In Search of Helvetius' Early Career as a Freemason

THE PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY iS to review the scant information that we have about Claude-Adrien Helvetius as a freemason and to add to it. What has been known about his masonic activity is his role in inspiring the creation of the Loge des Neuf-Soeurs (which finally became a reality only after his death), out of an ambition to see the masonic order take an active and useful part in the intellectual and artistic life of its time. Helvetius' actual masonic career, however, has been almost entirely a matter of conjecture. The documents which show that he was a freemason early, that is while still a fermier general at the very end of the 1740s, seem to have remained unknown up to now to specialists in the history of freemasonry. To these we can now add a previously unknown masonic poem which is dated and establishes that, in fact, Helvetius was a member of a lodge in Paris as early as 1747. We have so little firm information about the early Paris lodges and their membership before the middle of the century that each newly discovered item takes on a certain significance, either for the history of freemasonry or the biography of the individual freemason, or both. Thus, in the present instance, the establishment of the very early presence as a freemason of Helvetius, youthful fermier ge'neral and scion of a family enjoying a privileged status vis-a-vis the royal family, is important to those studying the recruitment and social composition of the order. Equally important is the establishment of this early date of his masonic membership for Helvetius' biography, since the 1 740s

Decadence, Literature, and Society · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Psychology