The Real Human Story: The Latest Set of Bastards

 In a footnote in his 𝘔𝘪𝘥𝘥𝘭𝘦 𝘈𝘨𝘦𝘴, Victor Duruy wrote:

"*The history of the early stages of the feudal system has long been and still is a subject of controversy and disagreement among scholars."

After giving an account of how the dukes and counts emerged as good defenders of early France, ending the era of (further) invasions, as though closing the door behind them after they had used it themselves, Victor Duruy went on to note: 

"Later, the masters of these castles were the terror of the country, but they saved it at first, and though feudalism became so oppressive in the latter part of its  existence, it had had its time of legitimacy and usefulness. Power always establishes itself through service and perishes through abuse."

This law of human nature has, unlike the physical laws enunciated in a previous video, never changed.

Duruy’s relationship with Napoleon III - Napoleon III first noticed Duruy because of his historical scholarship, especially his 𝘏𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘴 𝘙𝘰𝘮𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘴. Duruy was then chosen by Napoleon III to assist with the emperor’s biography of Julius Caesar, a major prestige project. Impressed with his abilities, Napoleon III appointed Duruy Minister of Education in 1863, a position he held until 1869. 

What Duruy did under Napoleon III - As Minister of Education, Duruy pushed ambitious reforms:

Expansion of secular secondary education for girls.

Introduction of modern languages and contemporary history into the curriculum.

Reorganization of teacher training.

Attempts (unsuccessful due to lack of imperial support) to establish free, compulsory primary education.

Creation of public lecture programs and modernization of provincial education.

These reforms were some of the most forward‑looking of the Second Empire, even when Napoleon III himself hesitated to back them.

Napoleon III was not just a patron of reformers like Duruy; he was a reformer in his own right. What makes him interesting is that his reforms came in two distinct waves, almost like two different regimes wearing the same crown.

1. The Authoritarian Modernizer (1852–1860)

In the early Empire, Napoleon III ruled with tight control, but he used that centralized power to push through major structural reforms, especially in the economy and infrastructure.

Key reforms in this phase:

Massive railway expansion that knitted France into a single national market.

Modernization of Paris under Haussmann (sanitation, boulevards, water systems).

Support for industrialization through credit institutions like the Crédit Mobilier.

Agricultural modernization and rural credit.

Public works boom that reduced unemployment and stimulated growth.

This was the “imperial technocrat” phase — authoritarian, but with a developmental agenda.

2. The Liberal Empire (1860–1870)

After 1860, Napoleon III pivoted toward political liberalization, partly due to public pressure, partly due to his own evolving convictions.

Reforms in this later phase:

Relaxation of press censorship.

Greater parliamentary powers (ministers became accountable to the legislature).

Expansion of civil liberties.

Legalization of trade unions (1864).

Educational reforms (where Duruy played a central role).

Moves toward free trade, including the famous Cobden–Chevalier Treaty with Britain.

By the late 1860s, France was drifting toward a constitutional monarchy in all but name — a remarkable shift from the plebiscitary authoritarianism of the 1850s.

How to understand Napoleon III as a reformer. He wasn’t a consistent ideologue. He was:

a Bonapartist modernizer,

a believer in social progress,

a ruler who used state power to accelerate modernization,

and eventually a liberalizer who tried to democratize his own regime.

His reforms were real, substantial, and often ahead of their time — but they were also uneven, sometimes contradictory, and ultimately overshadowed by the catastrophe of 1870.

The “Liberal Empire” anticipated aspects of the Third Republic.

The Goncourt Brothers, social observers and often critics of the changes of their time, and from whom I frequently steal good lines, deplored the tacky esthetics of the middle class who became prominent in this era. I mean superficial and shallow like some characters on TV who remind me of a few of my relatives. I also have a couple who remind me of Bondi, whew! They're lower-middles, however, some with military backgrounds. It was my father who once belonged to the John Birch Society (well funded by Koch and others), who tried to tell people that all conspiracies were really part of One Vast Conspiracy. That all secret societies are the same secret society. For hundreds of years there were psychos who said the Society of the Cincinnati, in the American Revolution, of which George Washington was one of the shining lights, was a branch of the Illuminati. And was a secret society. And, therefore, that’s why the Masons built the monument in Alexandria to Washington. Not because he was the first President of the United States but because he was the Mason and was the head the Illuminati in this country and therefore was one of the founders of the Society of the Cincinnati.

Veblen would have had an absolute field day with that claim—not because he’d take it seriously, but because it would give him a perfect specimen of what he called ceremonial interpretation run amok. A few things he’d almost certainly do:

1. He’d treat the Illuminati story as a ceremonial myth, not a factual proposition. Veblen’s instinct was always to ask: What work is this belief doing for the people who hold it? He’d see the Washington‑Illuminati claim as a way for groups to dramatize anxieties about power, legitimacy, and elite coordination. In his language, it would be a “survival of archaic animism”—the tendency to attribute social outcomes to hidden personal agencies rather than to impersonal institutional processes.

2. He’d say it reveals more about the believers than about Washington. Veblen loved to show how stories about “great men” are really stories about the community’s need for symbolic anchors. A conspiracy myth like this would, in his view, be:

• a status drama, where elites are imagined as part of a secret fraternity

• a moral narrative, where power must be explained through hidden ritual

• a compensatory fiction, giving coherence to a world that feels too complex

He’d treat it as a psychological artifact of a society struggling with rapid institutional change.

3. He’d contrast it with the industrial/engineering mentality. Veblen’s favorite contrast was between:

• the predatory, ceremonial, myth‑making mindset, and

• the matter‑of‑fact, engineering mindset

The Illuminati story would fall squarely into the first category. He’d say it’s a way of interpreting history through personal intrigue rather than through technological, economic, and institutional evolution. Washington, in Veblen’s reading, was shaped by:

• frontier economics

• colonial institutions

• the material constraints of the 18th century

—not by esoteric lodges pulling invisible strings.

4. He’d probably mock the whole thing with dry, surgical sarcasm. Veblen had a gift for deadpan demolition. He might say something like:

People prefer a spicy myth to a boring institutional explanation.

5. He’d use it as evidence of conspicuous credulity. Just as he wrote about conspicuous consumption, he also diagnosed a kind of conspicuous belief—the display of one’s identity through the adoption of dramatic, identity‑affirming narratives. A Washington‑Illuminati myth would be, for him, a prestige‑laden way of signaling:

• anti‑elite suspicion

• anti‑institutional sentiment

• a desire for moral clarity

It’s not about Washington at all.

It’s about the believer’s place in the modern social order.

This describes the petty bourgeoisie, who focus on personalities in preference to systems theory. In the its Revolution, France had finally shucked these obstructionist medieval survivals (sometimes called "residues") to finally achieve a measure of sovereignty. It was almost a chaos of principalities like Germany and Italy before their own grand unifications.

But, like the Moose Lodge and the Kiwanis, elites like to form clubs, too. Like coffee houses, these become venues for serious discussions. Like all institutions, these tend to devolve. If average Americans had continued joining voluntary associations, then they could have become effective counters to this process of entropy. Countervailing powers. "Conspiracies" are a normal part of social life.

Now, these same conspirators are the Jacobins who made the French Revolution. A woman named Nesta Webster wrote that book. To refute it, a Rhodes Scholar, Crane Brinton, wrote his doctoral dissertation called ‘The Jacobins,’ in which he refutes her. Now I think that, at the end of his life, 

Brinton probably came to feel that he was wrong. That there was some secret society involved in the Jacobins. And a student of his named Elizabeth Eisenstein, a marvelous researcher and later a professor at American University) under Brinton wrote a doctoral dissertation on the founder of the Babeuf Conspiracy. The Babeuf Conspiracy was a conspiracy of the extreme left which burst out in France in 1894 or so, led by a man named Babeuf (who was executed for it) had behind him a descendant of Michelangelo, named Buonarrati (Michelangelo’s family name was Buonarrati. Her doctoral dissertation shows that Buonarrati founded many secret societies.

One of them was the Babeuf people, who tried to change the French Revolution from a middle-class, bourgeois, capitalist revolution — a constitutional revolution — into a communist revolution. Now Buonarroti was also the founder of the Carbonari, of which Mazzini was the head in the 1840s, which united Italy in the 1860s. If you start with Buonarroti, 1793 or 1794, you can trace a connection down through these various secret societies which culminate in the Mazzini Carbonari. For example, one strange fact is that Italy was able to get free from Austria only because France defeated Austria. Why did France do that? Nobody can see why. It wasn’t in France’s interest. And yet France declared war in 1859 on Austria and at the battles of Magenta and Solferino defeated, and then suddenly made a peace treaty with Austria, without freeing all of Italy. And the reason, we are told, that they suddenly made the peace treaty is because the emperor, that is, Napoleon III, was so sickened by the sight of blood. Why did he really do this? He did this because in 1858 a Carbonaro threw a bomb at him. This Carbonaro was arrested and executed. But before he was executed, the Emperor went to his cell, where the Carbonaro gave him the secret sign of a fellow Carbonaro. 

The emperor of France who was elected president of France in 1848, seized seized power in 1851, the throne in 1852, and proclaimed a new Napoleonic Empire, and was overthrown by the Germans in 1871, after being emperor for twenty years, had been a refugee from France because he tried to make a revolt in France in 1836. Napoleon III (then Louis‑Napoléon Bonaparte) became involved with the Carbonari around 1831, when he was in his early twenties and living in Italy. His participation took the form of joining a Carbonari‑linked nationalist uprising in the Papal States, a detail preserved in historical summaries of his early political activism. This early revolutionary phase shaped his later imperial politics. Furthermore, he was a a private policeman in the Chartist march on Parliament in London in 1848, the year in which he was elected president of France. He’s a mysterious figure.  He was a special constable—essentially a temporary volunteer policeman—in April 1848, during the buildup to the great Chartist demonstration of 10 April 1848. The British government feared that the massive Chartist rally planned for 10 April might turn into an insurrection. Thousands of London men, including foreign exiles, were sworn in as special constables to reinforce the Metropolitan Police. Louis‑Napoléon Bonaparte, then living in exile in London, joined one of these squads. Contemporary reminiscences place him drilling in St James’s churchyard with other special constables.

This brief stint wasn’t a formal police career—it was a politically symbolic moment. It showed his willingness to participate in public order during a volatile moment in British politics. It also placed him in the public eye shortly before his return to France and rapid rise to the presidency later that same year.

You should search the web for the life of Christopher Lee, who also enjoyed an incredible string of coincidences. He was the model for James Bond, for instance.

What I’m summing up is this: I do think there was probably a continuous sequence of secret societies from Buonarroti through the Babeuf conspiracy, through the Carbonari unification of Italy, which was 1861. I cannot see anything since then. It may exist. I haven’t really studied it. I am more inclined to attribute it to synchronicity and the path he was following during a time of political ferment.

But I cannot see any connection between the Masons and the Illuminati. I see things such as political expediency, such as bringing von Braun to the United States, retaining German industry to counter the Soviets instead of the original plan to "pastoralize" Germany so that it could never threaten Western Civilization again the way Veblen believed it would (feudalistic militarism + German industry - he didn't know all the details about the Quarter but drew inferences from broader institutional trends), a hasty corner-cutting collaboration with the Mafia, and the checkered past of a client state that sprang forward in R&D further than even the U.S. did because of its fresh institutional takeoff, so now this former sponsor depends on Israel while Israel is scheming to throw it off (while decaying, complete with a cult of unreason and criminogenesis).

And sexual perversion because this is also a symptom of a Time of Troubles. All that nervous tension needs relief, you know, and the more antinomian it is, the better. Like the Cavaliers in their day.