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In this 1943 text, first published in English translation in 1945 in Contemporary Jewish Record, Alexandre Koyré analyzes the open conspiracy and its mechanism, which includes the necessity for the leader to constantly remain in the limelight and to ceaselessly deceive the rank and file among his supporters, and proposes to read totalitarianism itself as functioning like a secret society.

This paper belongs to a series of papers on Kafka. Abstract: In this paper, I study conspiracy theories as two novelists handle them: Kafka and Sade. Kafka’s depiction of guilt depends on anxiety that refers to nameless accusations. His protagonists may well assume that a conspiracy targets them in a way they can never understand. I explain the logic of the law that embodies such anxiety, in his novels The Trial and The Process. My second example is the Marquis de Sade who gives many examples of conspiracies on his major novels Justine and Juliette. I study two of them, first, the group of murderous monks in Justine and the Parisian secret society called Sodality in Juliette. Both are successful organizations and Sade helps us understand why this is so. I discuss some real life examples of conspiracies. Finally, I compare Kafka, Sade, and their viewpoints: Kafka’s is that of the victim and Sade’s that of the victor.

This paper explores the Poro, a male secret society in rural Sierra Leone, and how it conditions access to security and justice. It critiques dichotomies between state and non-state and substantiat...

Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902) safeguarded his imperial vision with a series of wills. Sensing that his life would be relatively short, he left to his trustees the task of carrying out his wishes after his death. He also left a substantial fortune to make it possible. This article uses those wills to follow the development of Rhodes’ ‘big idea’, the creation of a secret society to promote imperial expansion, from its birth in Oxford to the final compromise of the Rhodes Scholarships. The article questions the existence of a much-quoted teenage will, examines the influences on Rhodes at Oxford that led to the famous ‘Confession of Faith’ will and identifies a link between the 1892 will and the Mandela Rhodes scholarships founded in 2003.

This article aims to retrace the history of the Acéphale secret society and its role in the development of the work of Bataille, notably the unfinished project of the Atheological Summa ( Somme athéologique) . Based on sociological notions of the ‘secret society’ and ‘the society of men’, it updates the dual aspects of Acéphale: a diurnal or ‘political’ aspect constituted by the publication of the journal Acéphale, and afterwards by the public activity of the College of Sociology; and a nocturnal or religious side, as evidenced by the activity of the secret society itself, an activity aiming to strengthen the communitarian link amongst the followers, and to open them up to what Caillois would call ‘a broader conspiracy’.

This paper uses the secret society to pose questions about the politics, epistemology and ontology of organizing. Against assumptions of transparency, or the possibility of hermeneutic understanding, I suggest that much organizing is actually invisible and opaque. The paper begins with a consideration of the characteristics of historical and contemporary organizational conspiracies, and then moves on to elaborate what sort of ‘facts’ need to be claimed about a secret society to bring it into existence. After a section on the politics of contemporary organizational conspiracies, the paper concludes with some speculations on what the example of the secret society can tell us about the paranoia required by contemporary organizational researchers, as well as the ontology of organizations. After all, we have still never seen an organization.

Twenty-three-year old Daryush Valizadeh, known to his predominantly heterosexual male fan base as Roosh, is a well-known pick-up artist within the worldwide “Seduction Community,” which relies on pop evolutoinary psychology to teach the art of getting laid. Its origins date back to dubious neuro-linguistic programming “speed seduction” theories in the early 1990s, but the Community rose to prominence with investigative reporter Neil Strauss’s 2005 bestseller expose The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, which spawned a VH1 reality show and drew aspiring “PUAs” to online forums and self -proclaimed gurus promising foolproof seduction strategies.

In considering the history of 'secret military networks', the activities of radical right-wing splinter groups in Britain in the period 1937-41 presents an opportunity to explore questions which might at first appear more relevant to previous centuries. The secrecy which surrounded anti-war and pro-war German groups suggests a number of recurring issues in relation to secret military networks: how officers communicated, their motivations and how individual groups tended to operate. Although the activities of these groups have been studied before, no attempt has been made to consider the specific role of military officers. In fact, officers from all three armed services were present in these organisations and played an important part due to their knowledge of the methods of the intelligence services which had placed these groups under surveillance. While the presence of modern, well-organised intelligence services had made conspiracy much more difficult, the maintenance of a body of political beliefs not accepted in British society at the time was just one of several elements displayed by the splinter groups which had first been identified by Georg Simmel in his seminal article 'The Sociology of Secrecy' (1906) as characteristics of a 'secret society'.

This chapter examines the emergence of a colonial archive on ‘native savagery’ following the panic over ‘human leopards’ in Sierra Leone in 1912. It shows how the fright of the colonial elites was charged by the regurgitation of past prejudices and experiences of violence. The colonial archive—colonial officials used to refer to ‘Thuggee’ in India as the ultimate example of native ‘savagery’—was consulted to reinforce existing racial stereotypes. The panic ultimately resulted in an explosion of anthropological literature about the ‘leopards’ being disseminated all over Britain and its Empire. As the detailed analysis of this peculiar genre of texts clearly suggests, the narratives of the ‘leopard murders’ drew on earlier prejudices about African religion and ritual, and the resulting ‘scientific’ literature in turn became an important reference point for later investigators.

From 1796 until the fall of Napoleon’s Empire in 1815 the public and private lives of many, perhaps most, Italians were filled with war, rumours of war and preparation for war. While they cannot be compared with twentieth-century experiences of ‘total war’, the impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on the security, economies, politics, lives and culture of Italians of all classes was considerable. However, measuring the impact of war is complicated. War was experienced more often indirectly than directly, affecting different social groups in different ways, while the consequences that are specific to war are not easily distinguished from the broader burdens imposed by the imperial project. Bearing these qualifications in mind, this chapter will begin by considering the human and material costs of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Italy. It will then explore the many different ways in which the experiences and memories of war weighed on Italian politics and political culture, from the closing years of Empire (1812–1815), including the Legitimist Restorations (1814–1815), to the liberal revolutions of 1820–1821 and their aftermath.1

Very soon after the short period in which the attention of the institutions and national public opinion had been captured by the trials of the Notarbartolo case, the mafia became part of the normality of the Sicilian situation once more, and any investigative activity was very low-key. The reasons for this ‘normalisation’ can be attributed principally to the deep roots that the Sicilian cosche had grown within the political structures of the island, and thanks also to the increased suffrage that the left-wing parties had erroneously considered the best antidote to the mafia (Pezzino 1995, p.161). Links between the mafia and members of the island’s politics were not isolated, especially since the cosche even infiltrated those movements which fought for a fair distribution of public land, such as the Sicilian Fasci. An eloquent example is the case of Vito Cascio Ferro, an important mafioso of the day, who was director of the Fascio in Bisacquino, while other gabelloti, directly involved with the mafia, promoted the movement at Contessa Entellina (Block 1986, pp. 121–26). A clear attempt to anaesthetise the problem of the mafia and its dangers emerges from the island’s police reports. In fact, the institutions, almost forgetful of the results obtained by previous investigations, reconfirmed the old refrain, that the mafia was not a criminal organisation.

After the 1680s, Big Vehicle Religion gradually developed on the Yunnan-Burma frontier. It was banned by the Qing government and became a sect of Chinese secret societies. The founders of this religion combined various Buddhist and Taoist elements together and claimed this to be the route to their salvation. They also trained many students to be monks. After the Sino-Burma wars these monks established a Five Buddha Districts system among the Lahu and some Wa villages in western Mekong River, until the system was destroyed by the Qing government in the 1880s. The monks became leaders of the Luohei/Lahu through millenarianism and many Han immigrants also became involved in the movements to become the Lahu or the Wa. The monks performed critical roles as social activists in Lahu cultural reconstruction. As a shaping power, their human agency was deeply integrated into secret societies and they formulated regional political centers as well as a network mechanism for the floating indigenous populations. Secret societies clearly shaped a historical framework for local politics and economic flux in the Yunnan-Burma frontier and became a cross-border mechanism for contemporary life after the border between Yunnan, Burma and Thailand was decided. However, it used to be a networking dynamic linked with silver and copper minefields, Sino-Burma wars, and anti-Qing millenarianism. Local people could also use this frontier space for their negotiations with different states before the coming of European colonialism. Après les années 1680, le bouddhisme du grand véhicule se développa sur la frontière birmano-yunnanaise. Le gouvernement des Qing l’interdit mais il devint une secte diffusée par des sociétés secrètes. Les fondateurs de cette religion combinèrent des éléments bouddhistes et taoïstes et prétendirent que c’était la voie du salut. Ils formèrent également des élèves pour en faire des moines. Après les guerres sino-birmanes, ces moines établirent un système de cinq districts du Bouddha parmi les Lahu et certains villages Wa de l’ouest du Mékong, jusqu’à ce que ce système soit détruit par le gouvernement des Qing dans les années 1880. Ces moines devinrent des leaders des Luohei/lahu dans des mouvements millénaristes et de nombreux immigrants Han participèrent à ces mouvements pour devenir des Lahu ou des Wa. Ces moines tinrent des rôles critiques comme activistes sociaux dans la reconstruction culturelle lahu. En tant que pouvoir actif, leur action humaine fut profondément liée à des sociétés secrètes et ils instituèrent des centres politiques régionaux ainsi qu’un mécanisme de réseau pour des populations indigènes fluctuantes. À l’évidence, des sociétés secrètes donnèrent forme à un cadre historique pour la politique locale et les flux économiques à la frontière birmano-yunnanaise et devinrent un mécanisme transfrontalier pour la vie quotidienne après l’établissement de frontières entre le Yunnan, la Birmanie et la Thaïlande. Il s’agissait de fait d’un réseau dynamique lié aux mines d’argent et de cuivre, aux guerres sino-birmanes, ainsi qu’à un millénarisme anti-Qing. Les populations locales pouvaient également utiliser cet espace frontalier pour négocier avec les divers États avant l’établissement du colonialisme européen.

The Fenian movement was born in 1858 as an alliance between the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a revolutionary secret society, and the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish-American organisation intended to supply this society with funds and trained officers. This was not the first time that Irish nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic had tried to cooperate, but it was the first time that there was a steady arrangement in place. The Fenian partnership was extremely successful on the surface, but it was undermined by fundamental differences in customs, political attitudes and ultimate goals between Irish and American Fenians. The clearest evidence of these differences was afforded by the Fenian Brotherhood?s successive attempts to invade Canada between 1866 and 1871. As military episodes the Canadian raids were negligible; as Irish revolutionary attempts they seem absurd.However, they were a perfectly coherent manifestation of the Irish-American ?hyphenated identity?.The present article traces the parallel evolution of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Fenian Brotherhood up to 1866, and reconstructs the cultural and political reasons for the revival of the Canadian scheme, the ensuing split in the Fenian Brotherhood, and the final collapse of the Fenian alliance.; El movimiento Feniano surgió en 1858 como una alianza entre la Hermandad Republicana Irlandesa (Irish Republican Brotherhood), una sociedad secreta revolucionaria, y la Hermandad Feniana (Fenian Brotherhood), una organización americano-irlandesa concebida para suministrar a esta sociedad ayuda económica y militar. No era la primera vez que los nacionalistas irlandeses a ambos lados del Atlántico habían intentado colaborar, pero era la primera vez que establecían un acuerdo permanente. La alianza feniana resultaba enormemente provechosa en apariencia, pero en realidad se veía socavada por diferencias fundamentales en las costumbres, actitudes políticas y objetivos finales de fenianos irlandeses y americanos. La prueba más clara de estas diferencias fueron los sucesivos intentos de la Hermandad Feniana de invadir Canadá entre 1866 y 1871. Desde el punto de vista militar, las incursiones en Canadá fueron episodios insignificantes; como intentonas revolucionarias pueden parecer absurdas. Sin embargo, eran una manifestación perfectamente coherente de la ?identidad con guión? (hyphenated identity) de los americano-irlandeses. El presente artículo traza la evolución paralela de la Hermandad Republicana Irlandesa y la Hermandad Feniana hasta 1866, y reconstruye las razones culturales y políticas del resurgimiento del proyecto de invasión de Canadá, la consiguiente escisión en la Hermandad Feniana, y el desmoronamiento final de la alianza entre fenianos irlandeses y americanos.

In the first chapter, I quoted two Sicilian writers, the anthropologist Giuseppe Pitre and the novelist Luigi Natoli, who in the late 1800s and early 1900s reevaluated the Sicilian contribution to the Italian nation, evoking (inventing, in Hobsbawm/Ranger’s sense) a noble regional tradition. In 1882, Pitre denied that the words Mafia and omerta could refer to the criminal sphere: according to him, omerta in particular corresponded to manliness, the traditional code, and the sense of oneself that forced every Sicilian male to defend both his own and his family’s honor.1 In 1911, Natoli narrated the legend of a secret society—I Beati Paoli—that, centuries ago, had defended Sicilians, primarily the poor and the weak, from the tyranny of the Spanish occupation. While it is unclear whether the two specifically intended to legitimate the Mafia, the Mafia-connected Italian congressman Raffaele Palizzolo surely intended to do so when he used both Pitre’s and Natoli’s arguments—the cultural and the political one—in the interview he gave to the New York Times in 1908.

This essay explores the political evolution, activities and legacy of Tse Tsan Tai. Following a childhood in Grafton, Australia, where he developed his early political aspirations, Tse landed in Hong Kong in 1887. He was a foundation member of the Furen Wenshe (Literary Society for the Promotion of Benevolence) until its merger with Sun Yat-sen's Xingzhonghui (Revive China Society) in 1895. Tse served as a strategist and fundraiser in the Xingzhonghui's 1895 and 1900 uprisings and negotiated with leaders of the reform movement for greater unity and cooperation. Several leading reformers supported his 1903 Guangzhou uprising that brought together revolutionary, reformist and secret society interests. Consideration is also given to the public debate that arose in Australia in 1932 when V.Y. Chow proclaimed that Tse rather than Sun was the true founder of Republican China.

Examines the history of the Illuminated, a secret society founded by Adam Weishaupt in Bavaria, on 1 May 1776, which aimed to overthrow civil and religious institutions with the claim that the ends justify the means. Looks at Karl Marx and the links with the Illuminated's doctrine and also compares the Illuminated's ideas with the teaching of Smith. Concludes that although the Illuminated may have been activated by the most altruistic of motives, their search for the good society was doomed from the start.

When List heard about the scathing decision of the criminal court, he decided to elude the execution of his sentence and fled to Strasbourg in the hope of rehabilitating himself there. His wife Karoline, her son Karl Neidhard and their children Emilie and Oskar first remained in Stuttgart. Karoline was afraid of the risks involved in an attempt to escape, especially because she was expecting another child and her health was very bad (Fig. 2.1).

New, startling experiments in sexuality Often emerge out of the ufology milieu. Science-fiction author Ursula Leguin, for example, describes an androgynous society in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). Various twentieth-century contactees, who redefined themselves as prophets after their CEIII experience, have founded new religious movements where the impact of advanced technologies on gender roles is explored. Procreation, parenting, monogamy, and traditional “family values” are Often challenged in UFO religions, whose leaders create new, utopian, “Scientific” models of gender and of family.

Irish Catholic immigrants in North America provided, on the surface, a potentially powerful source of support for the revolutionary designs of the Fenian movement in Ireland. The Catholic bishops, encouraged by their colleagues in Ireland, especially Paul Cullen, the archbishop of Dublin, resisted Fenian strategies in the new world by declaring that the Fenian organization was condemned by the church as a secret society. The bishops' task was complicated by the circumstances of the American Civil War in that the Fenians recruited to their ranks from among the Irish enlisted soldiers. With anti-English sentiment running high in the northern states, the Union authorities were inclined to turn a blind eye to Fenian machinations both during and after the war. Although the bishops had been anxious in 1865 to have the backing of Rome for their anti-Fenian stance, their post-bellum position was more cautious and they, for the most part, opposed the papal condemnation of Fenianism in 1870, a condemnation issued at the behest of the Irish bishops. The church in America and Canada laboured under various disadvantages, mostly of an anti-Catholic nature, which hampered its ability to deal resolutely with the Irish nationalist discontent in its midst. Ultimately, however, the disintegration of the Fenian movement in North America had more to do with its own internal incoherence than any external pressure.

The appearance of the Ku Klux Klan in Ontario in the mid-1920s was viewed with concern by provincial officials; the dismissal of the Klan by one Ontario editor as “a public nuisance” does not reflect the disquiet that ran through official circles as membership went from strength to strength. The Klan’s early disappearance from Ontario, while becoming a political force in Saskatchewan, raises interesting questions about Canada’s regional political cultures in this era. This article argues that the robust Orange culture of 1920s Ontario was a barrier to political action the KKK could not overcome. A different political culture in Saskatchewan produced a different outcome.

When I was working on my master’s thesis on Afro-British integration on the Sherbro coast, I started to regularly see references to queens and other titled women of authority in the literature on early Sierra Leone. I was surprised because the general treatments of women in Africa I had read always talked about how oppressed African women were. So where did these so called queens come from? This was not ancient Egypt or the Nile Valley where I might expect some queens to show up. One reference in Sierra Leone’s general history was to a woman called Queen Yamacouba, who had signed the treaty handing over the land that became the Freetown Colony to the British. Who was she and what did her title refer to? Another puzzling reference was to a woman who was called “Seniora Doll, the Duchess of Sherbro.” I could not understand how an African woman could have become a duchess while living in Africa in the seventeenth century. Who could these queens and duchesses be?

Today, as they observe the turbulent developments taking place in the society known until very recently as Soviet, our foreign colleagues, known appropriately as Sovietologists, are puzzled. How can it be that such a strong, centralized government has collapsed just like that, without any warning, and people who have lived in fear for more than seventy years have suddenly undergone such a radical transformation? "How do you explain the fact that the Soviet people have put up for so many years with an oppressive totalitarian regime?" they ask. That is largely the view from the outside. There is also an opposite view, the view from the inside, according to which nothing at all has changed—and even if it has changed, it is only for the worse, and this solely because of the ineptitude and incompetence of the new government, yesterday's democrats, who have thrown out the communists and taken their place. The word democrat has almost become a term of abuse.

Some of the Romanian students and political emigres took actual part in the fighting of February 1848 on Parisian barricades, alongside the Belgians, Irish, Poles, Hungarians, Piedmontese and others immigrant Communities. In the wake of the victorious French revolution, most immigrant communities Hungarians, Piedmontese, Sardinians, Belgians, Swiss, Poles hoped that the new republican regime might supply arms and logistical support for freedom fighters organized into 'legions' to return to their respective countries, overthrow authoritarian regimes or foreign domination there and fight for the unification and the independence of emergent nation-states. Their hopes were seconded in France by the extreme left, radicals and secret society conspirators - people such as Auguste Blanqui, the new Paris prefect Marc Caussidiere, Armand Barb?s, Fran?ois-Vincent Raspail and public figures such as George Sand - who would have wanted the see the revolution exported to the rest of Europe.Keywords: Europe; Paris; Romanian

Some of the Romanian students and political emigres took actual part in the fighting of February 1848 on Parisian barricades, alongside the Belgians, Irish, Poles, Hungarians, Piedmontese and others immigrant Communities. In the wake of the victorious French revolution, most immigrant communities Hungarians, Piedmontese, Sardinians, Belgians, Swiss, Poles hoped that the new republican regime might supply arms and logistical support for freedom fighters organized into 'legions' to return to their respective countries, overthrow authoritarian regimes or foreign domination there and fight for the unification and the independence of emergent nation-states. Their hopes were seconded in France by the extreme left, radicals and secret society conspirators - people such as Auguste Blanqui, the new Paris prefect Marc Caussidiere, Armand Barbes, Francois-Vincent Raspail and public figures such as George Sand - who would have wanted the see the revolution exported to the rest of Europe.Keywords: Europe; Paris; Romanian

The last months of the Bienio Progresista were marked by dithering in the Cortes over the new constitution, mounting Court and Army intrigue, increasing proscription of political activity and press censorship. The end began in early June with the closure of Barcelona’s progresista clubs by Military Governor, General Juan Zapatero. Espartero’s failure to defend freedom of assembly cost him what little support he still retained among advanced Progresistas and Democrats. With the Cortes suspended for a short summer recess, deserted by the only leader of sufficient notoriety to be able to confront O’Donnell, and no longer with any rights of public association, advanced Progresistas and Democrats returned to the politics of conspiracy.

This chapter looks at the role of women in eighteenth-century British fraternities, hitherto little studied by academics.1 As indicated in the previous chapter, the difficulty of ascertaining gender relations lies in the unambiguous and proscriptive stance officially adopted by Freemasons in 1723, when James Anderson (c. 1679–1739) laid out the general regulations of the fraternity in The Constitutions of the Free-Masons.2 Herein, as Robert Beachy stresses, Charge III stipulated that ‘the persons admitted Members of a Lodge must be good and true Men, free-born, and of mature and discreet Age, no Bondmen, no Women, no immoral or scandalous Men.’3 The Scottish Presbyterian minister made it abundantly clear that women were to be categorically excluded from every aspect of Freemasonry, which was by far the largest fraternity in eighteenth-century Britain.

Traditionally, the literature on police deviance has focused on criminal and/or unethical acts committed by officers against the public trust. In the process, considerably less emphasis has been given to seemingly minor transgressions committed by some against their peers. For example, to many consumers of police literature, the “code of silence” connotes an unwritten rule that forbids reporting another officer's illegal activities for any reason. The idea that some might report minor rule infractions for the sole purpose of personal gain is seldom entertained. In practice, police do snitch. This paper explores the development and practice of this phenomenon as a form of deviance from the subcultural perspective. Various motives for snitching are examined, and a typology of police snitches is provided. Finally the discussion touches upon some ethical implications of administrative tolerance and utilization of this deviant actor's services.

This paper examines the "underground" Christians of the Edo period, looking principally at the experiences of Christians in community. It is argued that these experiences reflect a tension between the complementary realms of secrecy on the one hand and privacy on the other, concluding that at the start of the Edo period, the Christians who took their faith and practice underground exhibited the characteristics of a proscribed religion practiced in secret. However, with the relaxation of enforcement of the state's religious policies, and with the passage of two centuries and more, the underground Christians became something different, what came to be styled the Kakure Kirishitan, who subsequently in modern times acquired and finally retained

As soon as news of the attack spread, the British resident at Gwalior induced Sindhia to send a detachment of horse to support Halhed as well as ordering his officials to cooperate in the pursuit of the attackers.1 Halhed was even allowed to attack any village within Sindhia’s territories that offered refuge to Laljee and his followers, which implies an unusual willingness on the part the Maratha leader to assist the British.2 Correspondence between Sindouse to Calcutta, however, was very slow, and the Government’s reply to Halhed’s initial reports was written on 31 October before news of the attack had reached the presidency. The Governor General approved of Halhed’s zeal, and also authorised him to withdraw from the area should the situation become untenable — by which time the damage had already been done.3 When the attack became known, the detachment Halhed had requested was duly despatched under the command of Capt. Popham and a reward of Rs 5000 for the capture of Laljee was warranted.4

After ten years of planning, plotting and writing, the Decembrist conspiracy’s denouement came suddenly and swiftly. This is explained by three main factors: first, the reports of Shervud and Maiboroda exposing the Southern Society in particular, second, the totally unexpected death of the 47-year-old Tsar Alexander on 19 November 1825 which precipitated an equally unexpected succession crisis and, third, the uprising in St Petersburg on 14 December 1825, the day which was supposed to bring an end to Russia’s interregnum with the public inauguration of Nicholas I. Following the events of 14 December the authorities had little difficulty in identifying and rounding up those who had been involved. Some indeed gave themselves up. The conspiracy unravelled at such a speed that within hours the first prisoners found themselves in the Winter Palace, subjected to a preliminary interrogation, in many cases by Nicholas I himself, and to the humiliating procedures of arrest and detention. However, the net had been closing in on the Southern Society well before the end of 1825. This chapter traces the events which led to Pestel’s arrest, analyses both his investigation at the hands of the Investigating Committee and his behaviour during this six-month process and concludes with an account of his execution.

This paper considers the relation between Leiris and Bataille and argues that the relation was closer than is often thought. It examines the role of Leiris in the Acephale secret society, and shows that the theme of secrecy, in its multiple senses, is the organizing principle of Leiris’ work. This requires a reassessment of the role of Leiris in Bataille’s thought and activities.

At their 1823 congress the leadership of the Southern Society had envisaged the use of force in pursuit of their political objectives. Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin, for example, noted in his testimony that ‘the intention of the Society was the introduction into the state of a representative government. The means of attaining this was through the spread of branches of the Society and the use of armed force.’ This was an intention from which, as he stated elsewhere, ‘we never veered’.This chapter explores the Southern Society’s plans for seizing power, and Pestel’s contribution to them. The conspirators’ intentions to do so by violent means brought into sharp focus the intended fate of Alexander I and the imperial family, the issue which above all others most preoccupied Nicholas I and the Investigating Committee. Of interest as well is Pestel’s equally controversial proposal for the ensuing dictatorship of a provisional government and the role in it which he saw for himself. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Pestel’s loss of morale in the wake of his failure to unite the Northern and Southern societies under his leadership. As enumerated by the Investigating Committee, there were three major charges laid against Pestel.

Pestel has been described by a recent commentator as ‘the most impressive Russian revolutionary before Lenin’. The central issues of Pestel’s revolutionary credentials, his influence, his personal ambition and his legacy have all been discussed in earlier chapters but we return to them here in order to summarise our conclusions. These also include final consideration both of Pestel’s regicidal intentions and Nicholas I as Pestel’s executioner, and of the Decembrist ideologue’s historical significance.

We hear talk of ‘subcultures’ all the time. The term can be found in the popular press, in ‘underground’ style magazines, in debates and discussions among the young and the old. One can even hear it bandied about in Madison Avenue marketing meetings - the all-hallowed ‘subculture’, the source of future trends! Yet, despite its prevalence there seems to be very little consensus on what the term actually means. As it stands, it incorporates a wide range of groups from punks to Hell’s Angels, graffiti to Riot Grrrls. These are not all illegal. They are not all male. They are not all young. And they are not all centred around a certain ‘style’ or activity. So what binds them together under this one umbrella label? What is their defining characteristic? As the CCCS saw it, their distinction. They told us that subcultures ‘must be focused around certain activities, values, certain uses of material artefacts, territorial spaces etc. which significantly differentiate them from wider culture’ (Clarke et al., 1976: 14). Yet, they also told us that this definition holds for the working classes alone: ‘They are all subordinate sub-cultures, in relation to the dominant middle-class or bourgeois culture’ (Clarke et al., 1976: 13).

The struggle between the Church and the Fenians, as this unfolded in the 1860s and 1870s, was concerned with who would condition the form and content of Irish political life in that period. The Church, led by Cardinal Cullen, was anxious to promote Catholicism at every level of Irish society, convinced as he was of the fundamentally anti- Catholic nature of the operations of the British Protestant state in Ireland.1 For their part, the Fenians rejected the Church’ analysis that Ireland’ ills were as the result of Protestant government. The Fenians emphasized that it was the English government of Ireland;per se which lay at the root of the problems facing the country. So far as the Fenians were concerned, the Church could not dictate the terms and conditions of Irish political life. The role of priest was restricted to his sacred function, and if he chose to speak on political matters his views were to be given no more consideration than those of any other man.

The question of amnesty for the Fenian political prisoners, as Isaac Butt told Gladstone, was a mark of whether or not Ireland was in the United Kingdom as an equal partner with England, or was a subject nation held by force of arms.1 For his part Gladstone would have been willing to release all the Fenian prisoners in 1869, but was prevented from doing so by pressure from the Whigs in his cabinet. In the event, 49 out of 81 prisoners were released, though Kickham was the only prominent member in this group.2 Sympathy for the Fenian prisoners had been intensified throughout late 1868 and early 1869 by tales of systematic mistreatment and by the activity of the amnesty movement under the careful direction of its indefatigable secretary and prominent Fenian, John Nolan. By the time the amnesty movement was founded in November 1868, the prisoners had become a symbol of the general discontent experienced in Ireland at the hands of London rule.

Despite the turmoil of the previous year, by October 1866 Gladstone, for one, was convinced that Fenianism in Ireland was not formidable. At least, so he told Pope Pius IX. The Pope, for his part ‘spoke warmly against Fenianism’ and assured Gladstone of his hostility to it, and that of the Irish clergy.1 The importance of Fenianism as an issue in British-Vatican relations had been underlined earlier that year in an exchange between Odo Russell, the unofficial British diplomatic representative at Rome, and the Pope. Pius explained to Russell that the principles of Fenianism had been condemned in his latest allocution and he hoped that the Fenians would soon be completely suppressed.2 A report from the British consul at Naples told of the activities in that city of the prominent Fenians Dowling, ‘the brothers Harris of Pittsburg, Higgins … of Baltimore and Davidson of Quebec’. While the Home Secretary was inclined to dismiss Bonham’s report as ‘too vague to act upon’ he did have the matter followed up, and asked the Foreign Office to make enquiries. Odo Russell filed a report in April to the effect that the police authorities in Rome were keeping a close watch on one of the Harrises. Russell also took the opportunity of complaining to Cardinal Antonelli that the Irish clergy were the fermenters of political strife.

On 31 December 1830, Galois, together with all the other republicans, was to encounter another serious setback. Louis-Philippe issued a decree dismissing General Lafayette and disbanding the National Guard. The two republican batteries refused to be disarmed, and nineteen artillerymen, who were considered the ringleaders, were arrested. The men involved were: Captains Cavaignac and Guinard, and Privates TreLat, Sambuc, Andry, Francfort, Penard, Rouhier, Lenible, PeCheux, D’Herbenville, Chaparre, Gourdin, Guilley, Chanvin, Lebastard, Pointis, Danton, the grandson of the famous Georges-Jacques Danton, and the Gardnier brothers.

On the night of Thursday 7 September 1815, more than one hundred men gathered in the hamlet of Ballagh, in the parish of Clonoulty, Co. Tipperary. Armed with axes, saws and sledgehammers taken from the local forge, they began systematically demolishing two buildings which had been used as a public dispensary. Walking up and down to inspect the work was Patrick Keogh, who, like many of those present, came from a prosperous farming family. At one point, some of the men knocked on the door of Michael Dwyer’s inn and shop opposite the dispensary and demanded candles. Work also ceased for a time when there was a rumour of ‘peelers’ approaching. When the task was completed, the entire party formed themselves into two lines and fired a ceremonial volley of shots before obtaining whiskey from Conor Hayes’ inn and making their way home.

The South African public first learned of the Broederbond’s existence when the Prime Minister, General Hertzog, tore aside its mask in a sensational and vehement expose on 7 November 1935. His attack ranks as one of the most sensational speeches in South African political history, and shook both the Broederbond and the infant GNP to their foundations. But it could not have been totally unexpected: echoes of the upheaval caused by fusion in Broederbond ranks had inevitably reached Hertzog’s ears. Like future crises in the Broederbond, news of this one filtered through to the external world, and the secret organisation was to learn that internal purges, small though they might be, tended to weaken security and discipline. Moreover, Hertzog had betrayed anxiety over the Broederbond’s growing power in a passing reference to it at the OFS United Party Congress a month or two earlier. He warned delegates that the Broederbond had outgrown its original role and that it had become an ‘important political instrument in the hands of purified politicians’.1 In spite of its beaver-like activity in nearly every OFS town and village few of the United Party’s rank and file knew anything about the secret society. Indeed, only an extremely small group of people even knew of its existence.

As Prime Minister, General Smuts showed remarkable restraint and tolerance in dealing with right-wing pro-German subversion. This was not only due to his phlegmatic temperament. Remembering, perhaps, how his suppression of the 1914 pro-German rebellion had fed the latent fires of Nationalism, Smuts was sensitive to the danger of escalating the domestic conflicts of 1940–3 into a full-blooded civil war. While South African volunteer troops were fighting a life and death struggle against the Axis in the Western desert and later in Italy, he permitted the official Nationalist parliamentary opposition and its affiliated religious, economic and cultural organisations to oppose the war effort openly, and to express sometimes blatantly treasonable support for Nazi Germany. Smuts even allowed the OB to function throughout the war as a crypto-Nazi, pro-violence, mass organisation.