Barruel and Robison: How the Illuminati Conspiracy Theory Began

Two books, one thesis

In 1797 two authors working independently published arguments that the French Revolution had been prepared by a secret conspiracy. Augustin Barruel (1741–1820), a French Jesuit writing in exile, published Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme (1797–1798). John Robison (1739–1805), a professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh, published Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe (1797).

Both pointed to the Bavarian Illuminati, alongside Freemasons and philosophes, as a central channel of that conspiracy.

What they drew on

The Bavarian government had published papers seized from members in the 1780s. Those documents gave later writers genuine material about the order’s secrecy, grades, and anticlerical aims. Barruel and Robison used this material, but extrapolated from it to claims of continuity and coordination that the documents themselves do not establish.

Why the books spread

Both works appeared during war and political fear across Europe and were quickly translated and reprinted. They offered a single, intelligible cause for a bewildering upheaval. In the United States, Robison’s book helped spark the 1798 Illuminati scare in New England.

How historians assess them today

Historians treat Barruel and Robison as important primary sources for the history of conspiracy thinking and counter-revolutionary ideas. Their central claim, that a directed Illuminati conspiracy caused the Revolution, is generally rejected: the Bavarian order had been suppressed years before 1789, and the Revolution has well-documented political, fiscal, and social causes.

Reading them today is useful precisely because many later Illuminati claims repeat their structure: a small documented fact, followed by a sweeping inference.