19th century

The nineteenth century in Foucault’s Pendulum is not simply a backdrop for the novel’s occult history. It is the period in which the characters locate the public multiplication of esoteric claims, competing secret societies, and commercial forms of belief. Their retrospective account draws on real organizations and publications, but also exposes the method by which fragments of history are made to support an imagined continuity: the more material that can be gathered, the easier it becomes to mistake accumulation for evidence.

Occultism and the Public Secret

In a discussion of secret traditions, Aglie distinguishes esotericism from the occultism that spread in the nineteenth century. Esotericism, in his account, is a search for knowledge transmitted through symbols and closed to the uninitiated; occultism is the visible surface of that supposedly deeper tradition. He contrasts the Templars, whose silence under torture is treated by the characters as evidence of initiation, with occultists who publish and circulate secrets. Yet the distinction is unstable: the century’s print culture turns claims of hidden knowledge into material available to anyone, even as secrecy itself becomes a selling point. The novel makes the proliferation of disclosures part of its problem, not proof that the disclosures are true.

The historical survey associated with this account records a crowded field of movements and rival claims. It notes the 1865 foundation of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, with the qualification that other sources give different dates, and the later foundation of the Societas Rosicruciana in the USA in 1879. It also places the Grand Orient of France’s break with the Grand Lodge of England and its secular turn alongside the growth of other esoteric organizations. The list includes the Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose-Croix, founded by Stanislas de Guaita in 1888, and the Golden Dawn, also founded that year in England. In 1890, Joseph Péladan left Guaita’s order to establish a competing Rose-Croix organization; the conflict between the two became known as the War of the Two Roses. These details create a history of organizational proliferation, disagreement, and competing authority—not a single, demonstrable chain of succession.

Aglie’s criticism gives this catalogue its interpretive edge. He calls the nineteenth century a century of informers, in which people rushed to publish the secrets of magic, theurgy, Kabbalah, and tarot. In his judgment, the public exposure of a supposed initiatory secret empties it of value; a revealed secret is no longer a reliable sign of initiation. The episode thus sets secrecy and publicity against one another, while showing that both can be used to claim authority. The printed record preserves the claims, but does not settle whether they describe a real tradition.

Print, Commerce, and Manufactured Demand

The novel links the period’s occult publishing to a wider publishing economy in which visibility and credibility can be produced. Garamond describes the market for books on Hermetic subjects as an opportunity: readers are drawn to material that promises truths beyond ordinary science and school learning. He presents Project Hermes as both a commercial venture and a cultural mission, but its launch is planned through deliberate promotion. Garamond writes to periodicals under different names to solicit information about the series; their editors then contact his company, where he responds mysteriously about titles supposedly in preparation. The resulting buzz alerts occult readers to the project before the books exist as a settled list.

The same publishing world contains sharply different business models. Garamond’s university editions rely on institutional connections, professors’ prefaces, authors’ proof corrections, and textbook adoption; they are designed to cover costs without financial surprises. Manutius, by contrast, is described as a vanity press with four staff members: Garamond, Signora Grazia, a bookkeeper, and Luciano, the disabled shipping clerk. Its business is organized around authors who pay for publication, not readers who buy books. Belbo remarks that Luciano ships books only to authors, and that Manutius is not interested in readers; the key aim is to keep authors loyal to the firm.

The imagined negotiations over Adeodato De Gubernatis’s manuscript reveal how this model turns an author’s hope for recognition into financial exposure. Garamond is expected to praise the work, imply that it merits a literary prize, and then describe its commercial prospects as limited. The author, anxious to reach acquaintances who know he has submitted a manuscript to a major Milan publisher, may offer to cover production costs. The contract’s ten pages of small type include extensive subsidiary rights and provisions that the author may overlook while imagining success. It sets a maximum print run of ten thousand without specifying a minimum, makes the author’s payment independent of the verbally agreed print run, and allows unsold copies to be pulped after a year unless the author buys them at half price. The supposed launch is lavish in its press materials, but the actual plan is to print one thousand copies and bind only three hundred and fifty, with much of the small distribution set aside for the author, reviewers, minor bookshops, and newspapers. The contrast between promotional scale and physical circulation exposes how a book’s apparent public presence can be staged.

Historical Analogies and the Making of the Plan

The nineteenth century’s records become especially consequential when the characters use them to support the Plan. Casaubon’s later reconstruction of the Templars’ supposed secret history depends on reading recurring names, places, and institutions as signs of continuity. He initially treats the proposed escape of Templars from Paris to Scotland, and their alleged incorporation into Freemasonry, as a repeatedly copied legend without foundation. Later, under the Plan’s influence, he turns the Provins message into a practical itinerary and concludes that Tomar must have been the first meeting place. He then reminds himself that the task is not to discover the Templars’ secret but to construct it. The turn from dismissal to belief shows how historical material can be reinterpreted when a pattern has already begun to govern the reader.

The novel makes that process explicit through its account of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Diotallevi points out that a text pretending to describe an ancient Jewish conspiracy contains references to specific French controversies of the late nineteenth century: educational policy, the Panama Scandal, the presidency of Émile Loubet, and disputes over Jewish shareholders in the Metro. These contemporary allusions support the theory that the text was assembled in France in the decade before the Dreyfus Affair, to weaken the liberal front. Belbo then notices that its alleged plan to conquer the world resembles the Provins document if the references are changed: Jews become Templars, the Elders become the Thirty-six Invisibles, and the Metro tunnels become the tunnels of Provins. The comparison does not validate either conspiracy. It demonstrates how replacing names and settings can make separate texts appear to confirm a shared design.

That warning culminates in Lia’s explanation of the Provins message. She concludes that it is a laundry list, not evidence of Templar meetings at the Grange-aux-Dîmes; there was no Plan and no message. Casaubon describes the method by which the three men had turned it into a puzzle: connect concepts by analogy, accept the chain if it eventually returns to its starting point, and prefer connections already made by others because familiarity makes them seem self-evident. The rule system makes almost any sequence appear coherent. The nineteenth-century archive, with its abundance of societies, publications, and disputed origins, becomes the ideal material for such a game: its real details lend apparent weight to connections that the evidence does not establish.

Pendulums, Correspondences, and Retrospective Order

Casaubon’s later pattern-making also draws the nineteenth century into a supposed history of the Pendulum. He assembles publications on pendulum experiments across several countries, including Jean-Baptiste Biot’s 1821 work on geodetic, astronomical, and physical observations in France, Spain, England, and Scotland, and Edward Sabine’s 1823 account of experiments using a pendulum to determine the Earth’s figure. He adds the research of Feodor Petrovich Litke, published in 1836 under the auspices of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. Their dates and geographical reach strike him as clues to a secret associated with the Paris meridian and Saint-Martin. The evidence cited, however, consists of scientific works and institutional publication; the hidden coordination is Casaubon’s inference.

This tension between documented fact and invented connection is central to the novel’s treatment of the period. The nineteenth century supplies actual movements, books, institutions, controversies, and scientific investigations. The characters’ interpretive method then binds those particulars into a single occult history, as if resemblance and repetition established causation. Later, Lia’s correction and Casaubon’s own final acknowledgment undo that certainty. The period remains significant not because it proves the Plan, but because its abundance of materials makes the Plan seem readable—and shows how a reader can convert a crowded historical record into a conspiracy by supplying the connections the record itself lacks.