ON OCTOBER 6, 1789, there was seized at the home of Mirabeau’s publisher, a number of important documents. One of them, called Croquis ou Projet de Monsieur de Mirabeau, was a statement of the aims and purposes of the Illuminate, supposedly written by Mirabeau; Illuminist, Cabalist and the darling of the Jewish society of Paris (having reported on his trip to Germany–where he received his initiation into Weishaupt’s Illuminate–to his Jewish supporters at the home of Henrietta Herz).
To please his Jewish friends and supporters of the French Revolution, Mirabeau wrote his great apology for the Jews under the form of a panegyric of Mendelssohn, the father of Jewish Illuminism. Suitable praise of Mirabeau’s love of Jewry and his services to the eternal internationalists, can be found in M. Samuel’s “Memoirs of Moses Mendelssohn,” 1827. In this document concerning “Mirabeau’s Project,” after a diatribe against the French Monarchy, the document goes on to say that “in order to triumph over this hydra-headed monster these are my ideas:
“We must overthrow all order, suppress all laws, annul all power, and leave the people in anarchy. The laws we establish will not perhaps be in force at once, but at any rate, having given back the power to the people, they will resist for the sake of their liberty which they will believe they are preserving.
We must caress their vanity, flatter their hopes, promise them happiness after our work has been in operation; we must elude their caprices and their systems at will, for the people as legislators are very dangerous, they only establish laws which coincide with their passions, their want of knowledge would besides only give birth to abuses.
But as the people are a lever which legislators can move at their will, we must necessarily use them as a support, and render hateful to them everything we wish to destroy and sow illusions in their path; we must also buy all the mercenary pens which propagate our methods and which will instruct the people concerning their enemies whom we attacked.