High Tide of Revolutionary Democracy 627
glish origin, spread throughout Europe. To designate a busy patriot of republicans
views in a derogatory sense, the word “clubbist,” clubbiste, etc., sprang up in En-
glish, French, German, Spanish, and Italian, and so on to klubista in Polish. Usually
the clubs were open, since publicity was their aim, but even open clubs might de-
velop secret activities, as in Holland in 1794, or turn from an open to a secret exis-
tence when forbidden by governments, as with the United Irish groups at the same
time. In America the democratic clubs that sprang up in 1793 or 1794 turned into
ordinary units of party organization; in England after 1794 the more vulnerable
middle- class members ceased to come to meetings; in Continental monarchies
they became clandestine; in France after the closing of the Jacobin Club late in
1794 they were prohibited, but soon rose again; so that in France, as in the Sister
Republics, in the late 1790’s, the democratic clubs and “circles,” while often dis-
liked even by republican governments as too radical and too turbulent, managed to
remain open as centers of political discussion.
The world of clubs shaded off into a wonderland of secret societies, on which it
is almost impossible to obtain satisfactory evidence or to form any rational judg-
ment. A club of a kind that in another country would be open might be secret for
local reasons, as at Naples in 1792. The secret societies seem to have been quite
distinct from Masonic lodges, though membership might be overlapping. A secret
society differed from a club in being organized for action, with no pretense of dis-
cussion, since the views of the members were assumed to be firmly formed. A se-
cret society might preserve a certain democratic character, with power flowing up
from the membership, through election of delegates by local units to higher levels,
as with the United Irish; but it was more usual for secret societies to be controlled
tightly at the top, with the members themselves excluded from the secrets. There
were organizations of this kind of both revolutionary and counter- revolutionary
purpose, such as the Martinovicz conspiracy in Hungary and the Babeuf conspir-
acy in France, or, at the extreme Right, the Eudaemonists of Germany from 1794
to 1798, the “philanthropic institutes” in France in 1797, or a peculiar organization
which the Swedish Fersen learned of from a French émigré at the German city of
Rastadt in 1798.
Members of clubs, in some cases more or less clandestine, were usually among
the first to welcome the French army in many places from Amsterdam to Naples,
and to try to take part in setting up a revolutionary republic. But there is no case in
which any serious revolutionary disturbance can be attributed to the machinations
of a secret society, again with the exception of Ireland, where the United Irish were
certainly more than a secret society in any ordinary sense of the word. The books of
John Robison and the Abbé Barruel have already been analyzed. They purported to
expose a universal secret plot against all governments and religions. They were
written in 1797, before the actual height of revolutionary expansion, of which both
authors had really very little knowledge. Both drew heavily on German sources,
and it seems likely (such an opinion being inevitably impressionistic) that there
was in fact more proliferation of secret societies in Germany in the 1790’s than in
other countries. But Germany was also, along with Spain and Portugal, the part of
Europe in which truly revolutionary activity or successful republican agitation
could least be found.