l the revolutions which were
about to break out at any point of Europe. I owe to him the
unshakeable conviction that all these movements of "oppressed
peoples," etc., etc., are devised by half a dozen individuals, who
give their orders to the secret societies of all Europe. The ground
is absolutely mined beneath our feet, and the Jews provide a large
contingent of these miners....[871]

These words were written in the year after the _Dialogues aux Enfers_
were published.

It is further important to notice that Joly's work is dated from Geneva,
the meeting-place for all the revolutionaries of Europe, including
Bakunin, who was there in the same year, and where the first Congress of
the _Internationale_ led by Karl Marx was held two years later. Already
the revolutionary camp was divided into warring factions, and the
rivalry between Marx and Mazzini had been superseded by the struggle
between Marx and Bakunin. And all these men were members of secret
societies. It is by no means improbable then that Joly, himself a
revolutionary, should during his stay in Geneva have come into touch
with the members of some secret organization, who may have betrayed to
him their own secret or those of a rival organization they had reason
to suspect of working under the cover of revolutionary doctrines for an
ulterior end. Thus the protocols of a secret society modelled on the
lines of the Illuminati or the Haute Vente Romaine may have passed into
his hands and been utilized by him as an attack on Napoleon who, owing
to his known connexion with the Carbonari, might have appeared to Joly
as the chief exponent of the Machiavellian art of duping the people and
using them as the lever to power which the secret societies had reduced
to a system.

This would explain Maurice Joly's mysterious reference to the "political
system which has not varied for a single day in its application since
the disastrous and alas! too far-off date of its enthronement."
Moreover, it would explain the resemblance between all the parallels to
the Protocols from the writings of the Illuminati and Mirabeau's _Projet
de Revolution_ of 1789 onwards. For if the system had never varied, the
code on which it was founded must have remained substantially the same.
Further, if it had never varied up to the time when Joly wrote, why
should it have varied since that date? The rules of lawn tennis drawn up
in 1880 would probably bear a strong res