge Symbolique
Ecossaise (n. 54 above), sees significant continuity from the eighteenth century to the
nineteenth century: “In fact, despite some interruptions due in general to political tur-
moil, women’s presence in the lodges appears permanent” (1:319). On the basis of the
additional materials on adoption in the BNF and elsewhere, I agree that its decline after
1815 has been exaggerated. For 1815–48, I count ten more adoptive lodges than the
thirteen listed in Ragon, Franc-maçonnerie (n. 57 above), pp. 94–101, and the two
others listed Etienne-François Bazot, Le tuileur-expert . . . (Paris, 1836), pp. 199, 201,
the basis for most subsequent accounts.
97
See the impressive list of hautes bourgeoises and imperial aristocrats in the anon-
ymously authored Procès-verbal de la séance inaugurale de la loge d’adoption des
Chaveliers de la Croix . . . (Paris, 1811), pp. 29–34, marking a major shift in the almost
exclusively aristocratic membership of documented adoptive lodges before the Revo-
lution.

drawn entirely from adoptive Masonry after the Revolution. The myth of Ma-
sonic conspiracy certainly discouraged new initiations, but more than likely
the answer lies in the changing historical context. During the Constitutional
Monarchies, which regarded Freemasonry’s new liberal and republican ten-
dencies with alarm, a large, secure middle class had yet to emerge, much less
to embrace Masonic ideals for women, however anodyne they might have
been. Government decrees against voluntary associations and five papal pro-
nouncements against Masonry also hurt.98 Consequently, the first half of the
century saw fewer expressions of adoptive fervor everywhere in France.
Along with this waning interest of Freemasons in initiating women came
another development: the rise of competing Masonic and para-Masonic or-
ders.99 With its astonishing panoply of degrees—upward of ninety-nine—the
Misraı̈m, or Egyptian, Rite, actively supported its lodges of adoption.100 Re-
98
Note the modest social status of Masons in the lodges in the Département de la
Seine, which were watched by the police (1815–34), as recorded in the Ministry of the
Interior’s “Rapports sur les loges,” in ANF F7.6700, d. 29. At least two lodges among
these, whose members included retirees, pensioners, merchants, physicians, lawyers,
students, and low-ranking civil servants, held an adoptive initiation; see Les Amis
Fidèles on July 9, 1828 (fol. 30r), and Les Amis Bienfaisans et d’Osiris Réunis on July
21, 1829 (fol. 149r). Police surveillance of the Masons inhibited their activities, as
noted of a lodge in the Département de la Mayenne: “Since most members of the Loge
des Amis Réunis belong to the best classes in the city, they have feared sharing the
disfavor that public opinion has developed of secret societies, and they have ceased
meeting in their assemblies” (ANF F 7.6697, fol. 1v). Article 29 of the Penal Code
permitted authorities discretion to close down associations of twenty or more members,
including Freemasons and their adoptive lodges. Despite Louis XVIII’s declaration in
1819 that Freemasons no longer constituted a threat to the monarchy, the fear of radical
ideas still kept the police on their trail, especially when a prominent intellectual such
as François-Vincent Raspail addressed an adoptive lodge in 1822; see Sainte Liberté!
Ton nom n’est pas un blasphème: Discours prononcé à la loge d’adoption des Amis
Bienfaisans, samedi 16 mars 1822 . . . (Paris, 1822).
99
This development was widely noted by the mid-nineteenth century; see, e.g.,
Jacques-Etienne Marconis de Nègre, Le rameau d’or d’Eleusis, contenant l’histoire
abrégée de la maçonnerie . . . (Paris, 1863), and Le tuilleur général de tous les rites
maçonniques connus contemporains (Paris, 1853). See the elaboration of Masonic
adoption in the rites discussed in “Dames Chevaliers de la Bienfaisance ou du St.
Sépulcre” (c. 1818), in BNF Nouvelles Acquisitions Françaises (hereafter cited as NAF)
10958, fol. 179–84. This proliferation of interest in the occult was general to Masonry;
see Jean Baylot, Oswald Wirth, 1860–1943: Rénovateur et mainteneur de la véritable
franc-maçonnerie (Paris, 1975), pp. 127–86, especially with the subsequent vogue for
the ideas of Gérard Encause (better known as Papus), Jules Doinel, Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky, and Dr. Laland (or Marc Haven). By the twentieth century, Masonic oc-
cultism developed a life all its own, as suggested by Umberto Eco’s best-selling novel,
set partially in Paris, Foucault’s Pendulum, trans. William Weaver (New York, 1989).
100
According to Jupeau-Réquillard, La Grande Loge Symbolique Ecossaise (n. 54
above), 1:320. Compare “Ordre de Misraı̈m: Rite d’adoption—Quatre registres . . .
1856–1857,” in BNF FM 1.304(4), one of the few extant tableaux kept of adoptive

818 Allen
lated secret societies, most of them originating in the later eighteenth century,
flourished soon after the Revolution, as Germaine de Staël pointed out in her
appreciation of the German “l’esprit de secte.”101 By then women were initiated
in many comparable groups in France. Among these sects was the one created
by the fabulist Antoine Fabre d’Olivet; much of the inspiration for this mystical
group came from the less well known Adonhiramite Rite.102 Commentators
such as E.-F. Bazot and F.-T. Bègue Clavel gave vent to their outrage over the
distortion of Masonic rituals—as Clavel put it bluntly, “the point of it all is
the banquet, which always accompanies them, and the ball, which is insepa-
rable from it”—but their criticisms failed either to deter the expansion of new
societies or to revitalize Freemasonry’s adoptive practices.103
The Romantic movement’s fascination with the exotic and the occult en-
couraged interest in para-Masonic societies.104 For instance, Masonry’s foun-
lodges. Note also that Raspail’s Sainte Liberté oration was for an adoptive initiation in
the Misraı̈m Rite; his principal point was to explain the Egyptian origins of Masonic
liberty by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, who in his version are initiated together
by the Pontiff of Truth deep beneath the pyramids. See also the manuscript of an
adoptive ritual from the Misraı̈m archival dossier, in BNF FM 1.304, fol. 139r–143v,
whose symbolism, however, is exclusively biblical, with particular attention to the
Egyptian influences from the Book of Exodus. The orator is also clearly female. In
both cases, the relationship to Freemasonry is very distant.
101
Germaine de Staël, De l’Allemagne, ed. la comtesse Jean de Ponge, 5 vols. (Paris,
1960), 5:141. Mme de Staël’s account of German Freemasonry makes no mention of
adoption (5:141–48). On the proliferation of secret societies in the period—Illuminati,
Babeuvistes, Carbonari, Misraı̈m, and others—see Baylot, La voie substituée (n. 63
above), albeit with no mention of any women. But they appear in the BNF FM mate-
rials, e.g., the inductions by the Ordre des Templiers in “Dames Chevalières de la
Bienfaisance ou du St. Sépulcre” (n. 99 above), bereft of Masonic symbolism.
102
Compare Antoine Fabre d’Olivet, La vraie maçonnerie et la céleste culture, ed.
Léon Cellier (Paris, [1953]), pp. 39–67; with [Louis Guillemain de Saint-Victor], Re-
cueil précieux de la maçonnerie adonhiramite . . . , 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1783), and
Origine de la maçonnerie adonhyramite, ou Nouvelles observations, critiques et rai-
sonnées . . . (n.p., 1810).
103
F.-T. Bègue Clavel, Histoire pittoresque de la franc-maçonnerie et des sociétés
secrètes anciennes et modernes, 3d ed. (Paris, 1844), p. 33. Compare Etienne-François
Bazot, Code des francs-maçons . . . (Paris, 1830), and Le tuileur-expert (n. 96 above);
Jacques-Phil. Levesque, Aperçu général et historique des principales sectes maçon-
niques . . . (Paris, 1821); Maxime Vuillaume, Manuel maçonnique, ou Tuileur des di-
vers rites de maçonnerie pratiquée en France, 2d ed. (Paris, 1830); and Hivert-Messeca
and Hivert-Messeca (n. 2 above), pp. 181–206.
104
Little serious work exists on this important topic, and nothing on the role of
Masonic women; see Auguste Viatte, Les sources occultes du romantisme: Illuminisme-
Théosophie, 1770–1820, 2 vols. (Paris, 1968), which is only distantly tied to Free-
masonry; Daniel Béresniak, Franc-maçonnerie et romantisme (Paris, 1987), which is
superficial; G.-H. Luquet, Gérard de Nerval et la franc-maçonnerie (Paris, 1955),
which is narrowly focused; Côte-Darly [Blanche Lantoine], Alexandre Dumas père et

dation myth of the biblical Hiram Abiff, King Solomon’s architect for the
Temple in Jerusalem, was elaborated by a story in Gérard de Nerval’s Voyage
en orient (1851) and then staged in Charles Gounod’s opera La Reine de Saba
(1862). In both Nerval’s and Gounod’s accounts, the redemptive role of Balkis,
the Queen of Sheba, sanctions the craft secrets that Hiram chose to guard to
the death rather than reveal. Unable to save Hiram from assassination by Sol-
omon’s hired henchmen, Sheba expresses her undying love for this model
Mason. An oriental queen therefore redeems the self-sacrifice of an exemplar
in Masonic mythology, justifying the ritual secrecy of the craft against the
hostile forces arrayed against it. By embracing women’s symbolic role, one
embodied by Sheba and her own mythic tradition, Freemasonry appears here
to acknowledge the influence of both the Romantic movement and a more
active public role for women.105
Similarly, George Sand is best known in this context for having devoted a
long novel, Consuelo: La comtesse de Rudolstadt (1842–43), to an elaborate
para-Masonic cult for both sexes. With rites and symbols borrowed from a
host of mystical groups, Sand’s imaginary sect, the Invisibles, reflected her
efforts to promote greater emotional liberty for women like herself.106 As the
mysterious grand maı̂tre tells Consuelo, the comtesse de Rudolstadt, after she
had remained true to her virtuous passions and thus demonstrated herself wor-
thy of initiation, “We profess the precept of divine equality between men and
women, but we have been forced to recognize the regrettable results of your
sex’s education, of its social situation, and of its proclivity for a dangerous
levity and capricious instinct; so we cannot practice this precept to the fullest
la franc-maçonnerie (Paris, 1924), which reproduces one of Dumas’s neglected plays;

and, more generally, Henri Prouteau, Littérature et franc-maçonnerie (Paris, 1991),
which also is superficial.
105
See Gérard de Nerval, Oeuvres, ed. Albert Béguin and Jean Richer, 2 vols. (Paris,
1961), 2:503–606; and Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, La Reine de Saba: Opéra en
quatre actes . . . [,] musique de Charles Gounod (Paris, Opéra, 28 février 1862) (Paris,
1862). See the informative article on the Masonic mythology focused on Hiram, in
Saunier, ed. (n. 37 above), pp. 402–5, in which Sheba plays no ritual role. She is in
fact added to the Masonic myth by Nerval and Gounod for their own creative purposes.
106
The sources for Sand’s ritualistic amalgam are varied: besides the different Ma-
sonic obediences, such as the Grand Orient and the Scottish Rite, there were the Mis-
raı̈m, the Adonhiramites, the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, the Swedenborgian theo-
sophes, and republican secret societies. As Sand put it in a letter to her son, Maurice
Dudevant, on June 8, 1843: “I am up to my ears in Freemasonry. I am caught up by
the ‘Kadosh,’ the ‘Rose-Croix,’ and the ‘Sublime Ecossais.’ The result is going to be
a most mysterious novel” (Correspondance, ed. Georges Lubin, 25 vols. [Paris, 1969],
6:666). Note some of the titles she read in preparation for this novel: Clavel (n. 103
above), which was condemned by the Grand Orient for revealing Masonic secrets; and
Barruel (n. 87 above), which was the influential source on Freemasonry’s international
conspiracy; and others listed in Sand, Correspondance, 6:161–62 n. 3.

820 Allen
extent; we can confide only in a small number of women, and it is on you

alone that we are now conferring these secrets.”107 Such a sentiment, of course,
was not so far removed from the original concerns of Freemasons—to cele-
brate virtue and to combat vice—in creating adoption in the first place. Many
of the ideals remained, even if the rituals and symbols had changed in Sand’s
literary effort, in part, to reinvigorate Masonry’s commitment to enlightened
mysteries for both men and women.108
It is worth comparing Sand’s interests with those expressed by a grande
maı̂tresse during a Masonic ceremony just five years earlier, in 1838.109 Despite
the novelist’s penchant for declamatory mysticism, the similarities between
107
George Sand, Consuelo: La comtesse de Rudolstadt, ed. Léon Cellier and Léon
Guichard, 3 vols. (Paris, 1959), 3:374. See the useful commentary on this novel in the
scholarly apparatus provided by the editors, and also in François Ménard, “George
Sand et la franc-maçonnerie,” Le symbolisme, 36th yr. (1953–54): 293–309; Henri
Seauton, “George Sand et la franc-maçonnerie,” Renaissance traditionnelle, no. 15
(1973), pp. 155–68; and Simone Vierne, George Sand et la franc-maçonnerie (Paris,
2001).
108
Another instance of para-Masonic interest, albeit of an even more remote sort, is
George Sand, Spiridon, ed. Georges Lubin (Paris, 1976), an extended dialogue between
a Benedictine novice and an older friar on religious absolutes during the Revolution.
Thanks to the manifest failure of the eighteenth-century church to face down the spir-
itual relativism of the Enlightenment, Father Alexis has written a heretical work on the
need to develop a new religion of humanity with ideals reminiscent of Masonry. This
work owes much to the influence of Pierre Leroux, the unorthodox socialist, occasional
Freemason, and confidant of George Sand. See also George Sand, Le compagnon du
tour de France, ed. René Bourgeois (1843; reprint; Grenoble, 1988), in its celebration
of the “operative” origins of Freemasonry, derived almost exclusively from Agricol
Perdiguier’s Livre de compagnonnage (Paris, 1839). This mythology, however, has
developed a life of its own, such that otherwise good scholarship assumes it; see Cyn-
thia Truant, The Rites of Labor: Brotherhoods of Compagnonnage in Old and New
Regime France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), pp. 182–84, 211–14, which, like Sand’s novel,
confuses the operative and speculative features of Masonry, primarily because her
sources do. Clearly women were never involved. Other literary depictions of Masonry
are less innocent. See the misogynist view of Freemason women in Charles Monselet,
La franc-maçonnerie des femmes, 4 vols. (Brussels, 1856), a gothic novel set in the
1840s. The principal character is the marquise de Presigny, grande maı̂tresse of an
adoptive lodge, who secretively controls the lives and fortunes of other characters in
the novel through her network of Masonic adepts. Monselet, of course, sees the agency
of Freemason women as an occult threat to society, sharing in a tradition that will
resurface later in Charles Hacks and Léo Taxil, Le diable au XIXe siècle, ou Les mys-
tères du spiritisme: La franc-maçonnerie luciférienne, par le Docteur Bataille, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1892–95), a hostile account of supposed Masonic occultism. By then, Romantic
literary influences, like the image of spiritualist Freemason women, had become ste-
reotypical tropes in popular writing.
109
See Extrait du tracé de la fête maçonnique célébrée [May 7, 1838] dans la re-
spectable loge d’adoption sous le titre distinctif de la Réunion Intime . . . (Rouen, 1838),
for a lodge of adoption in the small town of Bernay, Eure.

author and Mason are striking. At the initiation of two candidates in the Scot-
tish Rite, Mme Bosquier reflected at some length on the principles of adoptive
Masonry. Her initial curiosity about the mysteries and her preference for the
festivities, she said, had long since given way to the truly important features
of the movement: “You have come to learn how to tame your passions and to
taste the sweetness of friendship,” she reminded her new charges.110 After
defending the induction of sisters into the lodge—after all, women are models
of virtue—Bosquier praised “the amenity and the decency that prevails among
us,” whose morality was entirely Christian.111 The lodge’s attention to philan-
thropy, especially for fellow Masons and their families, was the most sacred
of duties. The unity fostered by this charity made the lodge a true family that
benefited everyone: “There, Mesdames, this is what I can tell you today about
Masonry.”112 In a manner far more prosaic than Sand’s, Mme Bosquier ex-
pressed the attraction that adoption still had for its initiates in the nineteenth
century.
A much tamer, less occult version of Masonry for women thus remained
the norm before 1848. It was manifested most often in the tenues blanches.113
These social occasions—much simplified initiations for the children as well
as the wives of Freemason men—were better known for their elaborate ban-
quets and balls. This practice made the participation of family members more
appealing. As Jean-Marie Ragon wrote of these occasions, “Most of the large
cities of France and its colonies are often witness, especially when balls are
in season, to meetings of ladies under adoption’s auspices; morality, courtesy,
respect, charity, and the charm of good company are their foundations.”114 The
displacement of adoption may have been preferable for women who wanted
to share in Masonic activities without taking the trouble to learn all the rituals.
What this arrangement meant to the participants can only be inferred from a
110
Ibid., p. 9; emphasis in the original.
111
Ibid., p. 12.
112
Ibid., p. 14.
113
The vast majority of the adoption activities in the period are of this type. See,
e.g., the Scottish Rite initiation celebrations in the anonymously authored Annuaire des
loge, chapitre et conseil de la Clémente Amitié . . . Annee 5946 [1846] ([Paris], 1846);
the archival dossier on the Loge Ecossaise Belle et Bonne (1819), in BNF FM 2.
Sup. Con. 6; and J.-B. Chemin-Dupontès, Travaux maçonniques et philosophiques
(Paris, [1820]), which provides another account of the Bonne et Belle event in 1819:
“These meetings shined thanks to the merit, the rank, the charms, and the beauty of
the women; among the men were illustrious foreigners—among others, the prince royal
of Wurttemberg—everyone France has to offer who is distinguished in letters, sciences,
and arts, in the military and the administration” (pp. 105–6). In each case the festivities
overwhelm the solemnities of the occasion.
114
Ragon, Franc-maçonnerie (n. 57 above), p. 102.

822 Allen
few sources.115 Clearly there was a loss of women’s agency. Given the social
and cultural context, however, inclusion in regular Masonic activities may have
been more important to them than the occasional adoption into a separate lodge
for women alone.
A special place for families developed at mid-century. In a long oration at
a tenue blanche of the Clémente Amitié in 1838, for instance, Théodore Juge,
a thirty-third-degree grand maı̂tre, outlined an ambitious program for women.
He proposed their full partnership with men. Their mutual goal, he said, was
nothing less than “the moral regeneration of society.”116 The idea was to
strengthen society by bringing entire families into the lodge, into l’école de
vertu, as Freemasonry styled itself. For the next twenty years at least, an in-
creasing number of men, women, and children joined in such modified Ma-
sonic activities. The most active of these lodges, nominally in the Grande
Loge’s alliance with the Scottish Rite, was L.-P. Riche-Gardon’s Temple des
Familles during the Second Empire, which also organized lectures, concerts,
and study groups.117 Even before J.-S. Boubée and Ragon had started work to
115
See the poem about a heavenly dream, “C’étaient les cieux!” dedicated to the
Loge des Amis Fidèles but addressed to the author’s Masonic mother, in Désirée
Preault, Inspirations, poésies (Paris, 1840), pp. 321–22:
It was the smile
That delighted the heart,
I thought I heard you
Call me to you. . . .
The ephemeral dream
Fled before my eyes! . . .
Your kiss, my mother,
Showed the heavens to me again!
One possible interpretation of this metaphoric suggestion is, of course, that Masonry
of any sort simply deepens family relations. In a more explicit statement by Victorine
Hennon, Discours prononcé . . . à la fête de Saint-Jean d’été de la loge l’Alliance le
15 juillet 1855 (Paris, 1855), a sister-orator expressed her appreciation of “a meeting
of brothers and friends, a communion of ideas and sentiments in which the heart plays
a large part” (p. 1). The sentiment is similar to Preault’s.
116
See the oration from a tenue blanche at the Loge de Clémente Amitié, December
22, 1838, by Théodore Juge, “Discours sur l’émancipation des femmes considérée au
point de vue de la franc-maçonnerie,” Le globe (1838), p. 358. In the transformation
of Masonry for women in the nineteenth century, Jupeau-Réquillard, La Grande Loge
Symbolique Ecossaise (n. 54 above), 1:332–33, regards this as a key text, because it
led to the more independent role for women in the Grande Loge Symbolique Ecossaise.
117
On L.-P. Riche-Gardon, also known as Bénédicte Noldran, and the Temple des
Familles (also known as Renaissance des Emules d’Hiram), see André Combes, “Une
loge sous le second Empire: La Renaissance des Emules d’Hiram,” Humanisme, no.
111 (June 1976), pp. 13–17; Baylot, La voie substituée (n. 63 above), pp. 385–89;
Jupeau-Réquillard, La Grande Loge Symbolique Ecosaisse (n. 54 above), 1:340–46;

revive earlier forms of adoption, it had already come to include the initiation
of children in a form of Masonic baptism.118 Marital and funerary rites soon
followed, making of adoptive Masonry a whole way of life.119
A joint ceremony of two lodges in 1852 suggests how adoption had actually
changed since the eighteenth century.120 Besides the traditional icons, the dec-
orations in the hall included banners, flowers, and a special altar on which
rested the Bible and a sword. Mme Bonnet, the grande maı̂tresse and herself
the wife of a Mason, was responsible for directing the initiation of two young
women (aged eighteen and fifteen), and thirteen children (seven boys and six
girls), all of them the sons and daughters of lodge members. Citing the long
heritage of adoption since the days of the ancient Greek oracles, Zoroaster,
and Confucius, Bonnet admonished the candidates to remain true to the Ma-
Hivert-Messeca and Hivert-Messeca (n. 2 above), pp. 207–20; and the materials in
AMS LG “Loges de Paris,” boı̂te 42, d. divers; BNF Baylot FM 2.217 “Loge Temple
des Familles, 1862–63: Archives”; BNF FM 2.631 “Loge Temple des Familles: Cor-
respondance et tableaux”; and BNF FM 2.641 “Temple des Familles, 1860–65: Tab-
leaux.” Riche-Gardon also published several periodicals to promote the activities of
this lodge, nearly all of which are in AMS LG “Périodiques et journaux de la franc-
maçonnerie française,” boı̂tes 1–3.
118
See the defense of traditional Masonic adoption in Ragon, Franc-maçonnerie (n.
57 above); but also in J. S. Boubée, Etudes historiques et philosophiques sur la franc-
maçonnerie ancienne et moderne, sur les hauts grades et sur les loges d’adoption
(Paris, 1854), pp. 216–34, and Précis historique de la franc-maçonnerie, ou Souvenirs
maçonniques (Paris, 1866), pp. 150–65: “Well, this same Masonic religion wants
women to be loved and respected; [contends] that once allowed to share in our initia-
tions, they will enjoy the fullness of their rights in our Temples; in a word, [believes]
that they [should] be emancipated from the yoke of errors and prejudices; and is that
not rightly so?” (p. 164). Both Ragon and Boubée gave the traditional biblical sym-
bolism of adoptive rites a more positive interpretation. As Ragon put it: “This alliance
of heaven and earth, by the spirit of the stars bringing together the matter of earthly
elements, has made known, allegorically speaking, that the sons of gods are marrying
the daughters of men” (p. 32; emphasis in the original). For more on this trend in
adoptive Masonry, see Daniel Ligou, preface to Souvenirs maçonniques, by J. S. Bou-
bée, ed. Daniel Ligou (1866; reprint, Paris, 1987), pp. vii–xxxiii.
119
For a collection of such rites, see A. J. B. Blatin, Rituels maçonniques pour les
tenues blanches: Adoption et reconnaissance conjugale (Paris, 1895); these rites owe
little to Masonic adoption in the eighteenth century. Their justification was a common-
place; see, e.g., the child-welfare advocate Charles-Louis Chassin in an unpublished
speech to a tenue blanche (c. 1885), in BHVP Papiers Chassin, tome 22, fol. 290–91:
“Redemptive philosophy has saved you, women, from infertile virginity. It has given
you [back] your children whom you have had wet-nursed by mercenaries, and in [re-
turning] them to you, it has raised you in relation to yourself; it has freed you from the
servitude of superstition; it has restored you to your civic rights; it has given you a
mission, the most important for humankind” (fol. 290r).
120
See Union des loges la Tolérance . . . et les Zélés Philanthropes. . . . Tracé de la
fête d’adoption et du baptême maçonnique, 15 juillet 1852 ([Paris] [1852]).

824 Allen
sonic values—in this case, to prudence, charity, obedience, work, discretion,

virtue, and being agreeable to God: “A true Mason fulfills her family respon-
sibilities.”121 At one point Cassaignes, a vénérable, spoke of original sin, but
only to highlight the redemption made possible by Masonry. There was no
explication of the symbols or the mysteries to the mixed company of four
hundred family members and friends in attendance. After the distribution of
medals celebrating the occasion and the passing of le tronc de bienfaisance,
the group moved to the banquet hall for prayers, toasts, songs, recitals, a grand
meal, and a ball until dawn. The solemn mysteries had literally disappeared
from adoption, even though women clearly retained a prominent place in the
Masonic movement.122
III. WOMEN’S INITIATION AND ITS HISTORICAL IMPLICATIONS

The traditional role for women was soon contested. In the context of adoption’s
long embrace of social festivity, one emptied of the original ritual and sym-
bolism, various voices called for women’s initiation into Freemasonry proper.
The liberal republican Maria Deraismes was the first beneficiary. In 1882 a
lodge in the Grande Loge Symbolique Ecossaise (GLSE), Les Libres Penseurs
in Le Pecq, suspended its official adherence to the obedience and created a
mixed lodge by initiating Deraismes. Although the renegades relented when
the GLSE agreed to readmit them only sans Deraismes as a lodge member, a
precedent had been established. “A prejudice was overcome,” as Deraismes
put it euphemistically after her Masonic demotion.123 Just twelve years later,
121
Ibid., p. 14.
122
Compare Jean-Marie Ragon, Liturgie maçonnique: Rituel d’adoption de jeunes
louvetons (lowtons) improprement appelée maçonnique (Paris, 1859); Fête d’adoption
à la loge la Fraternité, à l’orient de Charleville . . . (Charleville, [1893]); and Fête
d’adoption maçonnique célébrée le 24 août 1862 au Grand Théâtre de Marseille (Mar-
seille, 1862). There are literally dozens of such fêtes published in the nineteenth century,
no fewer than ten of which appear under the BNF’s Hp call mark. Whatever the order,
almost every lodge with social pretensions celebrated some version of these Masonic
adoptions, primarily as a mechanism to strengthen its commitment to family values.
123
Maria Deraismes, “Loge Symbolique Ecossaise Mixte: ‘Les Libres Penseurs du
Pecq’ (Seine et Oise)—Discours prononcé au banquet, après la tenue maçonnique du
14 janvier 1882,” in Oeuvres complètes, 3 vols. (Paris, 1895–96), 2:282. There is no
sustained scholarly study of this important figure in French feminism. Compare Hivert-
Messeca and Hivert-Messeca (n. 2 above), pp. 221–53; Maria Deraismes, Ce que veu-
lent les femmes: Articles et discours de 1864 à 1894, ed. Odile Krakovitch (Paris,
[1980]); and APP BA 1031 d. Maria Deraismes, where a police report dated January
20, 1882, states: “The Lodge ‘Les Libres Penseurs,’ orient du Pech [sic] (St. Germain),
has just distanced itself from the Grande Loge Symbolique by an act relative to the
initiation of Maria Deraismes [emphasis in the original]. This initiation has caused a

however, with the help of Georges Martin, Deraismes finally succeeded in

creating a new obedience, the Ordre Maçonnique Mixte International: Le Droit
Humain.124 Women would be initiated by precisely the same ritual and would
share precisely the same responsibilities as men. Apparently the time was right,
because mixed Masonry grew quickly to sixty-nine lodges and four thousand
members, thus becoming the fourth largest obedience in France by 1940.125
Thanks to the liberal women’s movement represented by Deraismes, the
other obediences engaged in a prolonged debate: Should women share in the
Masonic mysteries? Repeatedly at the convents, or annual national meetings
of delegates, the question was raised and the motion to admit women de-
feated.126 The issue persisted for much of the Third Republic. After defiantly
dropping all reference to the Grand Architect de l’Univers in 1877, the Grand
Orient de France was particularly intransigent, even though in principle leaders
stir in the Masonic world. This lodge is accused of having committed a very serious
infraction by raising the issue of ‘introducing women into Freemasonry.’ By her edu-
cation, a woman is not prepared for playing an effective role in Freemasonry,” despite
a thick file of more than fifty police reports on Deraismes’s public-speaking career.
124
See Rémy Boyau, Histoire de la fédération de l’ordre maçonnique mixte inter-
national: Le Droit Humain (Bordeaux, 1962); Marc Grosjean, Georges Martin, franc-
maçon de l’universel, fondateur de l’ordre maçonnique mixte international: Le Droit
Humain, 2 vols. (Paris, 1988), and Le Droit Humain International, 1913–1947: De
l’éveil à la mise en oeuvre (Paris, 2002); and Hivert-Messeca and Hivert-Messeca (n.
2 above), pp. 281–328. Martin played an instrumental role in establishing mixed Ma-
sonry in France; see also Georges Martin, Etude abrégée de la franc-maçonnerie mixte
et son organisation (Paris, n.d.), and Principes d’éducation civique (Paris, 1911).
125
According to Lucien Botrel, Histoire de la franc-maçonnerie française sous
l’occupation (Paris, 1988), p. 28, using the figures the obediences themselves reported
to Vichy authorities. Compare the slightly larger number of lodges counted by N.
Switkow, La franc-maçonnerie féminine: L’ordre maçonnique mixte international: Le
Droit Humain (Brunoy, [1933]), pp. 27–111: in 1933 this author hostile to Masonry
documented seventy-three French lodges, sixteen of which were in Paris, with more
than two thousand members. The difference between these two compilations lies in the
number of dues-paying members (the former) and the number of regularly attending
members (the latter).
126
The Grand Orient’s convents discussed one aspect or another of women Free-
masons almost every year from 1891 to 1902 and then less frequently until 1921. See
a scholarly account of one prominent voice in the debate within the Grand Orient:
Daniel Ligou, Frédéric Desmons et la franc-maçonnerie sous la 3e République (Paris,
1966), pp. 64–65, 213–14, in addition to the controversy over dropping reference to
the Grand Architect of the Universe, pp. 79–94. Compare the contemporaneous issues
of Bulletin Mensuel de la Maçonnerie Mixte en France et à l’Étranger, in BNF FM
Impr. 12 (1), and the summary of convent debates on this issue and others of interest
to women in André Doré, “Trois quarts de siècle de travaux maçonniques: Questions
traitées par convents du Grand Orient de France de 1900 à 1975,” in Recueil des Actes,
1978–1979 [Institut des Hautes Etudes et de Recherches Maçonniques] (Paris, 1980),
pp. 309–31.

826 Allen
such as Frédéric Desmons were disposed to concede the point.127 Too much
of the Grand Orient’s energy was focused on the struggle with the church after
repeated papal condemnations of the movement; otherwise its resources were
aimed at the military during the Dreyfus affair and the subsequent affaire des
fiches.128 The new Masonic obediences—the Grande Loge du Rite Ancien
Primitif de Memphis Misraı̈m (established in 1899) and the Grande Loge Na-
tionale Indépendante et Régulière (begun in 1910)—were too preoccupied
with creating their own ritualistic identities to take the issue seriously. Despite
the discussion and prior experience, their rituals too remained closed to
women, even if their social and familial activities were not.
The Grande Loge de France, however, was another story. In keeping with
its long history of ritual innovation, but obviously also in response to growing
pressure from interested women, this obedience decided to revive adoptive
lodges.129 In 1901 the first loges féminines d’adoption under the aegis of the
Grande Loge were created. The ritual was deliberately redefined to resemble
more closely the one for men. But the initial enthusiasm for co-Masonry, that
is, lodges for women alone, was insufficient to sustain the movement that at
the time was clearly an effort to exclude women from Masonry proper. The
last of these gatherings was convened in 1938. It would take the shock of war
to establish a renewed place for women in the Union Maçonnique Féminine
de France in 1945, or the Grande Loge Féminine de France, as it has been
known since 1952. In time, with its 250 lodges and 9,000 sisters, a much
reformed co-Masonry would rival the 400 lodges and 11,000 sisters and broth-
ers of the Droit Humain. While hardly a movement on the scale of, say, labor
127
See discussion of Desmons’s generous remarks at the gravesite of Clémence
Royer in 1902, in Ligou, Frédéric Desmons, pp. 213–14: “Has not Clémence Royer
demonstrated irrefutably that women are clearly equal to men and that their apparent
inferiority is just a vain sophism?” (p. 213).
128
See, e.g., Serge Bernstein, “Les francs-maçons, la république et l’armée,”
L’histoire, no. 131 (March 1980), pp. 18–26. Fin-de-siècle Catholic writers were
alarmed by the pervasive influence of Freemasonry, hence the many publications iden-
tifying Masons; e.g., Répertoire maçonnique, contenant les noms de 30,000 francs-
maçons de France et des colonies (Paris, [1908]). Anti-Masonic authors also discussed
Masonry’s pernicious moral influence on women; see, e.g., Gabriel Soulacroix, La
franc-maçonnerie et la femme (Abbeville, [c. 1903]); K. de Borgia [Jules Doinel], Eva,
ou La franc-maçonnerie et la française (Paris, [c. 1896]); A. C. de La Rive, La femme
et l’enfant dans la franc-maçonnerie universelle, d’après les documents officiels de la
secte (1730–1893) (Paris, 1894); Jean Tourmentin, Les enfants de la veuve (Paris,
1900), pp. 237–338, and La femme chez les francs-maçons, d’après les derniers con-
vents du Grand Orient (Paris, 1902); and Georges Bois, Maçonnerie nouvelle du Grand
Orient de France, dossier politique et rituels réformés (Paris, 1892), pp. 229–52. All
of these sources are remarkably well informed.
129
See Commission d’Histoire, Grande Loge de France, Livre d’or (Paris, 1989);
and Hivert-Messeca and Hivert-Messeca (n. 2 above), pp. 329–46.

or the church, these two obediences are in fact responses to major changes in
French society and culture since the eighteenth century. By the outbreak of
World War II, women in Masonry were no more surprising than women in
other associations. No fewer than 15 sisters of the Droit Humain would die
for their work in the Resistance during the occupation.130
What also deserves mention are the new meanings of Masonic ritual for and
by women. The interpretations range broadly, of course, and depend on the
predisposition of the different voices speaking in the interwar period. Within
the mixed Masonry of the GLSE and the Droit Humain, several renegade
lodges called for a more radical political agenda, much like the one adopted
by the Grand Orient. Madeleine Pelletier was the most vocal in this regard;
she even found herself at odds with her own lodge, La Nouvelle Jérusalem, in
her efforts to promote the emancipation of women.131 Others, like the utopian
feminist Céline Renooz, appreciated the community of goodwill that the move-
ment represented. “I must say,” she wrote in 1903, “that I was deeply impressed
by the generous offers of help, assistance, and fellowship made together by
all the lodge’s brothers.”132 The mystical strain often associated with Masonry
at the turn of the century developed primarily through the auspices of the
Théosophes, a feature of the Droit Humain, thanks to Annie Besant. Alexandra
David-Neel’s interests in Eastern religions also began with her participation in
mixed Masonry with her husband, Philippe, in the same period.133
Less radically disposed—in part because of the new assertiveness of these
women—were the participants in co-Masonic adoption. The advocates of this
130
Grosjean, Le Droit Humain International (n. 124 above), p. 370. According to
Lucien Sabah, Une police politique de Vichy: Le Service des Sociétés Secrètes (Paris,
1996), p. 303, 50 members of the Droit Humain were deported to Germany and 1,540—
i.e., about 40 percent of the membership—were either arrested, under surveillance, or
harassed by Vichy agents during the war. Compare the Droit Humain’s interwar mem-
bership and activities discussed in Hivert-Messeca and Hivert-Messeca (n. 2 above),
pp. 347–81.
131
See the four uncompromising articles by Madeleine Pelletier on women in Ma-
sonry that appeared in L’acacia (1905–6). Compare Felicia Gordon, The Integral Femi-
nist: Madeleine Pelletier, 1874–1939 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 41–44; and Claude Maignien
and Charles Sowerwine, Madeleine Pelletier, une féministe dans l’arène politique
(Paris, 1992), pp. 53–64.
132
Céline Renooz, “Prédestinée: L’autobiographie de la femme cachée,” in BHVP
Fonds Marie-Louise Bouglé, Papiers Céline Renooz, boı̂te 18, d. 1903, fol. 10r. Re-
nooz’s mystical inclinations, however, would pull her in other directions, such as the
origins of Masonic symbols in the Hebrew Bible from a radical feminist perspective;
see Céline Renooz, L’ère de vérité: Histoire de la pensée humaine et de l’évolution
morale de l’humanité à travers les âges chez tous les peuples, vol. 3, Le monde israélite:
Les origines secrètes de la Bible (Paris, 1925), pp. 177–200.
133
Alexandra David-Neel, Journal de voyage (Paris, 1991), p. 88. On David-Neel’s
participation in Masonry, see Monestier (n. 45 above), pp. 82–87.

828 Allen
more traditional institution felt compelled to explain the differences between

the empty formalities of nineteenth-century adoption and the new adoptive
rituals modeled explicitly on the men’s. Marie-E. Bernard-Leroy, for example,
stoutly defended these initiations from allegations made by Amélie André
Gédalge, a vénérable in the Droit Humain: “The image of a perfect Democ-
racy,” Bernard-Leroy wrote just after World War I, “official Masonry believes
that the power to shed light or to confer honors emanates from the entire
assembly and that initiation can occur only in a just and perfect lodge. This
seems to me the very principle of our order and its raison d’être.”134 Adherents
of the adoptive rite also had a different notion of feminism. As the sister-orator
in “La Tolérance Adoption” stated in 1926, “Women cannot say to men [that]
everything shall be divided in two equal portions. Rather, [women] have the
right to their fundamental freedom, which alone permits the full development
of all their faculties, a development on which the social harmony of tomorrow
depends.”135 Such a modest sentiment, provoked in part by a more radical
conception of Masonry for women, reflected that of most French feminists in
the interwar period.136
By 1940 much had changed. First of all, the rituals had proliferated within
a variety of different obediences. The vast majority of the seven hundred
French lodges active in 1940 included women only in their social activities.
The smallest order for men, the Memphis Misraı̈m, continued to induct whole
families in their tenues blanches, but the others allowed this relic of a prior
century to lapse for lack of interest. The mixed lodges in the Droit Humain
and the loges féminines d’adoption dropped the symbolism from the Book of
Genesis as unworthy of women.137 Although the values of social equality,
religious toleration, and moral virtue remained, they were given new meaning
in the waning years of the Third Republic. Deep political divisions exacerbated
by economic depression, ideological conflict, and the threats posed by the
Soviet Union and Nazi Germany made Masonry’s original ideals seem quaint.
Philanthropy provided perhaps the last common goal within the bewildering
134
Marie-E. Bernard-Leroy, La maçonnerie d’adoption (n.p., [c. 1920]), p. 7; em-
phasis in the original.
135
La Respectable Loge No. 246 bis “La tolérance adoption,” Conditions des femmes
dans la société moderne (Périgueux, 1926), p. 2.
136
Compare the perspective of Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes:
Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago, 1994).
137
The nature of ritual for women in the twentieth century is difficult to determine,
because all Masons swear to keep their mysteries secret. Moreover, the archives of the
Droit Humain, which might otherwise have become a part of the BNF FM after the
German invasion, were destroyed in order to protect its members from persecution
during the war. Thus there are no public records of this obedience’s rituals. Otherwise,
see Andrée Buisine, ed., Grande Loge Féminine de France: Autoportrait (Paris, 1995);
and Loge Sub Rosa Genève, L’initiation féminine (Geneva, 1973).

array of identities and activities. In short, every image of civic-minded women

in society at large was reflected in the Masonic movement.
The very definition of a Freemason woman had changed. What had been
an expression of the eighteenth century’s preference for literary salon life gave
way to the nineteenth century’s concerns for domestic life, which in turn gave
way to the twentieth century’s grudging acceptance of women’s interests in-
dependent of men’s. From this historical perspective, it is anachronistic to see
in adoption an early manifestation of feminism.138 Because of its archaic and
variously interpreted ritual symbolism, especially as it developed over the
course of two hundred years, Masonry for women resembles the changing
world of its adherents. Soon after 1815, the nobility and its polite passions
were replaced by the provincial bourgeoisie and its commitment to republican
causes as defined in the lives of women: family, philanthropy, and morality.
With the women’s movement came the final manifestation of France’s rela-
tional feminism in Masonry and its many variations in fully industrialized
society. By the interwar period, complementary roles of men and women in
most social institutions had become a Masonic norm.
In fact, this understanding of gender relations had been the norm since the
eighteenth century. As we have seen, many women Masons left records of
precisely these sentiments: in 1781 Sister-President Daix praised men’s fair-
ness to women; in 1838 the grande maı̂tresse, Mme Bosquier, acknowledged
women as models of Masonic virtue; and in 1920 Marie-E. Bernard-Leroy
claimed that a just and perfect lodge promoted women’s active participation.
Men reiterated the same points. “If women are physiologically different from
men and are only a social complement to them,” stated Brother Lignier to his
lodge in Caen in 1912, “they are certainly equal to men from a moral and
intellectual point of view.”139 This perspective is little different from the one
expressed by Jeanne van Mighom in 1933: “Man and woman, each having
understood his or her mission, each having received enlightenment appropriate
to his or her particular nature, will realize all the aspects of their human being,
the unity toward which men [and women] have tended all the time! This will
be, perhaps, the last word of the great secret.”140 These views were pervasive
among Masons, and they suggest a form of relational feminism.
138
Even for women today, the purposes of Masonry are more complex; see “Une
franc-maçonne témoigne,” in Boitel (n. 27 above): “In a disoriented world where moral
values have disappeared, Freemasonry . . . offers some standards, an occasion for ex-
change, for intellectual and spiritual enrichment, for participation in the progress of
humanity, and for solidarity with all men [and women]” (p. 42).
139
Frère Lignier, in Loge Thémis . . . [:] Rapport de la commission de la loge
d’adoption (Angers, 1912), pp. 1–2.
140
Jeanne van Mighom, “En loge d’adoption,” Bulletin de la Grande Loge de France,
n.s., nos. 17–18 (October 15–December 15, 1933), p. 42.

830 Allen
The importance of Freemason women in modern France is hard to assess.

Without adequate records for all lodges since the eighteenth century, an anal-
ysis of the participants must be imprecise. But extant materials show that many
more women were active in the movement than contemporary commentators
or earlier historians have observed. On the eve of 1789, as figure 1 indicates
clearly, there were more than forty-five lodges of adoption and more than six
hundred members, many of them modest bourgeoises in provincial small towns
far removed from the better-known lodges of aristocrats in Paris. Moreover,
the Revolution only temporarily halted their activities. By focusing his efforts
on lodges in the military, Napoléon Bonaparte restored the fortunes of adoption
almost to what they had been during the Old Regime. Over the course of the
nineteenth century, as the nature of women’s participation changed signifi-
cantly from regular to occasional and primarily social adoption, their numbers
continued to grow from roughly forty to one hundred lodges, with a total
membership of approximately three hundred to two thousand women. The
special tenues blanches for which we have documentation incorporated a
growing number of women. After 1900, the movement grew still more rapidly,
to total seven hundred regular lodges with as many as ten thousand members
just before World War II. Accordingly, during the interwar period, adoptive
Masonry’s appeal to the nonworking middle class waned, while mixed Ma-
sonry’s increasing vitality can be attributed at least in part to its social com-
position of mostly women professionals in education, health, and business,
rapidly growing sectors of French society.141
These numbers do not make women’s Masonry a major historical devel-
opment. Even today the largest orders represent only 5 of the 880,000 regis-
tered associations in France, and these orders have approximately 120,000
male and female initiates in a country of more than 58 million inhabitants. But
numbers belie historical impact. Just as the Masonry of men was critical to
the establishment of the Third Republic, the Masonry of women actively fos-
tered the concomitant republican values that this regime came to represent:
secular rationalism, moral virtue, and social respectability. Moreover, mixed
Masonry welcomed dozens of political activists—Maria Deraismes, Clémence
Royer, Madeleine Pelletier, Louise Michel, and Maria Vérone among them—
even though most women Masons adhered to more conservative ideals—
namely, the relational feminism of middle-class women embracing comple-
mentary gender roles. The feminisms of mixed Masonry and co-Masonry were
in fact inseparable and interdependent; it is hard to conceive of one without
the other. Despite their relatively conservative perspective on feminist issues
today, Masonic women’s active associational life, albeit one defined and re-
141
For the sources of these rough estimates, see nn. 59, 90, 96, 122, 125, and 130
above.

defined in conjunction with men, provided a powerful example for women’s

public activism after 1968.
The enduring and contextual nature of women’s Masonic involvement is
what matters most historically. Even without access to la cité, exclusively
reserved for men until recently, women Masons constituted an organized, so-
cially sanctioned public presence. The development of voluntary association
since the eighteenth century certainly included many such women.142 For this
reason at least, it makes sense to reappraise their place in modern French public
life. In what Philip Nord calls “a general resurrection of civil society” on the
eve of the Third Republic, women played a more important role than he and
others allow.143 Their initiation into dozens of Masonic and para-Masonic
groups reinforced Freemasonry’s contribution to the establishment of repub-
licanism, though of a less radical kind than Nord claims for it.144 Not all so-
ciability had the same political implications, especially with the rise of many
competing associations sponsored by the church and its conservative allies.145
Compared to the founders and early activists in the Droit Humain, Masonry
represented a less politicized, more social women’s movement. This modera-
tion was the expression of the many other, more tradition-minded women in
Freemasonry since the eighteenth century. Consequently, Masonry’s changing
modalities—from lodge to lodge and over time—ensured a more nuanced
influence on bourgeois if not republican values in modern France.
What Freemason women tell us about the associational life of French
women generally is also rich. From a close examination of their texts and
activities, it is clear that they adopted the fraternal model of interest-group
organization as defined by Mary Ann Clawson and adapted that model to their
142
For example, Baker (n. 31 above), pp. 169–70, states that about 8 percent of
membership in village associations in the Loire from 1815 to 1914 was female.
143
Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-
Century France (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), p. 252. Compare Mildred J. Headings,
French Freemasonry under the Third Republic (Baltimore, 1949); Raymond Huard, Le
mouvement républicain en Bas-Languedoc, 1841–1881 (Paris, 1982); and Katherine
Auspitz, The Radical Bourgeoisie: The Ligue d’Enseignement and the Origins of the
Third Republic, 1866–1885 (Cambridge, 1982).
144
Note the conservative tendencies of even Maria Deraismes, discussed in Theodore
Zeldin, “The Conflict of Moralities: Confession, Sin, and Pleasure in the Nineteenth
Century,” in Conflicts in French Society: Anticlericalism, Education, and Morals in the
Nineteenth Century, ed. Theodore Zeldin (London, 1970), p. 45.
145
Compare various perspectives on French social and civic life, with and without
women: Maurice Agulhon, Le cercle dans la France bourgeoise, 1810–1848: Etude
d’une mutation de sociabilité (Paris, 1977); Christine Fauré, La démocratie sans les
femmes: Essai sur le libéralisme en France (Paris, 1985); Geneviève Fraisse, Reason’s
Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago,
1994); and Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby, eds., Gendered Domains: Re-
thinking Public and Private in Women’s History (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992).

832 Allen
own particular sensibility in mobilizing their collective interests in culture and

society.146 “The extent of women’s networks varies and with this, women’s
autonomy and well-being,” Clawson writes. “The societies that most closely
approach sexual egalitarianism seem to be those in which women possess
forms of organization outside the family and paralleling those of men.”147 The
result, for Clawson, is that the “fraternal” organizations and networks of
women in the Masonic movement challenged the masculinist values of the
Freemason men and forced them to make even sharper distinctions between
themselves and other Masonic and para-Masonic groups that admitted women,
including those with lodges of adoption. In contrast, women in Riche-Gardon’s
Temple des Familles in the 1850s and 1860s, for instance, brought to Masonry
a different sensibility and notion of sociability, and their influence affected the
way in which Masons incorporated them into their activities. Far from posing
a challenge to French Masonry, these women actually complemented and ef-
fectively shared in it, thereby creating a different model of fraternalism in
France.
The historical and cultural significance of this parallel development is evi-
dent in the gendered nature of voluntary association in modern France. An
exemplary organizational movement in the Anglo-American context, Masonry
was configured differently on the European continent and thus defined another
sociability, one more congenial to the aspirations and interests of women in
the public sphere, notwithstanding the many legal and political obstacles to
their full access to civic life. Similar to but distinct from the masculinist civil
society that Tocqueville recognized in Jacksonian America, the gendered in-
terest groups that women’s historians have studied recently in modern France
reflect another notion of associational activity for both men and women. Ma-
sonry provided a means for women to develop a changing partnership with
men within and outside of the home. Like middle-class women generally,
Freemason women pursued their traditional interest in philanthropy and social
morality, but they did so in a much more concerted way and with others of a
similar mind, including but also apart from men. If women’s Masonic socia-
bility is at all typical of modern association, then women certainly shared in
its particular French modalities, including culturally specific conceptions of
gender roles in public.
Given the inevitable political implications of organizations such as Free-
146
See Clawson (n. 4 above), pp. 21–52. According to Clawson, the model requires
that fraternal groups develop a corporate idiom, a special ritual, proprietorship of some
sort, and masculinity. In the case of women, the last criterion must be modified to
another kind of self-consciousness about gender. Compare Carol E. Harrison, The Bour-
geois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Em-
ulation (Oxford, 1999), pp. 1–21.
147
Clawson, p. 8.

masonry (despite their ostensibly apolitical intentions), historians have shown

that civil society of an Anglo-American sort did develop in France. Tocqueville
was only partly right. The strong, centralized, bureaucratic state tradition in
France, whose effects are still apparent in the large public sector of the econ-
omy, may have discouraged some voluntary association. But collective en-
gagement in France’s transition to modern social and political structures was
as extensive as it was culture-specific. France was not alone in having its own
rich associational life, a special mix of organization and conviviality. Com-
parable variations on civil society developed in other Western European coun-
tries, such as the German-speaking states. Asks the social historian Otto Dunn,
“Can one go even further and conclude from this that French sociability was
less marked than the German by the codification and pursuit of concrete ob-
jectives and that it created a larger space for free communication and the simple
pleasure of gathering together?”148 As evident from the activities of women
Masons, these different sociabilities were gendered in ways that also require
further investigation. To what extent did salons, charities, utopian communi-
ties, and various public-interest groups in France and elsewhere in the West
include women in similar capacities and for the same reasons as the French
Masons? The practices of societies with mixed membership and their justifi-
cations certainly deserve the same comparative attention that salons and Ma-
sonry in the eighteenth century have received recently.
As Andrew Prescott has argued for Freemasonry in Britain, women’s Ma-
sonry in France provides an invaluable lens through which to view past his-
torical developments and present historiographical issues.149 The varied texture
of everyday life is revealed in the fabric of personal relationships that make
up not only association but also a vital community of interests. It may be too
bold to assert that Masonry incubated women’s active participation in a dem-
ocratic society, at least in the eighteenth century. However, it is not difficult
to trace the development of a distinct female sociability suggestive of a sis-
terhood of engagement in public life during the nineteenth century, precisely
when Freemasonry appears at its most conservative. Masonic women of many
148
Otto Dunn, “Sociabilité et association,” in François, ed. (n. 10 above), p. 317.
Compare the titles listed in n. 21 above.
149
Andrew Prescott, “Freemasonry and the Problem of Britain” (inaugural lecture to
mark the launch of the Centre for Research into Freemasonry at the University of
Sheffield, March 5, 2001), pp. 4–5, 16. An earlier call to broaden the historical impli-
cations of research on Freemasonry is John M. Roberts, “Freemasonry: Possibilities of
a Neglected Topic,” English Historical Review 84, no. 331 (1969): 323–35, which also
recognized that work on the European continent was never so narrowly antiquarian as
it has been in Britain. Compare Luis P. Martin, ed., Les francs-maçons dans la cité:
Les cultures politiques de la franc-maçonnerie en Europe, XIXe–XXe siècle (Rennes,
2000).

834 Allen
different stripes shared in the interaction—or, as Geneviève Fraisse puts it,

the circulation—of public and private activities that ultimately fostered
women’s political consciousness and sense of historical agency.150 In short,
French Masonry, and other associations like it in the church, the salons, the
schools, the village, and the workplace, provided a socially sanctioned outlet
for women’s public activity in an otherwise prohibitive legal, political, and
cultural context.
This perspective also nuances the exceptionalism of French women’s path
to modernity. Their place in Freemasonry is unusual if not unique.151 No other
Western culture integrated women so rapidly into Masonic mysteries; this cer-
tainly occurred faster in French Freemasonry than in the Anglo-American va-
riety, which established adoptive lodges only after 1850. The Order of the
Eastern Star actually worked to exclude women (and blacks) as much as pos-
sible from Freemasonry.152 Similarly, Freemasons in the German-speaking
states adopted women briefly before 1789, but they reacted against this alleg-
edly French practice during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods: adop-
tion came to be considered nothing less than a betrayal of both Masonry and
the German nation.153 Only the Italian and the Spanish Masons seem to have
150
Fraisse, Les deux gouvernements (n. 22 above), p. 18. Compare Hazel Mills,
“Negotiating the Divide: Women, Philanthropy, and the Public Sphere in Nineteenth-
Century France,” in Religion, Society, and Politics in France since 1789, ed. Frank
Tallett and Nicolas Atkin (London, 1991), pp. 29–54.
151
From the beginning, French Masonic adoption was considered an aberration; see
George Smith, The Use and Abuse of Freemasonry, a Work of the Greatest Utility to
the Brethren of the Society (London, 1783); and Karl Ludwig Friedrich Rabe, Die
angenommene Freimaurereı̈, oder Die Freimaurereı̈ der Damen (Stendal, 1780)—both
of which treat adoption as a French invention. Compare the marginal place of Free-
mason women in the United States depicted in Lynn Dumenil, Freemasonry and Amer-
ican Culture, 1880–1930 (Princeton, N.J., 1984), with their more active role in Spain
and Italy depicted in Suzanne Marza, Premières manifestations de la franc-maçonnerie
féminine en Espagne au XIXe siècle, 1868–1898 (Aix-en-Provence, 1997), and in Fran-
cesca Vigni and Pier Domenico Vigni, Donna e massoneria in Italia delle origini ad
oggi (Foggia, 1997). Accounts by Masonic activists also provide space for women
elsewhere in the United States and in India: see Louis Goaziou, Women in Freemasonry
(Charleroi, Pa., 1925); and C. Jinarajadasa, Women in Freemasonry (Adyar, Madras,
1944). See also the materials in n. 58 above.
152
See, e.g., Andrée Buisine, La franc-maçonnerie anglo-saxonne et les femmes
(Paris, 1995); William A. Muraskin, Middle-Class Blacks in White Society: Prince Hall
Freemasonry in America (Berkeley, 1975); Loretta J. Williams, Black Freemasonry and
Middle-Class Realities (Columbia, Mo., 1980); and Harold Van Buren Voorhis, The
Eastern Star: The Evolution from a Rite to an Order, 3d ed. (Chicago, 1976).
153
Heinrich A. Lachmann, Geschichte und Gebräuche der maurerischen Hochgrade
und Hochgrad-Systeme (Braunschweig, 1866), pp. 95–114. Many adoptive rites in the
eighteenth century circulated in French or were translated directly from French into
German. Wolfstieg (n. 29 above), 2:997–1002, lists at least three of these. Fuller study

created mixed lodges earlier than the French in the nineteenth century. This
movement in Mediterranean countries was not sustained, however, and it was
quickly absorbed by the Droit Humain’s international network.
Masonry thus suggests a special place for women in French public life. Very
early on it embraced the nineteenth century’s relational feminism. This French
preference for equality between the sexes based on the special, complementary
roles of women and men in society became the norm, however contested it
became by the more radical voices that would help their more temperate sisters
to define their own feminism in response. Caught between unrepentant misog-
yny, on the one hand, and absolute rights, on the other, relational feminism
has developed a bad name, one ill-suited to the rigors of contending discourses
in modern France. Another expression of this moderate cultural politics like
Freemasonry for women, the New Woman and her promise for personal
agency, was effectively redefined by others, often by sensational journalists
such as the notoriously unscrupulous Léo Taxil in the 1890s.154 Demonized or
disdained in this way, the participation of French women in voluntary asso-
ciations, including the Freemasons and their many affiliates, has suffered an
undeserved neglect, even though the sources suggest that they had a very lively
share in public life. Women, of course, enjoyed neither citizenship nor sov-
ereignty—to adapt a telling phrase from Daniel Gordon—and yet Maçonnes
participated actively in the evolution of a more formal sociability in the vol-
untary associations that have come to characterize the distinctive social and
political culture of modern France.155
of women in German Freemasonry is now possible with the opening of the Merseburg
archives of Masonic materials confiscated during the Third Reich; see Renate Endler
and Elisabeth Schwarze-Neuss, Die Freimaurerbestände im Geheimen Staatsarchiv
Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1994–96).
154
On the remarkable career of Léo Taxil, also known as Gabriel Jogand-Pagès, the
author of more than one hundred titles available in the BNF, see APP dossier Gabriel
Jogand dit Léo Taxil, BA 1127–28, the bulk of which appears in Eugen Weber, Satan
franc-maçon: La mystification de Léo Taxil (Paris, 1964). This unconventionally or-
ganized collection of sources is the basis for Alec Mellor, Histoire des scandales ma-
çonniques (Paris, 1982), pp. 165–211; Fabrice Hervieu, “Catholiques contre francs-
maçons: L’extravagante affaire Léo Taxil,” L’histoire, no. 145 (June 1991), pp. 32–39;
and Gordon Wright, Notable or Notorious? A Gallery of Parisians (Cambridge, Mass.,
1991), pp. 87–95.
155
On the moderating influence of salon women on the eighteenth-century Enlight-
enment, see Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty (n. 9 above), pp. 191–94, despite
these women’s lack of sovereignty as well as citizenship. Compare the participation of
women in Libre Pensée societies, closely related to French Freemasonry, discussed in
Jacqueline Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, 1848–1940 (Paris, 1997), pp. 93–104.


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Sisters of Another Sort: Freemason Women in Modern France, 1725–1940

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James Smith Allen

In an article on “the feminist question” in 1900, a critic of French Masonry

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The apparent failure of women ever to share in French Freemasonry is

Richer, “Les femmes et la franc-maçonnerie,” Avenir des femmes (August 1, 1875),

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Assumed in this argument are certain notions of Masonry, association, so-

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I. SCHOLARLY CONTEXT AND EARLY MASONIC DEVELOPMENTS

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“functioned as adjuncts of a system of advancement for merit,” often setting

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et associations, 1830–1880: Vraies démocrates ou dames patronnesses? (Paris, 1991),

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exists largely because of their deliberate exclusion from certain Freemason

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of obediences, or types, of Masonry and its affiliated organizations. It is im-

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Freemasonry may well be of Scottish origin in the seventeenth century.40

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emphatically, “No man suspected of infamous and unnatural vices will be

No more will he be welcome

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growing role played by women in salons and comparable social gatherings in

sons notées de la très vénérable confrèrie des francs-maçons précédées de quelques

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On the eve of the 1789 Revolution, then, women participated in Masonry

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II. MASONIC RITUAL AND ITS EVOLUTION

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In our temples everything is symbol;

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ce qu’étoit la maçonnerie, et ce que les francs-maçons faisoient dans leurs loges,” in

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The Revolution marked only a brief hiatus in adoption’s declining fortunes.

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1815) rose dramatically in response to the First Empire’s efforts to re-create

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. . . Each brother renders homage

In keeping with the restoration of its prerevolutionary fortunes, adoption in

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la franc-maçonnerie (Paris, 1924), which reproduces one of Dumas’s neglected plays;

This content downloaded from 192.231.202.205 on Mon, 8 Dec 2014 11:13:48 AM

extent; we can confide only in a small number of women, and it is on you