Napoleon I

Napoleon I is drawn into the researchers’ invented Plan as a would-be broker among rival secret societies. Their account converts his reported contacts with Freemasonry, his convocation of the Grand Sanhedrin, and his Russian campaign into parts of a concealed struggle for world power. But the history they assemble is not reliable biography: it is a demonstration of how real names and episodes can be made to serve an unfounded conspiracy, including anti-Semitic claims that the novel traces through their textual sources and political uses.

Napoleon in the researchers’ reconstruction

The researchers first situate Napoleon inside a conspiracy narrative drawn from the Abbé Barruel’s account of secret societies. In that account, the Templars survive their suppression as a clandestine force bent on overthrowing monarchy and the papacy; they take over Freemasonry, which becomes a tool for political upheaval. The story then assigns the Illuminati of Bavaria control over the supposed plotters. The researchers treat Barruel’s work as a sensational narrative, but they nevertheless make it a building block in their own expanding Plan.

They then claim that Napoleon took the allegations about the Illuminati seriously enough to seek contact with Masons. In the researchers’ account, he had his brother Joseph named grand master of the Great Orient and himself became a high-ranking Mason, perhaps in several rites. The narration explicitly leaves the extent and nature of his knowledge uncertain. That gap does not restrain the researchers: it gives them room to turn conjecture into a link in their imagined chain.

Napoleon’s convocation of a French Jewish assembly in 1806 becomes their next supposed clue. Although the researchers acknowledge ordinary political and financial explanations for the assembly, they attach significance to its title, the Grand Sanhedrin, and recast the gathering as Napoleon’s attempt to identify and unite a Jerusalemite branch of the Templars. In this reading, an actual political act is made to carry a secret meaning for which the evidence supplied does not establish a basis.

Russia and the imagined alliance

The theory next follows Napoleon east. The researchers reason that if he had gathered other centers of power in Europe and reached the alleged Jerusalemite group through French Jews, he still needed the Paulicians. They speculate that he went to Russia to find them, presenting the claim as a clue rather than documented fact. Russia thus becomes, in their system, the place where a supposedly surviving mystical branch might be found.

They connect this imagined Russian branch to Prince Galitzin, an adviser to Alexander I whom they associate with Martinist-inspired groups, and to Joseph de Maistre, who had served as plenipotentiary of the House of Savoy in St. Petersburg. Their reconstruction gives de Maistre a double position: he distrusts the Illuminati and condemns revolutionary thought, yet the researchers suppose that he sought the Martinist circles because he suspected them of preserving an uncorrupted Paulician inheritance. They then concede that this supposed strategy failed: after the Jesuits were expelled from St. Petersburg in 1815, de Maistre returned to Turin.

Diotallevi responds to this unfolding genealogy by declaring that they have found the Paulicians again and that Napoleon evidently failed. The joke about Napoleon’s failure to make his enemies tremble from Saint Helena punctures the grand theory, but does not stop the researchers from extending it to later events. Their sequence depends on a crucial shift: uncertainty about Napoleon’s purpose is treated not as a reason to suspend judgment, but as space in which to invent a hidden purpose.

From Napoleon to anti-Semitic conspiracy writing

The researchers place the Grand Sanhedrin episode within a wider history of anti-Semitic accusations. They describe a Russian Orthodox Church statement that recast Napoleon’s effort to unite Jews as a threat to Christianity, and they connect such claims to the later charge of a Judeo-Masonic plot. Diotallevi then links the appearance of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Russia to the Paulicians. Belbo elaborates a theory of three branches supposedly descended from a Jerusalemite group: one leading to neo-Templars, another to a Baconian camp of scientists and bankers, and a third established in Russia. This elaborate taxonomy is the researchers’ speculation, not a substantiated account of Jewish history.

The book also shows how the Protocols acquire authority through reuse and fabrication. The researchers describe them as twenty-four declarations whose contradictory proposals include opposing liberalism while promoting revolution, manipulating public opinion, fomenting war, and controlling governments through figureheads. Their account relates the text to an earlier liberal pamphlet by Maurice Joly, which attacks Napoleon III through a dialogue between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. It further presents the claim that Joly’s language was itself derived from an earlier fictional document by Sue. The chain does not prove a hidden Templar program; rather, it illustrates how later conspiracy narratives borrow, alter, and recirculate existing texts.

The account of Rachkovsky makes the political harm of that process explicit. The researchers say that, after finding a pamphlet associated with Elie de Cyon that adapted Joly’s or Sue’s material, Rachkovsky substituted Jews for the original political target and circulated the altered text. They then describe its passage through Juliana Glinka and Russian officials to the tsar, where it damaged Sergei Witte. Their explanation is itself framed within the researchers’ conspiratorial vocabulary, but the episode underscores the way fabricated accusations can be deployed in political conflict and made to appear credible through a false appearance of insider evidence.

Historical figures turned into evidence

Napoleon’s importance to the Plan lies less in a demonstrated secret allegiance than in the interpretive role the researchers assign him. They connect his reported Masonic associations, the Grand Sanhedrin, Tomar, Russia, and the Paulicians as though each confirmed the others. In their method, a sequence of suggestive analogies becomes proof once it can be made to close into a circle. The same impulse appears in their treatment of the Protocols: contradictory claims and borrowed texts do not discredit the conspiracy, but are rearranged to reinforce it.

The novel sets this process against Lia’s later explanation that the Provins message was merely a laundry list, with no Templar meetings, hidden message, or Plan behind it. The researchers’ own rules for constructing the Plan make the mechanism plain: concepts are linked by analogy; a chain is accepted if it eventually returns to its starting point; and connections seem more persuasive when they have already been made by others. Napoleon’s place in the conspiracy therefore reveals the Plan’s central paradox. The researchers do not uncover a secret that explains history; they use fragments of history and inherited accusations to manufacture a secret that can appear to explain anything. The resulting narrative is not only an intellectual game: when anti-Semitic fabrications are recast as evidence, its false connections carry real political consequences.