what of the abolition of
the "working guilds" and "all the corporations," that is to say, the
"trade unions" of the period, which was carried out by the infamous Loi
Chapelier in 1791, a decree that is now generally recognized as one of
the strangest anomalies of the Revolution? Again, to whose interest was
it to do away with the customs and excise duties of France? To establish
the absolute and unfettered liberty of the press and religious opinions?
The benefits these measures might be expected to confer on the French
people were certainly problematical, but there could be no doubt of
their utility to men who, like Frederick the Great, wished to ruin
France and to break the Franco-Austrian alliance by the unrestricted
circulation of libels against Marie Antoinette, who, like Mirabeau,
hoped to bring about a revolution, or who, like Voltaire, wished to
remove all obstacles to the spread of an anti-Christian propaganda.

It is therefore by no means impossible that Weishaupt was at first the
agent of more experienced conspirators, whose purely political aims were
disguised under a plan of social reform, and who saw in the Bavarian
professor a clever organizer to be employed in carrying out their
designs.

Whether this was so or not, the fact remains that from the time
Weishaupt assumed control of the Order the plan of "social reform"
described by Mirabeau vanishes entirely, for not a word do we find in
the writings of the Illuminati about any pretended scheme for
ameliorating the lot of the people, and Illuminism becomes simply a
scheme of anarchic philosophy. The French historian Henri Martin has
thus admirably summed up the system elaborated by "Spartacus":

Weishaupt had made into an absolute theory the misanthropic gibes
_[boutades]_ of Rousseau at the invention of property and society,
and without taking into account the statement so distinctly
formulated by Rousseau on the impossibility of suppressing property
and society once they had been established, he proposed as the end
of Illuminism the abolition of property, social authority, of
nationality, and the return of the human race to the happy state in
which it formed only a single family without artificial needs,
without useless sciences, every father being priest and magistrate.
Priest of we know not what religion, for in spite of their frequent
invocations of the God of Nature, many indications lead us to