The end justifies the means

The end justifies the means is a political maxim whose changing ownership becomes evidence of how the novel’s invented Plan is assembled. First presented as a Jesuit principle, then attributed to Jews in the forged Protocols, and finally spoken by Rodin as the creed of a fictional Jesuit conspiracy, the slogan illustrates a world in which accusation and imitation continually exchange places. Its force lies less in establishing who first said it than in showing how a phrase can be detached from its source and made to serve successive plots.

A Maxim Passed Between Enemies

The phrase enters the conspiratorial history through a chain of polemical reuse. In Eugène Sue’s final chapter of Les Mystères du peuple, the Jesuit plot is laid out in a document attributed to the Society’s general and sent to Monsieur Rodin. The narrator observes that Sue assigns the Jesuits the motto later found in the Protocols, where it is attributed to the Jews. The reversal matters: the supposed confession of one enemy is already present in a fictional accusation against another.

The chain extends to Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavelli, a liberal pamphlet against Napoleon III. In Joly’s dialogue, Machiavelli voices the principle; the narrator says the Protocols reproduce the Jewish plot almost literally from Joly’s text, and that after Machiavelli the words become associated with Napoleon. The account then pushes the borrowing further back: it claims Sue’s document predates Joly’s by at least seven years. Rather than offer a stable origin, this sequence makes the maxim a trace of copying and reassignment.

The Protocols and Political Invention

The narrator describes the Protocols as twenty-four declarations forming a program attributed to the Elders of Zion. Their prescriptions contradict one another: they condemn liberalism while advocating the spread of liberal ideas, call for control while encouraging disorder, and invoke anti-Semitism as a means of managing populations and manipulating public sympathy. The maxim that the end justifies the means sits within this deliberately incoherent program, where contradictory tactics can be presented as parts of a single design.

The account also recounts a proposed route by which the Protocols were fabricated. In 1897, at Count Sergei Witte’s order, Pierre Ivanovitch Rachkovsky has Elie de Cyon’s villa searched and finds a pamphlet derived from Joly or Sue. The narrator says Rachkovsky altered the text by substituting Jews for Witte and arranged for it to circulate. In this version, the slogan’s transfer is not an abstract literary resemblance but part of a political forgery that turns an attack on one figure into an accusation against a people. The characters fold this history into their imagined rivalry among the Paulicians, Jerusalemites, neo-Templars, and Baconians, treating their own speculative reconstruction as a coherent explanation.

Rodin’s Declaration

The maxim returns in the embedded encounter between Rodin and Saint-Germain. Rodin identifies himself as the secret general of the Jesuits and claims that the Society invented crimes and machinations to secure dominion over the world. His declaration assigns the principle to the Jesuits once again, now as a boast inside the characters’ elaborate historical fantasy. The same phrase thus moves from an anti-Jesuit fictional document, through an anti-Semitic forgery, into a scene where a fictional Jesuit claims it for his own order.

That recurrence does not verify the accusation against any group. Instead, it displays the self-renewing logic of the Plan: a charge can be copied, redirected, and then treated as confirmation that the alleged conspiracy has always existed. The maxim’s apparent consistency masks the instability of its attributions.

From Irony to Belief

The men initially treat their associations as parody. They know their connections are unwarranted and extraordinary, and would be ashamed if anyone thought they truly believed them. But while gathering evidence for their meetings, they repeatedly practice linking everything to everything else. Casaubon later recognizes that the habit of pretending to believe can become indistinguishable from belief. He describes himself as becoming addicted, Diotallevi as corrupted, and Jacopo Belbo as converted; all three lose the ability to distinguish resemblance from identity or metaphor from fact.

That drift gives the maxim its wider significance. The Plan begins as an invented web that absorbs fragments of historical polemic, forged texts, and borrowed phrases. When its supposed targets identify their own myths within that web and act accordingly, the fabrication acquires real consequences: the conspirators believe they have recognized a design that their own method has helped construct. The slogan’s history is therefore also a model of the novel’s central danger—an interpretation that treats every recurrence as confirmation can make its accusations seem true without establishing that they are.