Synarchy

Synarchy is an imagined system of rule that changes political identities as it passes from one account to another. In the novel, it begins as Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’s scheme for a harmonious society governed by three councils, but grows into a supposed secret power blamed by opposing camps for incompatible plots. The narrator’s investigation ultimately treats this instability not as proof of a hidden government but as evidence of the human appetite for a design behind events.

Saint-Yves’s political scheme

Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, as Belbo recounts the story, had spent time among the followers of Fabre d’Olivet before becoming a clerk in the Ministry of the Interior. After marrying Marie-Victoire de Risnitch, he acquired a title through property she bought that had belonged to a Marquis d’Alveydre. Belbo relates the gossip surrounding the marriage, but the biographical details also mark a contrast between Saint-Yves’s public pose and the political dream to which he devoted his independent income.

That dream was Synarchy: a European society governed by three councils representing economic, judicial, and spiritual power, with the Church and scientists included in the last sphere. Saint-Yves imagined an enlightened oligarchy that would eliminate class conflict. The proposal therefore supplied a specific institutional arrangement, not merely a name for secret control. Its promise of harmony, however, made it available for later interpreters to recast in radically different political terms.

Saint-Yves also linked his writings to Agarttha, a hidden dwelling place said to have been disclosed to him by a mysterious visitor called Hadji Scharipf. Belbo notes that the man’s purported Afghan identity is doubtful, and that Saint-Yves called the place Agarttha rather than using the title King of the World. This association gives Synarchy a mythic geography as well as a political program: an ideal order could be imagined as having a concealed center, even when the historical claims surrounding that center were uncertain.

Competing political appropriations

The narrator’s account tracks how Synarchy escapes any single political classification. Some of Saint-Yves’s theses were taken up by Action Française. Yet in 1929 Vivian Postel du Mas and Jeanne Canudo founded Polaris, inspired by the King of the World myth, and proposed a synarchic program of social service over capitalist profit, cooperatives, and the elimination of class struggle. Belbo describes this as resembling Fabian socialism and a libertarian, communitarian movement. The same broad vocabulary could thus accommodate both right-wing and reformist projects.

Accusations of a synarchic plot intensified the contradiction. Polaris and the Irish Fabians were charged with joining a Jewish-led conspiracy by the Revue Internationale des sociétés secrètes, whose contributors included members of La Sapinière. In this account, revolutionary groups were themselves said to be fronts for an occultist circle. Belbo observes that such right-wing accusations collapsed diverse movements into a demo-pluto-social-Judaic conspiracy, even though the occultist writers he had encountered seemed little concerned with workers’ movements.

The claims then reverse direction again. In the 1940s, self-described synarchic groups advocated a European order governed by wise men above party politics, and met in Vichy collaborationist circles. But the political identity of Synarchy did not settle there. In Belbo’s reconstruction, a document from left-wing circles during the Occupation blamed a secret Pact of the Empire for France’s defeat and described it as Portuguese-style fascism. The pact, however, had been drawn up by Du Mas and Canudo from ideas they had already published openly. Husson later presented the same material as an intensely secret revolutionary pact of the left, while signing his book with the name Geoffrey de Charnay, recalling the Templar companion of Molay who died with him.

Further accounts multiplied rather than resolved the charge. Roger Mennevee, described as a leftist, presented Synarchy as a Jesuit plot against the Third Republic. In 1943, documents circulated in certain Vichy military circles, among Petainists opposed to Germany, alleging instead that Synarchy was a Nazi plot: Hitler was said to be a Rosicrucian influenced by Freemasons. In 1960, Villemarest attributed to international technocrats a plot to destabilize governments through wars, coups, party schisms, and political hatred. Belbo recognized in this supposed enemy the Imperialist Multinational State invoked by the Red Brigades. Each explanation assigned the same hidden agency a different allegiance and purpose.

From political mystery to universal plot

Belbo draws the account together through an intentionally destabilizing answer: a secret society may exist whose plot is to spread the rumor that a universal plot exists. The formulation turns the conspiracy claim back on itself. It does not establish that such a society exists; rather, it exposes how the repeated assertion of a world-governing secret can become the apparent common denominator of otherwise incompatible theories. When the narrator is asked to advise De Angelis about Synarchy, the joke has the form of an answer but refuses to provide the stable explanation the supposed evidence seems to demand.

Belbo also offers a down-to-earth psychological and political account. People blame someone else for their failures, while dictatorships need an external enemy to bind followers together. In a conversation later recounted by the narrator, Lia says that the befuddled investigator had wanted to know whether his confusion was personal or whether the material itself was too difficult. Her answer is that there is nothing to understand: Synarchy functions like God, a name for the order people need to imagine when they cannot endure the thought that the world arose by chance. The suggestion is not that political violence is unreal, but that attributing events to one encompassing design can offer emotional relief from contingency and responsibility.

The theory’s adaptability also mirrors the novel’s fabricated Plan. The narrator explains that the three researchers’ habit of linking everything to everything else gradually blurred the distinction between pretending to believe and believing. Their associative game, initially undertaken as parody, trained them to accept connections as if they were discoveries. Later, the supposed Plan’s fragments were taken up by others, who identified their own confused mythologies with it. Synarchy’s successive identities anticipate that process: contradictory interpretations can reinforce the impression of a single concealed structure precisely because each adds another apparent connection.

Meaning and limits of the secret

The novel’s critique turns on a distinction between a political program and the secret that conspiracy thinking projects behind it. The documented proposal attributed to Saint-Yves has identifiable features—three councils and a stated ambition to overcome class conflict—while the conspiracy accounts continually change who supposedly controls the world and why. Their disagreement does not stop them from asserting that Synarchy exists and secretly rules. The claim’s persistence comes from its capacity to absorb incompatible evidence, not from a consistent description of its object.

The narrator’s later reflection on the Plan makes the mechanism explicit. The Plan had no message or historical meetings behind it; its connections worked through analogy, completion, and the reuse of associations already made by others. Once its inventors’ collection of fragments was accepted as a coherent web, readers could treat old material as confirmation. In that sense, Synarchy is one instance of the larger interpretive trap: suspicion supplies a hidden cause, and the resulting story makes further suspicion appear warranted.

The novel finally locates the secret’s power in its refusal to arrive. A secret imagined as the key to frustration or salvation would disappoint if definitively exposed, while an unending sequence of interpretations can keep the search alive. The narrator connects this logic to the scene before the Pendulum, where the refusal to disclose a secret makes its pursuers imagine it as more valuable. Synarchy belongs to the same structure of desire: its force lies less in a verifiable organization than in the promise that somewhere, behind political confusion and chance, an explanation remains just out of reach.