706 Chapter XXIX
group of Pietists among the nobles of Holstein, where they defended the privileges
of the noble estates, resisted the reformist absolutism of the King of Denmark, and
denounced the faculty at the University of Kiel, including the theologians there, as
no better than Jacobins.^55
Among Catholics, a group of ex- Jesuits established at Augsburg took the lead
in denouncing the Enlightenment as a menace to religious faith and to civil soci-
ety. Augsburg was a free city enclosed in Bavaria, where the Illuminati were
founded in 1778, and to combat the Jesuits, while using the clandestine methods
with which they were credited, seems to have been one of the aims of the Illumi-
nati; at any rate, it is among the Augsburg Jesuits, as early as 1784, that the first
deliberate formulation of the “plot theory” of the eighteenth- century revolution is
to be found. The theory grew out of earlier attacks on the Freemasons, but the
Ill uminati made a more sensational target. It was from these somewhat intramural
disputes among Catholics, mediated by Protestant Germans, as well as by the
Scotch Presbyterian Robison and in America by a stalwart of Congregationalism,
Jedediah Morse, that the world was asked to believe, in 1798, that the Revolution
of Western Civilization was due to the machinations of a secret society. The Augs-
burg Jesuits continued to issue a number of periodicals into the 1790’s, aimed at
the lower clergy and at the mass of the Catholic faithful, to whom they offered
an absolute acceptance of the church as the only defense against the horrors of
irreligion and anarchy.^56
In Vienna, L. A. Hoffmann, in his Wiener Zeitschrift, took up the same crusade
against secret societies. How Hoffman himself, in conjunction with Leopold II,
had organized a secret “Association,” to combat both aristocratism and democra-
tism, has already been explained.^57 The Wiener Zeitschrift was shut down in 1793 by
the government of Francis II, which wanted no discussion of revolution pro or
con, and which, far from subsidizing a conservative ideology, preferred to have no
ideology at all. More widely read than the Wiener Zeitschrift was the Revolutions-
Almanach of H. A. O. Reichard, librarian to the duke of Saxe- Gotha. As early as
1790, at the time of the peasant rebellion in Saxony, Reichard had been asked by
the government of the Electorate to publish a counter- revolutionary journal at the
popular level. He had apparently done so, declaring that some “fine passages from
Dr. Martin Luther and the writings of other pious men” should serve this purpose
very well.^58 In 1793 he began to issue his Revolutions- Almanach at Göttingen. It
was aimed at a more sophisticated audience, and lasted until 1801. At Göttingen,
in Hanover, much was known about England; and one of the early articles in the
Revolutions- Almanach was a long and laudatory account of an English society,
founded in 1792, the Association for the Protection of Freedom and Property
55 Ibid., 423–38. The ex- revolutionary, Dumouriez, in Holstein in 1798, also denounced the Kiel
faculty for Jacobinism. See above, p. 616.
56 Valjavec, 290, 292, 305–307. On Robison and Barruel see above, pp. 559–64 and 627; on
Morse, below, p. 746. See also Droz’ Allemagne, and his article, “La légende du complot illuministe et
les origines du romantisme politique en Allemagne,” in Revue historique, Vol. 226 (1961), 313–38.
57 On Hoffman and the Wiener Zeitschrift, Valjavec, 308; Droz, 409–11; D. Silagi, Ungarn und der
geheime Mitarbeiterkreis Kaiser Leopolds II (Munich, 1960), 105–16; and see above, p. 495.
58 Stulz, Volksbewegungen, 101.