Magazines and newspapers all have stories they run in one form or another, year in, year out. The details may differ, but the stories are largely the same everywhere, striking universal chords of sex, health, and money. A few of these perennials, however, don’t travel. They drill deep into one country’s psyche while everyone else scratches their head and says, “Huh?”In France, the story that keeps coming back is about Freemasons. It’s everywhere. Most big French magazines run at least one big Freemason cover a year. Books dissect the “state within a state,” to borrow from a recent title. Blogs abound.“France has several of these marronniers—chestnuts,” says Alain Bauer, former grand master of France’s Grand Orient lodge and president Nicolas Sarkozy’s Masonic liaison. “There’s real estate prices and there’s how to cure headaches, and then there’s Freemasons. The ultimate French magazine story is a Freemason with a headache who’s moving. We don’t like these stories, but at the same time, we love them, because they make us feel like we’re still important.”
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Funny how Bloomberg does not provide a way for rebuttals. One notices, very quickly, that the author falsely claims that Freemasonry is anti-clerical, and that he lumps regular and irregular Freemasonry together. It seems that Bloomberg is no better than the National Enquirer, when it comes to scholarly historical fact.
ReplyDeleteThe first papal bull, in 1738, directed against Freemasonry, was actually against the French Freemasons, but the pope, being what he was, also added a rider, to just lump all the differing Lodges together, and admitted that he came to his conclusion using pure speculation and rumor. Also, there is speculation within Freemasonry, that Andrew Michael Ramsay's oration to the nobility, which was clearly mythical, was what set the pope off to start with.