The Grand Lodges and Modern Freemasonry 263direct connection to the Grand Lodge of London were established in
France. In 1735, these lodges drew up plans to form a provincial grand
lodge, sending their request for a constitutional charter to the Grand
Lodge of London, which turned them down. To avoid a second refusal,
they decided to go outside the organization and that following year, in
accord with the "Scottish" Lodges, they founded on their own author-
ity a provincial grand lodge. Two years later, on June 24, 1738—in
other words, six weeks following the issuance of the papal bull—a peer
of France, the Duke d'Antin,* was named the Perpetual and General
Grand Master of the Masons of the Kingdom of France.
The creation of this Grand Mastery Association, entrusted to a peer
of France, dissolved the bonds of French Freemasons to the Grand
Lodge of London, much to the irritation of their British brethren.
"These ingrates forget that the splendor they enjoy comes to them only
from England," was the bitter English response recorded in the 1738
edition of Anderson's Book of Constitutions. French Freemasonry
thereby escaped Protestant nationalism, as has been noted by Albert
Lantoine.+
There was no room for any ambiguity concerning the religious
domain of French Freemasonry. On December 27, 1776, the very
Catholic Lord Derwentwater, grand master of the Freemasons of
France—in other words, of the "Scottish" lodges—approved and
signed the Devoirs enjoints aux macons libres des loges francaises,^17
which is simply a version of one of Anderson's Constitutions, in which
the phrase "It is now considered more appropriate to compel [the
masons] only in that religion on which all men are in agreement," was
replaced by this one: "It has been deemed more appropriate to require
of them the religion appropriate to all Christians." This was the toler-
ance, limited to Catholics and Protestants, that was then deemed polit-
ically expedient to proclaim by both the Stuarts and the Hanovers. The
target was hit more precisely following 1738. In Les Statuts en usage
dans les Loges de Frances, published in 1742 but established earlier, we
* He was the great-grandson of the legitimate line of the Marquis de Montespan and the
beautiful Francoise Athenaise de Rochechouart.+
In 1771, there were not even ten lodges in France who drew their authority from the
Grand Lodge of London (Bord, La Franc-Maconneries en France, des origins a, 490).