First World War

The First World War is invoked as a historical fact and then recruited into the novel’s fictional conspiracy-making: a character asks why Germany and Turkey were allies during the war, presenting the alliance as a clue to an imagined link between the Assassins and secret societies. Its significance lies less in a narrated account of the war than in how the characters make history serve the Plan, turning political circumstances into apparent proof of hidden continuity.

The War as a Clue

In a conversation about the occult influences allegedly shaping Nazi Germany, Salon describes the SS founders as having imagined an organization modeled on the Assassins. He connects that claim to Germany and Turkey’s wartime alliance, asking the others to treat the alliance as a question demanding a secret explanation. The war thus enters the discussion as a bridge between modern European politics and a conjectured lineage reaching back to the Old Man of the Mountain and the Assassins.

Salon’s account does not establish that the alliance resulted from such a lineage. Instead, it reveals the interpretive move at the heart of the Plan: an actual historical relationship is detached from ordinary political context and made to look like evidence of occult coordination. Casaubon recalls that the Templars had been accused of colluding with the Assassins, and the alliance prompts him to revisit that connection. The inference expands the conspiracy’s scope without supplying independent proof.

The Plan’s Historical Rewriting

The First World War belongs to a wider sequence in which the characters convert records and political conflicts into a fabricated account of secret struggle. Their discussion of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion makes this process especially clear. Diotallevi calls the Protocols a series of twenty-four declarations attributed to the Elders of Zion and notes their contradictory prescriptions: they condemn liberalism while advocating the spread of liberal ideas, and combine appeals to revolution with schemes to heighten inequality and control governments. The text’s contradictions do not stop the characters from treating it as a program; instead, its inconsistencies become material for further interpretation.

The novel then traces how anti-Semitic conspiracy claims are reassigned and recirculated. When the Jesuits encounter a fictionalized Plan attributed to them in Sue’s novel, they exploit Simonini’s letter to attribute it instead to Jews. A later account describes how the Times identified Maurice Joly’s 1864 dialogue as a source for the Protocols, whose political language had been lifted from Joly’s portrayal of Machiavelli arguing with Montesquieu. The characters add another layer, claiming that Sue’s earlier document must itself have informed Joly. Each supposed source becomes an occasion for extending the genealogy rather than closing it.

The account of Rachkovsky offers a further example of political fabrication becoming apparent evidence. In the characters’ reconstruction, Rachkovsky alters a pamphlet derived from Joly or Sue by substituting Jews for Witte, then circulates the text as an exposure of a Jewish conspiracy. The document passes through Glinka and other intermediaries toward the tsar, damaging Witte politically. This narrative makes the Protocols an artifact of anti-Semitic manipulation, even as the characters absorb it into their own fictional history of competing secret branches.

Historical Memory and the Limits of Inference

The war also matters by contrast with Belbo’s memories of political violence. He remembers his youth during the partisan period as a time when opposing sides seemed distinct and choices appeared clear. In the later present, as he navigates what the novel calls the Diabolicals’ falsehoods, that remembered clarity stands against the Plan’s endless multiplication of hidden motives. His recollection does not specifically recount the First World War; it frames the broader difference between lived historical conflict and an explanatory scheme that turns every event into a clue.

Casaubon’s response to Salon’s account shows the Plan’s capacity to draw a reader into that scheme. He recalls the alleged Templar-Assassin connection from his thesis and immediately wonders how it could have been overlooked. Elsewhere, the same interpretive habit makes the Templars’ supposed meeting place at Tomar appear to confirm the Plan’s route. The First World War alliance functions in this pattern not as a conclusion supported by evidence, but as another point where historical facts are made to converge through analogy.

That convergence has a political cost. The novel’s account of anti-Semitic texts shows how fabricated claims can borrow the authority of documents, circulate through institutions, and recast Jews as hidden agents behind social upheaval. The First World War’s place in the Plan illustrates the same broader danger: once history is treated as a code whose every event must confirm a secret design, real political relationships lose their complexity, while the conspiracy’s unsupported explanations acquire the appearance of coherence.